How to survive the Arachnid Quarter - Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas tips and guide

If you're not already a Hearthstone player, now is a good time to become one, and not just because it's a maddeningly brilliant game.

The latest update has introduced a new style of solitary play, Curse of Naxxramas, which features a series of "wings", each of which contains new AI opponents to defeat and new cards to unlock.

Each wing will cost £4.99 / $6.99 to unlock - perhaps a big ask for a free game, but right now the initial wing (the Arachnid Quarter) is free. You need to have unlocked all the Hearthstone characters before you can play Curse, and that takes some time, so best get started as soon as possible.

With time being of the essence, we've played through the update and collected notes on the most effective ways to beat the various new elements on offer.

The first thing you'll encounter in the sticky webs of the Arachnid Quarter are the three new boss decks to play against: Anub'Rekhan, Grand Widow Faerlina, and Maexxna.

Neophytes should note that these are not fair fights. Each character has a deck stacked with overpowered cards and a very useful special power to boot. They might even look unbeatable at first, especially if you don't have a big card collection.

But here's the big surprise: although the loading screen hints suggest you create a custom deck to beat each one, all three can easily be taken out with the same cheap and common deck style.

What you need is speed: a deck that can quickly populate the board and bring the pain onto your opponent. Hearthstone veterans refer to sub-types of this style as these as "zoo" or "aggro" decks.

If you search online you'll find a lot of cheap and effective builds in this mold. I used a deck like this, but with Questing Adventurer in place of Scarlet Crusader. With that, I was able to beat all three of them first time round.

But if you're just starting out, you can build fairly effective speed-win decks out of nothing but common cards.

Here's an example of a solid, but totally free, speed win Mage deck. It's not as effective as a fully-optmised one, with various rare cards shuffled in, but it ought to get you past the Arachnid Quarter bosses without too much trouble.

Each victory unlocks some new cards for you to add to your collection. If you're itching to use them right away, here's some more good news: they look a perfect fit for a Hunter rush deck.

These are cheap, have been becoming increasingly common recently, and are fairly powerful in spite of not having great card synergy. With all these new Naxxramas cards being beasts, and so working really well with other Hunter cards, I can see this build becoming increasingly common in the near future.

Once you've polished off the three bosses on normal mode, you can earn yourself some more tasty cards by undertaking two classes challenges.

These are just rematches of two of the preceding fights, but the catch is that you have to use a pre-prepared deck rather than your own.

The fights are no more difficult than they were before. To win, you just need to learn how to use your deck.

The first class challenge gives you a Druid deck featuring some classic cards and some of the new ones from Naxxramas. One of the latter is Stoneskin Gargoyle, a 1/4 minion that heals at the end of the turn if it isn't destroyed.

In true Druid fashion, a lot of the other cards are buffs. In particular, buffs that push up health and provide taunt.

So: mulligan for a Stoneskin Gargoyle, get it on the board, and buff it until it's so cheesy you can almost smell it. With it's auto-heal ability, nothing will get past it and you can stroll to victory behind the protection of its stony bottom.

The other class challenge gives you a Rogue deck with an unhealthy amount of Echoing Slime in it. This is another new card that makes a copy of itself at the end of a turn, quickly filling the board with slimes.

You might think this is useful, and it is so long as your opponent doesn't draw one of the Sea Giants in its deck, since these cost less for each minion you have on the board.

The solution to removing these hard-hitting cards lies elsewhere in your pre-prepared deck. It has Big Game Hunter, whose battlecry will destroy a Giant, and Defender of Argus which will buff your slimes and give them taunt, to protect you against Giants.

Alongside there's Youthful Brewmaster and Shadowstep, both of which will get your Hunters and Defenders back into your hand so you can use them again. And again. And again.

After those relative cakewalks, here's the bad news: on heroic difficulty those same simple fights have become astoundingly difficult.

There's no great secret as to why. Your foes now have a colossal 45 health and their hero powers have been changed to become totally unfair.

Anub'Rekhan for example originally allowed him to summon a 3/1 creature, but in heroic, it's a 4/4 instead. So, unsurprisingly, he just fills the board with these hairy horrors.

Luckily, the only reward for winning these tough fights is only a card back, albeit a rather nice one. So there's no need to rush to earn your sticky spurs.

While absurdly difficult, however, they're not impossible. But to get all the way through, you'll likely need some very strong cards, and a healthy dose of luck too.

With that hero power, Anub'Rekhan can obviously push out a big line-up of very beefy monsters with terrifying speed. Any Hearthstone veteran will tell you that the best counter for big beasts is to fight fire with fire and run a Druid deck full of powerful taunters.

Effectively what you want to do is throw up a taunt wall as fast as possible, with the help of cards like Innervate and Wild Growth. Then use cards like Swipe and Starfire to blow away the boss from behind your screen.

The Grand Widow is probably the easiest of the three, although she's still one tough spider-cookie. Her hero power hits you or your minions with a 1-damage missile for each card in your hand, and in Heroic mode it only costs one to use.

The only way to survive this hard rain is to empty your hand, get those cards onto the board and get pummeling Faerlina as fast as possible. The sort of Warlock deck I linked to earlier for the normal level bosses should be ideal for this.

The final fight, against Maexxna, is not only difficult but horribly frustrating. As if 45 health wasn't enough, it starts with two minions on the board and can return two of yours to your hand every turn for free.

Yes, you read that right. For free.

So, what you're going to need is a lot of healing or armour and a lot of direct damage from either spells or charging minions who can hit that horrible spider face before they're sent back to your hand.

Fortunately, there are a number of classes that can do this. Mage, Warrior and Paladin are all workable, the latter being a particularly effective choice for budget decks.

Although if you're stuck without a decent selection of powerful cards, it's "effective" only in a very relative sense. You can win, but only with a lot of restarts and a lot of luck.

So, while Curse of Naxxramas might not be all that scary, the next time you see that Heroic card back on an opponent in ranked or casual play, you should probably be very, very afraid.