Actually I've just made a 1-3 with 8 or 9 golds yesterday, one of them Shupe.
Match#1: Blue coin, and I've only seen 2 of those gold. Instead I've consistently drawn all the crap bronzes I've been forced to pick (I think Dun Banner made his appearance on all my matches except one)
Match#2: I've demolished my opponent on red coin with almost all my golds in my hand including Shupe, while opponent played maybe 2. I felt sorry for him.
Match#3: My opponent also had 8 Golds (at least that's how much I've seen), I've only drawn 6 of mine, two of them were close to a brick (like Caretaker to Roach was my best option, because all other units were Gold in his grave). Also I was on blue coin.
Match#4: I was winning it easily, only on last turn my client crashed. Guess just another luck-based stuff here.
Okay, that was only a story so far, unnecessarily long and only partially relevant for the point I'm trying to gonna make.
I know a lot of people see Arena as some Casino game only more fun / tedious (based on your perspective
). But it could be so much more.
There are several Arena implementations out there in other games where it needs about as much strategy and tactics as constructed (only a very different kind), even if significant amount of luck is involved. Right now it seems to me that there is too much luck-based variance involved in the Arena mode even outside of G/S/B ratio of your deck to make this happen. Consolidating (i.e. fixing or at least limiting the variance of) G/S/B ratio could be a step toward that direction I was talking about, which I'd prefer.
I probably gonna make more runs, but so far I didn't find that much fun, and it's very much possible that after some time I'll just cash in my ore directly into kegs. Still I'm usually pretty bad in this game mode in any game, so maybe I just need to get the hang of the Gwent-variant to see tactics as a significant aspect.
