My hasty post yesterday expressed my excitement about hitting legend in Hearthstone. In this one I’ll give more detail on how I got there and a few observations.

I’ve played Hearthstone casually since just before open beta. Until this season, 80% of my time was spent in arena. When September rolled around, I noticed my travel schedule at work wasn’t as intense. It hit me that the timing may be right to make a run for legend.

Undertaker Priest had a lot of buzz at the beginning of the month so I started off with that. My original version contained a proud pair of Deathlords. After being dominated by Hunter’s Mark a few too many times, I swapped it out for a few more defensive cards like Unstable Ghoul and Holy Nova to combat the aggro decks.

After 100 or so games with the deck, my overall judgment is that it’s okay. I enjoyed pulling off a few meaty combos (one Shaman found himself on the wrong end of a Baron/Auchenai/Zombie Chow), and I got fairly adept at keeping the board state in my favor. I didn’t track stats at the lower ranks, but I’d estimate I hovered around 60% win rate.

I found Hunter became more common in the middle ranks. Folks had just learned of the impending Buzzard nerf, so hunters were out in full force to get in their final licks. The priest deck became too unreliable in that environment. When I won games against hunter (and Zoo to a lesser extent), I had to get lucky. If I didn’t find Auchenai/Circle, I was toast. The other issue that didn’t hit me until later is that these games could take forever. There were occasions where I’d pull off a nice Undertaker/aggro facestomp, but generally winning with priest took 10 to 15 minutes. That adds up over several days, especially for me since I’m on a relatively limited play schedule. After swallowing a few losses around rank 9, I decided it was time for a change.

I landed on Zoo after reading a few threads on the CompetitiveHS subreddit that bragged about legend success. I chose a tried-and-true deck list that relied on overwhelming the board and making efficient trades. I opted for that over some of the “fancier” lists with Voidcaller or Void Terror. I think I was drawn to the raw efficiency after piloting Priest gimmicks for 100 games.

I immediately noticed a difference. I wasn’t tracking stats at this point, but my climb from rank 9 to rank 6 was a win streak interrupted only once. Plus, the games were drastically faster. Once I got used to the common scenarios, I played more quickly and found games ended in 4 to 6 minutes.

Around this time I took a week-long break due to work events. I came back with a week left in the season and felt legend was a possibility. The initial climb to higher ranks wasn’t perfectly smooth, but I made enough progress to stay optimistic. Then, I hit a wall around three, and I hit it hard. For a couple nights in a row I couldn’t get any higher than two stars into it.

Around this time I took a hard look at my deck. It had previously occurred to me that Haunted Creeper seemed to be pretty good against me in the Zoo mirror and hunter. I ultimately swapped it in for Power Overwhelming. In hindsight, Power Overwhelming never fit well in the Void Terror-less version of Zoo I was running. It had some synergy with Nerubian Egg, but too often it was a dead card. In theory it provides extra burst, but after playing with the card I think that’s over-selling it. Unlike Soulfire or Doomguard, you need a rested minion on the board to benefit from Power Overwhelming. Overall I found Haunted Creeper to be a better board control card, and that’s what I needed.

Zombie Chow also entered the ring. It received some good press on CompetitiveHS, and I reasoned it would help me establish a stronger early board. I put it in place of one Argent Squire and Leper Gnome. I feel that’s incorrect since it makes the deck less consistent, but I couldn’t decide which one I wanted out of the deck altogether.

I felt better about the deck with those changes, but I still finished up the second-to-last night of the season with only three stars in rank 3. I anticipated a long final night to make legend.

I had little hope when I sat down to play the last night of the season. Then, though, I got off to a great start. I broke into rank 2 for the first time without losing a game. And I kept going. It wasn’t until the tail end of rank 2 that I played what would be my last loss on the way to legend. Shortly after, it happened. Here’s what the streak looked like:

So how did I do it? Honestly, I was so caught up in the moment that I wasn’t taking full stock of my strategy. I’ll try to do a better job of that in the future. In the meantime, here’s how I generally learned to approach games with Zoo.

To state the obvious: Zoo isn’t about going to face. My goal was to gain control of the board. Rarely in the first few turns would I go for face if the opponent had a minion on the board. Error on the side of playing out your hand. Certain classes had some punishing board clears (Shaman is the one I ran into most commonly), but the beauty of Zoo is that you can hedge with sticky minions like Haunted Creeper, Egg, and Harvest Golem. On that note… Keep your sticky minions sticky. I made mistakes early on by maximizing the value of sticky minions in trades when I should have been protecting myself against a board clear. For example, I recall getting blown out by a priest because I selfishly finished off a Dark Cultist with a pumped Egg instead of using the available Leper Gnome. That 4/4 didn’t last long. Know your finishers. Soulfire won me several games off the top because I was able to get the opponent to 4 health and stay alive for enough turns to draw it. Not to contradict #1, but know that your play needs to change if the opponent is down to 4 life (or 5 life if it’s a matchup that doesn’t play taunts). Milk those streaks! Towards the end I told myself I wouldn’t take a break until I lost two games in a row. That paid off. I’m not sure if there’s sound logic here, but my experience this season was very streaky. Had I pushed pause after hitting rank 1 to go eat something, who knows if I’d have made it at all.

In the end, I’m thrilled with where I landed. I finished it out at rank 905 with around 1.5 hours left in the season. I’ll have to figure out if it makes sense for me to make another go in a future season. Now that there’s less pressure to get there, I may take it more slowly with another deck.

For good measure, here are my overall status with Zoo starting around rank 5: