General Strategies and Advanced Rewards

I’ve found a lot of success with Monk (Green/Yellow) and Archer (Green/Red) when doing solo arenas. You want to draft leaning towards aggro, as the AI will often break your runes and ignore value trades. Minions with Drain actually help a lot to stabilize. I usually try to focus on Green first for archetypes, but that’s based on my preference for all of the Lethal prophecy taunts and the cards that let you move minions along lanes. This ability is incredibly useful to out-maneuver the AI. Red might be the best overall due to the ping-effect minions and an opportunity to out-race the AI.

In most cases, I just try to aggressively get on the board at the start. The AI will generally spend every card it can manage. Depending on how this goes, you can get great value trades to keep a board alive to the point where you haven’t broken any of their runes and they are out of cards. Try to avoid giving the AI a draw unless you have a board that you can use to deal with any worst-case scenarios. The turn length is infinite (unless disconnected), so no need to rush. Try to keep a presence in both lanes, and open with the non-shadow lane to draw out their minions.

Although the opponents can be incredibly aggressive, it’s usually best to go the safe route and use an aggro-control model to gain card advantage to build your board. Sometimes you’ll just have to make the call and race them, but don’t do that unless there’s no better option. As your solo arena rank increases, difficulty does as well, and you get some great rewards. A 9-win run can average around 125 gold, 160 soul gems, 2-3 packs and sometimes an epic card. Once you reach Rank 6 or so, it will require a 9-win run to increase your rank. When you transition from Rank 2 -> Rank 1, you will also get a Golden Adoring Fan as a reward. That’s 1200 soul gems if you disenchant it.

Remember here that you are working to outsmart the AI. It will almost always go face, so use that to your advantage. Minions are usually better than spells, but some spells can be amazing (Shadow Shift), and you always want something to target stealthed minions in the shadow lane. Having an early board with smaller minions is much better than having some late-game board-clears, as you might not make it that far. Even Piercing Javelin isn’t that great compared to some of the lethal green minion effects. Sometimes the AI will just destroy you, and you’ll end up following a 9-win run with a 2-3. It’s a great environment to learn mechanics of the game if you’re unfamiliar with some of them.