I'm curious as to how people see the Arena - both in terms of playing it and marking hands, and building decks.
I see it as a place to try to try out things. Let's face it, at 5-10
a pop, it's not really an earner once you've got a decent Gold farming deck. You can more in one Gold match than you can by having a Gold Arena deck up for 5 days. So I don't care about the money I could earn from it, and I don't care if my deck stays up for 12 days or gets knocked out in 3 games.
So I see it as a way to experiment. I get the card, then I see what cards I have which might work with it then, if necessary, buy cards to make a coherent deck. I'm still learning deck building, and I find that this is a more fun way to try things out than going in to the trainer - something that just doesn't appeal to me. Neither does the approach of treating it like maths that I've seen in various deck-building threads. That just doesn't seem like fun to me, and I'm not bothered enough about becoming a
great deck builder to start approaching it that way.
Of course, you're letting the AI loose with your deck, and the AI is stupid. But it's also fun to adjust for that. I week or two ago I got a draw of Adrenaline. I thought that this would go nicely with Vampires, so built a
/
deck. I test the deck out and find that I've got to get rid of all of my Devourers because the AI was wasting the Adrenaline on them. If anything, that's a lesson in making decks focussed.
I'll also experiment with combinations of cards that might be common but which I've personally not used before, or if the card dealt means that there's few sensible options. A day or two ago I had a Gargoyle deck up. If you get dealt a Gargoyle what are you going to do other than create a
/
deck? And that means Devourers and Earthquakes. Similarly, any weapon means synergy with Air and Flying Weapon.
And I reflect this in my marking. I'll automatically mark down Ghostmare (unless the card drawn was GotP or Nightmare, which only really have synergy with each other - I think it's churlish to mark someone down for using to best effect the card that they're dealt, even if I hate the deck that that creates) and any bow which ignores the card dealt, but otherwise I'll tend to mark everything else up. I do wish, though, that there were three options - a negative, a positive, and a neutral. So I could mark down decks which ignore the drawn card, mark decks which are perfectly reasonable but which are a little unimaginative (like my Gargoyle deck) neutral, and then mark up anything I think is particularly clever or interesting.
How about you? How do you approach building, playing and marking, and why?
