How To Set Up Hearthstone Deck Tracker

Find the all-time Hearthstone deck tracker for y'all

If you lot've played Hearthstone at anything beyond a very basic level, you lot should already empathise the importance of statistics. Specifically, how of import understanding them is to improving your chances of long-term success. During any game, you need to be able to calculate the odds of your opponent property a specific bill of fare, and how likely it is that y'all'll depict the crucial one you need. Arguably even more valuable is keeping track of the winrates of your decks against the opponents yous're normally facing. Thankfully, you don't have to rely on pen and newspaper or faltering encephalon cells to memorise everything. What you lot demand is a Deck Tracker.

Deck Trackers will take your ladder matches and turn them into easily quantifiable information that you lot tin then base decisions on. They achieve this through a background process that records data from the Hearthstone customer through diverse methods ranging from image recognition to software hooks. Importantly, all iii of the tested options hither are, at the time of writing, deemed safe for use past Blizzard and do not contravene whatsoever aspect of their ToS.

So why is objective data important? Well, it'due south easy to overestimate the corporeality of Face up Hunter you're actually playing against: those losses tend to feel actress painful, and so they stick out in your mind. It's also like shooting fish in a barrel to lose track of exactly how well a deck has performed for you over a day's play. This sort of data is available online. Meta snapshots like those provided by Tempo Storm (opens in new tab) and Liquid Hearth (opens in new tab) can provide you with information on which decks are supposedly common or should perform well. Withal, your ain experience, depending on the server yous play and the time of 24-hour interval, may well differ wildly. That'due south why keeping personal stats is crucial for players hoping to improve performance.

Keeping track of the winrates of your own decks lets you know which ones are strong and which even so crave piece of work. Knowing what you're upwards against most often should too inform which decks to play yourself, and the key tech cards to include in order to counter the metagame.

This article will look at iii of the most popular Deck Tracking options, along with their individual strengths and weaknesses, and how each can aid make you a better histrion.

Rails-o-Bot

Track-o-Bot is a uncomplicated, streamlined tool that is based around an online profile, making the bodily background programme very lightweight. Despite this, it offers perhaps the most robust set of tools for tracking win rates out of whatever of the available options.

Some initial setup is required, and when yous create your contour you'll have to sink a piddling time into customising which decks you want the tracking tool to look out for. This is well worth it in the long run, however, as it allows y'all to tell Rails-o-Bot to divide, for instance, games played against a Zoo versus games played confronting Handlocks—most other tools stop at logging that a game was played against a Warlock. This is accomplished by flagging certain cards every bit identifiers for each deck. So for case, a game where the tracker sees Flame Imp and Haunted Creeper from your opponent is automatically flagged as Zoo. This is a wonderful feature that allows you to generate much more complete information, given that win rates confronting unlike archetypes of the same class can vary enormously.

The downside of Track-o-Bot is that information technology uses the same card recognition process to decide which deck you're playing. Although this works fine in theory, it makes information technology hard to runway the difference in win rate between slight revisions of the same deck. If you modify one or two cards in your build as a response to your data on the meta, it's hard to get Track-o-Bot to and then provide yous with the information on your new deck as a split entity. You can create a new deck entry by telling the recognition software to look out specifically for the cards yous changed, only this is unreliable for a diversity of reasons. The card you've added as the new flag may never exist fatigued in a game, or information technology may also be a flag for a different build, creating conflicts in the recognition software.

Track-o-Bot too includes other standard features like a built in Arena tracker, game replay playback via a uncomplicated text based interface, and import/export functions to allow y'all to share the aforementioned account across multiple devices.

Hearthstone Deck Tracker

Of the three options tested hither, Hearthstone Deck Tracker is the well-nigh well known and the nearly controversial. Some competitive players have gone so far as calling for it to be banned by Blizzard due to the advantages it provides.

And so what'southward the fuss nearly? Hearthstone Deck Tracker creates an in-game overlay that provides you with information that otherwise requires a extremely high level of attentiveness and concentration to obtain. This includes the odds of your opponent holding a particular bill of fare in their paw, the odds of you drawing a detail card next plow, which cards were kept in your opponent's hand at mulligan, and which cards have been fatigued and played from both player'south decks. Although this overlay tin can exist intimidating at outset, a handy annotated screenshot is bachelor on their GitHub folio explaining what each section means.

