What can be won in the arena?
You get up to 5 rewards on completing 12 wins or 3 losses. One reward will be a card pack. The other one to four rewards are random (dust, gold, single cards). More wins = more and better random rewards.
What is the minimum price received when loosing 3 times?
You always get your card pack. The worst random reward is "5 dusts". However, there is MMR matching in arena. You should expect to win at least one game on average even if you're terrible at picking cards.
When accumulating gold through daily's what is the best way spend this gold?
- Dailies in play mode generate 1 pack per ~3 games.
- Arenas generate 1 pack per 5-15 games played.
- Games in Play mode without dailies generate 1 pack per 30 wins (now limited to 1 per day).
There's two extremes of player here: Some players complete the dailies and log off, sometimes going for multiple dailies at once (3 or fewer games per day). On the other extreme, others play at least two hours or more each day (8 or more games per day).
- If you value your time highly (as the first group does), doing the dailies in play mode generates more gold than arenas. Arena purchases wouldn't get used, so packs should be purchased instead. You may want to set aside 300 gold in case you get an extra burst of playtime so you can arena on those days.
- If you value your time playing at a net of zero (as the second group does), doing arenas generates more packs than play mode.
This is according to my own experience. I have 257 arena wins and I like to keep stats. I searched previously but couldn't find an official source for this.
1st, 10th, 20th, 30th pick in Arena are always rare or higher: I call this Rare Turn, the others are normal turns.
At any normal turn, you can get one of these sets:
- 3 free
- 2 free 1 common
- 1 free 2 common
- (possibly 3 common as well didn't pay attention, can't verify this)
- 1 Rare turn ( % not sure I would guess about 5% - 10%)
In a normal turn roughly you have a 60% chance of getting a free and 40% chance of getting a common card.
At any rare turn, you can get one of these sets:
- 3 rare
- 3 epic
- 3 legendary
I got a legendary about every 10 games and since we have 4 rare+ picks I assume the chance of getting a legendary in a single rare turn is about 2%
I got an epic about every game so I assume the percentage for that is about 20%
TL;DR:
Normal Turn:
Rare Turn:
- Rare+ : 4 times
- Epic : 20%
- Legendary : 2%
I don't have a source for this its all according to my personal experience. These numbers are most likely wrong, but should give the general idea. More data is needed for better estimates.
In a normal arena deck you will have something like this:
- 15 Free
- 10 Common
- 4 Rare
- 1 Epic/Legendary
Of course if you are lucky you could get 4 legendaries, 10 rares, etc..
Best Answer
Game knowledge is very important in Arena, to play effectively you need to be familiar with the class you're playing and all the cards in the game. There is a large component of luck in Arena, both in the draft and in the actual games, but there is also a significant skill component.
The actual games are similar to the other modes, with the exception that you can't rely on the two cards per deck limit to guess which cards your opponent might have on hand. The decks are also very different compared to constructed and rely much more on strong individual cards than specific combos. But most of your skill from constructed play should transfer to Arena.
Drafting is the most difficult part for a new player, I'd strongly recommend to use a drafting guide like Trump's Arena Tier List to help until you're comfortable with it.
If you enjoy the Arena mode more than constructed play, just start playing it and don't worry. If you don't enjoy it, just ignore it. If you're good enough to get more than 4 wins regularly, Arena is also more efficient than buying packs.
In short, I'd recommend to play Arena once you feel reasonably comfortable with the general rules and tactics. If you win less than 3 times on average you might want to practice a bit more before playing more Arena. Then you're likely making too many mistakes in either drafting or playing.