Blog#003: Made it to gold+50 wins with my Nature Deck on WE ranked - here is how!

So after I hit auric gold on friday and even solar gold on saturday, I was happy that my deck performs so well, especially because you don't see Nature decks so often on gold. I only used the free crypto rewards from coinbase and some steemrewards. So technically I still did not spend anything on this game :D You can find my decks onunchainedstats.

The idea behind it

I started building my first custom deck at around level 70 when I felt like the premade nature deck didn't perform so well anymore on shadow. I had to improvise, because I was missing a lot of core cards for the most popular decks, namely death zoo and war control. My initial idea was to make use of natures regen ability, because I felt like it is pretty underrated. Both Marsh Walker and Black Jaguar are pretty neat starters, and buffing them should give a decent amount of board control. Fortunately, here are a lot of common core cards giving either +1/+1 or +2/+2. On the downside, I also had to do without some really good cards that are in the premade nature deck. I chose some of the more expensive ones (Oliphaunt Mount, Firewine and Vinebound Jotun), because the deck was intended to be fast anyway. While I always played with the Animal Bond godpower with premade Nature, I decided to switch to Leech Life, since I wanted to focus on less but stronger creatures from the very beginning.

Testing and Evaluating

I soon realized my deck performs quite well, especially against Death Zoo. I feel like Leech Life helped a lot, because it killed important enemies while at the same time healing myself, thus effectively extending the game until eventually my enemy was running out of cards in his hand. I didn't need to adjust very much and had a lot of fun grinding the whole weekend :) Eventually I hit 50 wins and should be rewarded with a Genesis Rare pack! We'll see.

What I learned

1. Know your audience
Whatever deck you want to play, check the meta first. I was lucky to perform okayish against Death, Light and Deception but got crushed by almost every War Control deck.

2. Use what you have
Maybe you like one god or godpower most, or want to play it because it is successfull in the meta right now. If you are short on cards this might not be the best idea. Instead, check your inventory and build a deck on top of a combination of cards that already has some synergies.

3. Fine Tuning
You might notice that certain cards don't make it to the board very often, even if in theory they are pretty good. Remove them! Unplayable cards are just a burden that prevent you from drawing better cards.

4. Keep playing!
Sometimes you will end up loosing a lot of matches in a row, either because there are too few players online and you get matched with someone way out of your league, or because you just get unlucky. Keep playing! Maybe come back at another time, but don't get frustrated. Even with a winning rate less than 0.5 you can climb the ladder.