Playing around certains cards in arena is a skill you definitely want to learn if you seek to become infinite or just better at arena in general. In this article I will talk about situations when you should or shouldn’t play around cards since playing around them often decreases your win percentage. Because of that it is important to understand when, how and what cards you should play around in order to increase your win chances and in addition increase your average win rate. So next time when your board gets wiped on turn 7 with Flamestrike don’t blame it on your rng or how crazy your opponent deck is because it is partially your fault so take responsability.Why play around opponent’s cards?
A good question you may ask - why bother playing around cards? Some people might play around a card when in reality their opponent doesn’t even have it. Playing around cards lessens the value of your opponent’s cards in exchange to investing less resources on the board or just playing your cards in other distributions. Of course it is a risk/reward kind of situation where you evaluate if playing around cards lessens or improves your chances of winning that particular game.
When to play around cards?
Most of the time since playing around cards is a risky thing to do if you are behind on the board, tempo wise or in terms of card advantage you should avoid playing around most cards since by playing around them and investing less resources on the board you risk of getting overrun completely and if you do get destroyed by a card which you did not play around even though after the game it seemed like a good idea to play around it however given the situation in the game most of the time the correct play will be not to play around certain cards. When you are ahead the situation is entirely different. When you are ahead is the time when you can get completely destroyed by AoE like Flamestrike the most which may turn a 90% chance to win into a simple 50/50. When you are ahead you must play around cards that have the potential to completely swing the board advantage. Usually since you are ahead you won’t need to invest too many more resources since you should be winning either way if you are miles ahead on your opponent. So remember that you want to play around cards only when you are either ahead on the board. If you are equal on the board it is very situational when you should or shouldn’t play around certain cards and depends on specific given cases. And last point to mention is you should play around cards more often if your opponent has a lot of cards in hand since your opponent is a lot more likely to have Flamestrike if he has 10 cards in hand than he is if he has only 1. You can take this step further and notice which cards have been sitting in your opponent’s hand for a while. If there are cards that your opponent holds on for long amounts they are either very conditional or have high mana cost. Usually deck trackers show at which turn your opponent drew a card so you can get a better insight of what cards your opponent may be holding. For example if your opponent Mage has been holding onto a card since turn 1 and next turn he will have 7 mana it is very likely the card is Flamestrike and therefore you should play around it by playing minions with 5 or more health on the board.
What cards to play around?
First thing to consider if you should play around a certain card is it’s rarity. We all know that common cards are the most common, followed by rare, epic and legendary. A good rule of thumb is not to play around epic and legendary cards at all since you will see them played very rarely and if you play around them often times you will decrease your chances to win a game more often than you would increase them by playing around epic or legendary cards.
Another good rule to follow is not to play around neutral cards. Class cards are twice as likely to be offered in a draft so therefore more often you will see them played against you and when playing around them more times than not your opponent will have them in hand.
So now that we figured you should play around common and rare class cards you need to identify if the card you want to play around swings the board or puts you in a big disadvantage. For example it is turn 6 and my opponent Shaman hasn’t used Hex at all. Here I have 2 options - I could play Boulderfist Ogre or play a Chillwind yeti and a Bloodfen Raptor. The correct play is to play 2 minions instead of 1 big one. If you go with the Ogre play and your opponent uses Hex against you he effectively gains 4 mana worth of tempo advantage which in turn lets him grab the board and put you at a big disadvantage compared to what happened if you played 2 minions which weren’t that big. You want to bait out hard removal so your opponent can’t use it efficiently to gain an advantage. Another thing: if your opponent already used 2 copies of the card before you don’t want to play around them anymore for the rest of the game since having 3 copies of say a Consecration is very unlikely and you will lose more by playing around it than not. And lastly usually after a Hearthstone expansion Blizzard increase offering rates for cards from that expansion (TGT cards received a bonus after TGT was released, LoE cards received a bonus after LoE was released and etc.) so remember which impactful cards got released with the latest expansion and remember to play around them.