To all the active players in the Arena.

[Naesala]

Surprised by some of the levels of angry dissension in this thread. Tone it back a bit, guys.

I think we can agree that both sides are liable to use unoriginal decks. I think there is no harm in Gallahad asking for a change, but at the same time we can agree he should try as well to change in turn. Be the change you want to see, as it were. And I agree with Dm that there probably won't be much gains posting it, but also with Gallahad that there's no real harm. The arena is meant to be fun diversity, and I can understand being upset when so much of the rest of the game is stale and frozen without updates.

I'd also like to ask, do platinum players really gain so much electrum from their arena decks that it's a large benefit? Do platinum players still need electrum as badly? This is a curiosity of mine, as I've only reached gold and don't really play as often anymore.

[Cardplayer]

I'd also like to ask, do platinum players really gain so much electrum from their arena decks that it's a large benefit? Do platinum players still need electrum as badly? This is a curiosity of mine, as I've only reached gold and don't really play as often anymore.

I'm in plat and I will openly admit that I use pretty boring plat decks often. There are two main reasons for this
1. I'm fairly poor electrum-wise (I currently have 47k). While this seems like a lot to some people, war is coming up and I want to join a team. Over the course of the event, I'll (probably) have to splurge a lot of electrum on upgrades and cards and such. Thus, I'd rather not invest in creating a creative plat deck as I want to stockpile electrum or this event. So boring decks with what I have available, are often necessary. Creativity in plat decks, are often and unfortunately, easier for those wealthy among us.
2. Boring decks, while boring, win often enough. Each win grants 12 or 24 electrum. While this may seem a small amount, each successful deck does add up. This actually helps fund creativity and my electrum stockpile. 

Also creative decks that lose, fall out of plat, relatively quickly. So, boring decks soon take their place, because whether, we'd like to admit or not, they are effective at winning.

[kirbylover314]

I'd also like to ask, do platinum players really gain so much electrum from their arena decks that it's a large benefit? Do platinum players still need electrum as badly? This is a curiosity of mine, as I've only reached gold and don't really play as often anymore.

As someone in the lower end of Platinum (Level 65) and as someone who still has a long way to go in completing Trainer Edition, I find it hard to find time to efficiently grind the game regularly for a number of reasons, so making effective decks is a small but helpful way to gain electrum. Roughly 200 electrum over a few days isn’t much, but with minimal grinding it’s enough for a few upgrades every week. Note I grind a little less than an hour a day.

[farscape]

As others have already mentioned, if you use creative, original decks, they will most likely lose a few times quickly and will be out of the top 500 in just 3 losses. Why is that ? There are a few reasons:

1. The most efficient strategies are already well known, so they do not count as creative, thus creative decks tend to be less efficient
2. The AI is not very smart and has no long-term strategic thinking ability, it makes on-the-spot decisions whether to play each card individually, thus unable to execute any smart creative strategy, e.g. it cannot play OTK decks, cannot hold back cards strategically. This severely limits the type of strategies and creativity you can put into an arena deck.
3. An unusual combo / synergy is completely unknown for the AI, therefore it cannot play it, so you better refrain from building decks on it.

In other words, what OP is asking is for everybody to post semi-farms that are easy to beat, so he can gain  more efficiently, while also having some fun. If you look at it this way, you realize how selfish that request is.

[Ghaladh]

In other words, what OP is asking is for everybody to post semi-farms that are easy to beat, so he can gain  more efficiently, while also having some fun. If you look at it this way, you realize how selfish that request is.

If you manipulate out of contest everything I wrote, you can make me say whatever you want the others believe I said. I can put anything under thousands of different perspectives and obtain from the same statement thousands of different meanings. In the way of a more polite conversation, I strongly suggest to stick to what has been written and not to what you want to read between the lines.

Said that, my request, I say it again, is to put some more thoughts in the composition of your defensive decks. Now, let's talk some logic, without the insidious innuendo that might deliver by a malicious interpretation of statements.

1) It's a universally shared opinion that there is no unbeatable combination of cards. Each strategy has its strength and its weakness. Let's consider this a fact.

2) It's logical to think that if I have 75 decks that uses the same strategy, I will be able to beat all of them with the same deck built to beat the strategy used by those 75 decks. Of course I might have bad luck and the RNG might work against me; no victory is assured, yet, I will win the great majority of those 75 games. That's a fact.

3) Let's say that I have to fight thousands of decks, all of them using only 10 different archetypes. There is a built that can defeat 6 of those 10 archetypes and can win potentially against 2 but will surely lose against the remaining 2; this kind of built will potentially give me 60%/80% of win rate. That's hypothetical, of course, yet the logic of it it's unquestionable.
By this principle can be deducted that the most popular farming decks will be those able to beat most of those archetypes.

4) Following the reasoning in point number 1 and 3 we can verily state that the more archetypes are used in the defensive decks, the less globally effective will a farming deck. Are you following so far?

Connect the dots. Is it the guy who's using the unoriginal farming deck to push the other players to use banal defensive decks or is it the other way around? Asking for more variety, am I asking for an easier way to farm or am I looking for trouble because the deck I am using will be less effective, considering that i will have to cope with a wider range of strategies?

Never twist someone else words. It's vile and most of the times makes you appear not so smart.

[Cardplayer]

As others have already mentioned, if you use creative, original decks, they will most likely lose a few times quickly and will be out of the top 500 in just 3 losses. Why is that ? There are a few reasons:

1. The most efficient strategies are already well known, so they do not count as creative, thus creative decks tend to be less efficient
2. The AI is not very smart and has no long-term strategic thinking ability, it makes on-the-spot decisions whether to play each card individually, thus unable to execute any smart creative strategy, e.g. it cannot play OTK decks, cannot hold back cards strategically. This severely limits the type of strategies and creativity you can put into an arena deck.
3. An unusual combo / synergy is completely unknown for the AI, therefore it cannot play it, so you better refrain from building decks on it.