This level of information at your fingertips can allow you to brand informed plays without the level of memory, concentration, or calculation that is required to brand the aforementioned play in a tournament situation. This can be both a blessing and a expletive, as information technology tin go too much of a crutch for your play in the long term, especially if you promise to transition to tournament play where the utilise of deck trackers is banned. Thankfully Hearthstone Deck Tracker offers the ability to disable parts or all of this overlay in a very robust settings card.

Across the controversial advantages that Hearthstone Deck Tracker offers, the software is a robust winrate tracking tool in its own correct, offer a few other advantages that brand it a very pleasant tool to work with. Dissimilar the other options listed hither, it allows you to build and save specific decks in the program itself, which means your winrates will always be tracked for the specific deck you're playing. If yous edit a deck to update it, or experiment with a new build, it's automatically saved as a new version and the stats volition start to be tracked independently. The previous builds of a deck are all preserved in an archive along with their stats, allowing you to switch back easily if your new revision isn't working out, or then you can easily compare operation between various iterations.

Hearthstone Deck Tracker can also export whatever deck you've saved directly into Hearthstone at the click of a button. This is an invaluable tool to any player that experiments regularly with different decks, and is a unproblematic way of dodging the 9 deck slot limit currently imposed by Blizzard in the game.

The major downside, however, is that Hearthstone Deck Tracker lacks the tools to separate opposing deck archetypes in its stat reports. This means that although the stats on decks yous're playing will ever be very precise, reports on your winrates volition be limited to scores vs classes, and not broken down further into specific deck archetypes.

Hearthstone Tracker

Hearthstone Tracker is the third pop option for deck tracking software, but somewhat pales in comparison to the ii options listed above. Information technology offers far fewer in-game features than Hearthstone Deck Tracker, but feels swollen and heavy compared to the elegant simplicity of Rail-o-Bot. Besides, in comparison to Track-o-Bot, it lacks whatever simple mode to distinguish between the decks of your opponent beyond which class they were playing.

On height of this, information technology's simply too unreliable in my experience. The screenshot tool for importing your decks into the customer rarely works. Additionally, in-game tracking is desultory. Many games are only tracked partially, or missed altogether. At fourth dimension of writing, a beta release is available that claims to solve these problems, but it hasn't been pushed to the client updater or made available on the website yet. Even when it'due south working correctly, the tracking methods used by Hearthstone Tracker seem inconsistent and clunky. It requires more than manual attention than the other options, and in my testing never gained the trust required for me to leave it alone to do its thing—which is of grade the goal with any tool like this.

These failings are enough to take Hearthstone Tracker out of the running and leave u.s.a. with a straight shootout between the get-go two options.

Deck choice Hearthstone (from phone interface)

Decision and additional tips

With Hearthstone Tracker out of the equation, your conclusion comes down to the simplicity and powerful winrate tracking options of Rails-o-Bot versus the feature-packed Hearthstone Deck Tracker. The verdict depends on what yous want from the tool. If you're solely interested in keeping track of your winrates, Runway-o-Bot does it best. It's the most simple, lightweight, and unobtrusive pick. Nonetheless, if yous feel you'll get mileage out of the additional tools in Hearthstone Deck Tracker, such as the overlay or deck management and export options, the small sacrifice in tracking clarity becomes worth it.

Beyond the overall strategic advantage that these tracking tools can bring you, improving as a thespian also ways improving your mechanics and in-game conclusion making. The replay options provided in both recommended options are a great tool for this, as you can look back through a tracked game and search for any misplays you might have fabricated, or where primal decisions could accept sent the game down an alternate path. Don't underestimate the sometime-fashioned method of taking manual screenshots, however, as having the full board state available at a glance tin can make information technology much easier to decide the right line of play. If y'all find yourself running out of time on a particularly catchy turn, have a screenshot using Blizzard's handy built-in Impress Screen tool and come back to it later on to fully suspension downwardly all the options.

The important thing to recognise is that no deck tracker will immediately improve you equally a player. Instead, they should exist seen as tools that you tin apply to improve gradually over time. This is one of the major downsides of Hearthstone Deck Tracker, equally its overlay tools are essentially doing your piece of work for yous, instead of developing the skills you demand to somewhen achieve similar results on your own. Keep this in mind if your ultimate goal is taking the tournament scene by storm!

Pcgp Logo Red Small

PC Gamer Pro is a new aqueduct dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every mean solar day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota ii, Hearthstone, CS:Become and more. GL HF!