Reaching the legend rank is the goal of every Hearthstone player. The achievement itself is a boastful accomplishment that only 0.5% of players reach every season. Although the game is heavily dependent on luck, it is no coincidence that the same players manage to reach legend every season.
Mindset Is The Key
Believe it or not but the number one factor in Hearthstone is your mindset and how you approach the game. Improving should be a number one priority over your personal goals. A lot of people fail to actually understand how luck and the RNG/ RTP system actually work and are prone to tilting due to the luck-based nature of the game.
Professional Hearthstone players treat every turn like gambling in an online casino and every mana crystal as their chip. It is essential to ignore your emotions and focus on your current events rather than dwell on whatever ridiculousness happened in the past.
Gambling skills simply translate extremely well, which is also the reason why we see so many HS pros exceed in poker tournaments.
Risk Management
Performing in Hearthstone is about all your risk managing skill. Sometimes the worst-looking decisions yield the best results due to lower potential risk. This is why it’s important to hone your risk management skills to the fullest. Use free social casino sites like GamblersArea to improve your gambling skills and improve your Hearthstone mindset.
Don’t Be Results Oriented
The decision-making of Hearthstone is very similar to gambling in poker. Before each game starts, your hand is dealt, the deck shuffled, and there are simply situations where you are meant to lose no matter how good you were playing. You are expected to lose almost half the time and that is okay. Letting inevitable losses/results orient your mindset will only lead to frustration and further downfall.
There is a reason why even the best players consider anything above 50% win-rate decent. If you’re winning more than half the time you are statistically meant to reach legend with enough games played.
Study The Format Meta
Even the simplest of games like chess requires extensive study of the meta. If you want to compete at the top 0.5% level of players you simply have to learn all the ins and outs of your format.
You are free to experiment and build your own decklists. However, time after time you’ll find out that your gameplay will always revolve around the current meta. Each game has a certain stage that changes every season with new updates or expansions.
Meta builds in Hearthstone are simply decks that statistically dominate the current ladder. Learning the best decklists is essential in competing on the Hearthstone rankings, as you’ll inevitably encounter these builds and class types.
Play The Meta Or Counter It
You have 2 approaches to deal with each ever-changing meta. You can either choose to go along with it and play the most popular decks or go against the current. Some deck archetypes are purely successful because they counter the top decks in current play.
Play The Meta - Net-decking
Copying a top-tier decklist is definitely the easier option and recommended for beginners. Once you understand the meta you can simply copy a decklist most suitable for your playstyle. Use free sites like Tempostorm’s meta snapshots to have that extra edge over other players.
Counter The Meta - Adapt Your Decklists
If you’re somewhat a more experienced player, you will notice certain patterns in the tier lists. While class cards are unique, the majority of decks circle around a few of the same mechanics. You can exploit all these people mindlessly net-decking with some creative tricks and adding some tech cards into your deck.
For example, if you’re getting a lot of Rogue and Warrior matchups, adding an Ooze to your list could make or break certain situations even though your deck type doesn’t usually feature this card.
Analyze Your Stats With A Deck Tracker
After some progress, you’re bound to hit a plateau. Getting stuck definitely feels frustrating but you can learn from your mistakes and bad habits by analyzing your games. Hearthstone, unfortunately, doesn’t possess a replay or tracking feature so be sure to install a deck tracker.
Deck trackers are free to use and extremely helpful with every major pro player using them.
Download one here.
Optimize Fun & Efficiency
In order to grind efficiently, you need to stay concentrated. The easiest way to stay naturally concentrated is to have fun. Copy pasting a decklist card-for-card can feel extremely boring and bland. Use this method of mixing both to crunch these games efficiently while keeping it fun.
Bronze - Diamond | Play Fast Decks
Players at this level are pretty bad but if you’re starting all the way from bronze it is tedious and long nonetheless. Do not play long and complicated control decks that have stretched out win conditions. Even though you might see these builds sitting on top of tier one you will be sacrificing efficiency.
Make sure to only play fast aggro decks all the way to Diamond. The climb shouldn’t be hard since the winning streak gives extra bonus stars up until this point.
Diamond 5 - Legend | Prioritize Fun
Once you reach the Diamond 5 rank it’s time to get serious. You’ll gain a checkpoint but enter a unique territory where bonus stars are no longer rewarded for winning streaks. This makes the grind from Diamond 5 to Legend extremely drawn out and you’ll need to maintain concentration for each playing session.
The best way to stay concentrated for long hours is to just have fun but all the while using a deck that is top tier.