Cost of decks

Why hello there...

This is the first time I have experienced an expansion. The cost of decks (I am seeing in HSReplay) have really skyrocketed. I foolishly thought that if I bought the mega bundle I would have a good chance of creating a meta deck or two. I went from being able to create 4 decent decks to zero.

What happened? I need to craft way more than I can actually afford now.

Does this happen every expansion?

I am actually having way more success with my Token Druid than any other decks I create!!

Right now is a VERY bad time to be crafting decks if you are really after meta ones and aren't a whale.  

Deck prices have skyrocketed because everyone is slamming every legendary and epic they can into a deck and trying it out. They won't work in the long term and eventually most of the decks and their legendaries will get kicked out of the meta.  Same in general for stuffing as many Uldun cards as possible.  Even if the deck turns out powerful, it needs time to be fine tuned, so it'll shed and add a lot of cards before it's finalized.

As such crafting right now gives you a good chance of getting stuck with decks that get deemed bad later on.  

It's also why your token druid deck is working better.  It's spent over 6 months being refined (started since at least Rumble).  A 6 month old high tier deck is going to wipe the floor with a batch of 2-day old decks probably made by people who don't know how to make a deck.

Lastly, 50-80 packs generally nets you most of the commons and rares, which is the best value as far as open packs is concerned.  After that, though, you need the remaining epics and legendaries, and, bluntly, opening packs is NOT a good way to get them: far too rare, far too much of a chance to get the wrong ones.  

Instead what you want to do is preserve your dust carefully.  Wait until the dust settles.. about 2 weeks or so, and see which decks actually hold out.  Then focus on the ones that you only need a few cards to make or uses cards that can be used in other decks you are interested in.  THEn you'll have your meta decks.

Right now the people crafing and building are either folks who bought the entire set (about $200.  Some people can toss $200 every 4 months without batting an eye) or don't care and are crafting whatever they like even if it messes them up later.  The more cautious ones are either using Whizbang decks or spamming Arena while they let the first group sort out the bad from the good.

Hey Dakarian

Thank you sooo much for this reply, that really makes me feel a hell of a lot better. I thought I had just flushed my money down the drain.

What you say makes perfect sense.

Have a glorious weekend.

I had the same feeling as you when Rastakhan launched. I was still missing a bunch of important epics and legendary from previous expansions and wasn‘t able to use most new cards propperly.

Once the euphoria drops a little, you realize that not every legendary is as good as it seemed. Most of the time they get run over by some kind of aggressive budget deck.

My advice would be to invest a small portion of your dust into decks that you like. This week is the best and probably only opportunity to tinker around with the quests and reno decks. The unique experience is worth to risk some dust imo.

Zephrys is a good example. Even more when you got an other singelton card. I doubt him seeing much Tier 1 play but he‘ll stick around for a long time and is a fun card for sure.

Quests with high potential are an other. I‘ll craft the rogue quest since burgle rogue has allways been my go to when i‘m bored. The shaman quest seems to be a safe bet aswell.

And finally: Build around the legendarys you opened. Set yourself the goal to successfully use every single one of them at least once. But be quick, meme decks already dissapear... i

Quote From Bersak

And finally: Build around the legendarys you opened. Set yourself the goal to successfully use every single one of them at least once. But be quick, meme decks already dissapear... i

Completely agree. I remember how I got The Voraxx from a random Ungoro pack - I tried running it in Druid and Warrior (ranks 15-18th), and even though it wasn't hugely successful I got some wins, it was fun and probably made my opponent laugh when they see a warrior running broke ass combo like The Voraxx and Rampage

Im Shrek and i had to sell fiona to craft the druid quest. I have 0 gold rn and im in 40 thousand dollars of debt

Standard cost HAS risen, since 1-2 years ago. Not only does this mean it is harder to build a meta deck compared to the past, but also that an ill evaluation of cards (ie. you craft a card that turns out to be unplayable in the meta) is much more punishing: test-crafting is a luxury of the few, and the average player, including the average money-payer, are much more dependant to that (netdecking and meta-shaping) in order to decide what to craft for themselves.

And the fact that Standard cards are bound to Rotate, implies the increased dust investment is just mid-termed at best.

This whole thing is a huge argument in favor of Wild, where any dust investment is virtually eternal, and any non-meme deck can be carried to at least rank 5 with enough patience.

Quote From RavenSunHS

Standard cost HAS risen, since 1-2 years ago. Not only does this mean it is harder to build a meta deck compared to the past, but also that an ill evaluation of cards (ie. you craft a card that turns out to be unplayable in the meta) is much more punishing: test-crafting is a luxury of the few, and the average player, including the average money-payer, are much more dependant to that (netdecking and meta-shaping) in order to decide what to craft for themselves.

And the fact that Standard cards are bound to Rotate, implies the increased dust investment is just mid-termed at best.

This whole thing is a huge argument in favor of Wild, where any dust investment is virtually eternal, and any non-meme deck can be carried to at least rank 5 with enough patience.

Yeah, I always tell people that Wild is cheaper and you can create ~800 dust decks that can get you to rank 10 with ease. Also, good cards in wild tend to stay good cards so investing there almost never loses value. But, to your point, since KofT release, standard has increasingly gotten more expensive if you want more than an optimized aggro deck or two. My only hope is that it kind of plateaus soon since there are a bunch of decks that cost would have a direct cost of over 70 USD if you covert dust into real world currency. 

With the amount of "Overall good legendaries" people are taking the wild approach and just throwing in legendaries because they SEEM good and not actually thinking about them in deckbuilding stances, stuff like ziliax is usually fine for this but other cards like siamat, or khadgar or kalecgos in a singleton deck that only runs 2 cards to synergize with khadgar's effect is pretty useless, all in all use your own brain whether you think that 20k dust requirement deck actually needs all 15 legendaries, most of the time they don't.

To mirror what Dakarian had said, unless it is a card that you "NEED" to have (like wanting to craft the whole expansion) crafting many cards out of the box is a bad idea.  A number of cards go through nerfing in the initial release of an expansion.  And if you go through the trouble of crafting a number of cards for a deck that is now no longer viable due to nerfing, you're probably going to be out a lot of dust.  After about a month is when the meta starts to see the shifting and you could be safer crafting then. 

I know that it can be frustrating to see people playing cards that you want and, even more so, losing because of them.  However you would be doing yourself an immense disservice by crafting a bunch of stuff.  If I were you, I'd pick a couple of cards that you like and craft those.  But I would advise against crafting many Legendaries or Epics as those are the ones that typically get targeted first for nerfs.

Ditto what Dakarian said. Long time HearthPwner here. This is indeed the most “luxurious” expo we’ve seen to date.

By luxurious, I mean most of the legendaries FEEL like they’re important, instead of coming off as meme-tier.

First, Bliz released another full legendary cycle (quests rd2). Second, they re-printed the LoE, who are now HS’s most revered heroes. Third, the LoE synergizes with the remaining neutrals, most of which are good utility on their own . But how many in fact will turn out to be must-craftables like Zilliax? You tell me. I’m taking a backseat for now.