In other words, what OP is asking is for everybody to post semi-farms that are easy to beat, so he can gain  more efficiently, while also having some fun. If you look at it this way, you realize how selfish that request is.

I don't believe the OP is selfish in his request, but the request of creativity in plat will unable to really be fulfilled, because creative decks eventually become the norm and creativity declines. Hence, how many of the plat decks were discovered. Also, since people>AI, the strategic capacities of creativity that would effective in the hands of a person, are unfortunately, in many cases not able to be replicated in the hands of AI. Boring rush decks are the norm, because well, the AI knows how to use them well. Creativity is better sought in the PvP arena, I guess.

[dragtom]

unfortunately, decks like pdials and swallow have a good fighting chance against... I don't know, 80 to 90% of the deck archetypes?
When creating an arena deck, I ask myself if it would win from the following 4 decks:
-pdials
-swallow
-vdb
-SoB air rush

If it only works against 1 of these, I know it will quickly lose.
It is possible to soft-counter them all by using a novabow with gravitymark...
including purify, chargers, plagues, and gravy shield + PA. That works surprisingly well.


Also, I went through your list, and... from this list alone, I can not agree with what you see as 'original' and what not.
The ones that seem to return all the time are mostly SoV-based decks and quanta denial.
Quanta denial can be done in many ways. As can be a rush.
You've stated that you liked a rushbow (20) because it can be done in so many ways. Why not the same for quanta denial?

Any mono is boring, including (26). Except for when the mono includes SoP (3).

tsunami + SoP is boring (10), probably because its a form of quanta denial, but SoP + wardens is cool (48).
But adding poseidon in this deck (or drawing it) makes it suddenly boring?

tl;dr: From this list, I think you are not very consistent with what you call creative and what is boring.
Of course, this does not include the other 3950 games you've played.

[rosutosefi]

SoPa has to be the biggest "creativity" bait in arena right now. SoPa on small critters isn't original at all. Anything with Life, even if it's just a mindless SoG splash, gets a ton of votes too. It's pointless to judge what's "creative" and what's not. You'd get a somewhat different judgment of what's creative or not from a vet vs a relative newbie.

Also, it's pointless to get people to create more creative decks when everyone grinding, including you, are using only 3-4 decks. Anyone would try to counter those. The leading decks are only leading right now because they specifically counter the meta created by unoriginal decks used by those that farm.

If we truly wanted a creative arena meta, everyone - including you - should stop netdecking and stop creating a narrow meta. Which is impossible anyway. So everyone just goes with what works.

[treebeard xiii]

SoPa has to be the biggest "creativity" bait in arena right now. SoPa on small critters isn't original at all. Anything with Life, even if it's just a mindless SoG splash, gets a ton of votes too. It's pointless to judge what's "creative" and what's not. You'd get a somewhat different judgment of what's creative or not from a vet vs a relative newbie.

Also, it's pointless to get people to create more creative decks when everyone grinding, including you, are using only 3-4 decks. Anyone would try to counter those. The leading decks are only leading right now because they specifically counter the meta created by unoriginal decks used by those that farm.

If we truly wanted a creative arena meta, everyone - including you - should stop netdecking and stop creating a narrow meta. Which is impossible anyway. So everyone just goes with what works.

The most sense in this whole thread while the OP is right that the arena is stale the fact is I'd assume a lot less than half the active players even know about the forum so asking the few who are around to try and be a little more 'creative' will make very little impact in the grand scheme of things. Drawing this discussion out any longer will only cause a rift between the forum which is already cracked.  We all want to face 'creative' decks when farming but unfortunately human nature makes that slightly more difficult. Therre are those amongst us who do make unusual decks but there are a larger number of people who don't.

If you want a truly enjoyable farming experience the best there is, is in gold arena and that is where I stay on the rare occasion i do farm, it has the largest variation in decks from my experience and has the largest variation of viable decks for farming it.

[Espithel]

I'll note just one thing before I pseudo-ignore this thread:
Creativity correlates to, but does not cause fun.

That means to say that fun decks don't have to be creative, and creative decks don't have to be fun.

Because I can name more than a few decks that could count as creative whilst being some of the most unfun/cruel decks around.
And some of the standard, common decks, like all SoPa decks in general, I find to be pretty fun.

When I go to plat (which is occasionally, I stick around in gold for the most part), I never really get why people complain about unoriginal decks. I can see why they complain about how mind-numblingly hard it is, but not the uncreativity.
Gold is at least as nearly as bad. But gold is also much easier.

[yee]

I must admit that I quite often put up boring decks, but I try some uncommon variations from time to time.

The thing is that the more simple the deck is the better the AI plays it.

[farscape]

Sorry for the negative comment at the end of my post, that was unnecessary and caused the main points of my post to be ignored, so let's try again:

As others have already mentioned, if you use creative, original decks, they will most likely lose a few times quickly and will be out of the top 500 in just 3 losses. Why is that ? There are a few reasons:

1. The most efficient strategies are already well known, so they do not count as creative, thus creative decks tend to be less efficient
2. The AI is not very smart and has no long-term strategic thinking ability, it makes on-the-spot decisions whether to play each card individually, thus unable to execute any smart creative strategy, e.g. it cannot play OTK decks, cannot hold back cards strategically. This severely limits the type of strategies and creativity you can put into an arena deck.
3. An unusual combo / synergy is completely unknown for the AI, therefore it cannot play it, so you better refrain from building decks on it.