there’s nothing stopping a new player crafting a deck with ethereal obelysks, lavastorm obelysks, firestorm obelysks, whisper of the sands and dunecaster after a few hours of playing.
if you want a strong budget vanar deck i went 34W/14L from rank 4 to s-rank in november with this 1140 spirit list http://i.imgur.com/1dWtT29.png
Well tomorrow is rotation day 
@hsuku’s Gauntlet academy has good advice if you want to use gauntlet to grind out a bigger collection. It’s also fun on its own.
id say starting out in this game, with any faction if u run dispels heals and card draw u can often win just by outlasting ur opponents in lower ranks if u focus on clearing the board of enemy minions
Vanar is a bit more difficult to get comfortable with so I’d recommend getting some games in with Lyonar first. I whipped up this insanely cheap (limited myself to Basic and Common cards) decklist with cards you should already have, won’t rotate out and are very cheap to craft if you need to and very likely to still be useful for a long while after the expansion drops tomorrow. It’s best to wait with crafting or disenchanting things for at least a week or two so we can see how the meta develops so we can avoid having you waste Spirit.
You’re going to want to get three copies of Ironcliffe Guardian and three copies of Lifestream (a new card) while you work with something that looks like this deck. Do you have any Blaze Hounds or Sojourners? Or any Lyonar Rares or Epics?
Paddo is very unreliable so people don’t really play it. You can try it but the results are so random that it doesn’t usually work out.
Id normally point you towards my budget guide, but with the expansion plus rotation starting tomorrow its about to be dated. But overall the game is quite balanced and very skill intensive, it just takes practice. Many have taken budget decks all the way to S rank just to show that skill is the largest factor.
Two days from now we will at least have a good idea of where the game will stand, but for now here is an affordable Bond List that you should be able to put together in a day or two that wont change tomorrow:
Decks pretty straitforward, use all your strong stat sticks to bully the early game, and then try to get something with a lot of health to stick and then Divine Bond for the win.
Here is my budget guide which I will try to get an update for by the end of the week, but it should at least show you the basics, just be careful as a lot of the cards I recommend currently are rotating.
https://forums.duelyst.com/t/deathsadvocates-budget-guide-immortal-vanguard-update/12842
All of these suggestions are very good… but here’s the real:
Just keep playing. It’s still a collectible card game at its core and if you want more cards without shelling out cash, the good news is that Duelyst makes that easy. Just keep playing. Finish your quests everyday, get your gold, get your spirit and “roll the dice” with your orbs. Maybe you like one faction but you keep getting cards for another. Well… learn that faction a little. The best part of this game is figuring out how cards work and how you can use them in new interesting ways to work with what YOU have. And as everyone else has been saying: work on your strategy. When you play and lose don’t blame it on what they have, ask yourself what your deck needs or what you need to do and then build your deck around that. There’s no limits on how many combinations you can make. Make 100 decks. try them all. You’ll find your play style soon enough.
Thx for all,
I’ll read most of the links you gave.
I don’t have a decklist or a useful link to share with you @hugoken , but I can tell you that we all go through that frustration, you’ll face weird matches that will make you angry. It’s the hard way but if you keep playing eventually you’ll learn, you’ll build a decent deck and you’ll manage 
. Personally watching streamers and replays, even of my own games, helps me, I suggest you do the same!
The only thing I just don’t understand with this game is that I play against rank 16 while I’m rank 20.
They are no other rank 20 that wanted to play ? ?
Sometimes matchmaking can create matchups with a big gap in ranked, not sure if it’s due to the system being weird or a lack of available players at that moment.
I’ll go ahead and second @deathsadvocate’s deck in this topic, it’s super-solid. Just don’t disenchant anything you might want later to make it. Disenchant duplicates and trash cards only.
Its probably down to time Vs appropriate opponent. Sometimes there isn’t a person in your exact rank looking for a match. Most of the time you should expect to play against people who may be a couple of ranks above or below yourself. If you happen to near a division threshold you can end up playing people from that division, or if you are very unlucky with your time zone with not having many players online at that time.
Gauntlet looks unbalanced too …
It’s just about ranged minions and buff
my opponent refresh his heros power with the 2/2 turn 1 then cast his 1/1 ranged
turn 2, +4/2 on it —> wonderful !!!
I’ve made 5 of them: my best score was 3.
During my picks, I had to chose so many useles minions … 10/10 for 2 than need 3 turns to come alive. I has so many picks about awful golems that need a full deck of golem to be good.
oh yeah, it is completely unbalenced, bad players lose while good players win, that is unfair.
I’m having an extremely hard time taking you seriously. KE + Heartseeker is one of the most rudimentary combos in a Reva deck. Your opponent picked KE because he/she got Reva, unlike you who probably picked cards based on immediate face value without keeping anything more comprehensive or strategic in mind. Carelessly losing to such a primary tactic and redeeming the entire game mode as unbalanced shows how unskilled you are as a player, as well as how unfit you are to make such opinionated judgments.
“bad player”
“unskill”
–> LOOOL !!
ok
that’s enough
come to play against me at hearthstone
come with your basic deck against my full contructed one.
I’ll show you how unskilled I am …
Show me how good and skilled you are at truly skilled game.
My battletag: Hugoken#2591
If we want to go for a true game of skill then I will happily play Go with you. Sticking to on topic, I have already offered to help you improve, if you don’t want to get good then don’t complain about being bad.
There is no point in comparing different games. One can be good at Duelyst and bad at HS and viceversa. I have played both games at fair levels and I can tell for sure that the general skill cap for Duelyst is higher, given the presence of a board which opens space for tons of opportunities.
Just play the game you like more, but don’t tell this game is unbalanced, because you just don’t have enough experience to make reliable statements on it. A lot of people here can help you into improving, but it must start from you: if you like the game and want to improve, play and listen to the community.
I can also show you how good I am at synchronised swimming. Let’s play a round of poker.
Scrabble or Mortal Kombat?
