New players can\u2019t possibly catch up unless they spend money. [or unless they\u2019re real savvy with how they approach the game. I covered some of that here<\/a>. Most of that advice is still \u201cbasically true,\u201d since the meta game has devolved into \u201caggro wins\u201d and most of the aggro wins cards are trapped in Goblins Vs Gnomes. I\u2019m not bitter. At all.]<\/p>\n These twin problems: the terrible meta game coupled with the barrier to entry have had Blizzard thinking, I suppose. And one of those thoughts is that they need to create a format for the more casual and newer players. That format is the Tavern Brawl.<\/p>\n A Tavern Brawl is basically a player versus player game of Hearthstone with different rules each week. Each brawl awards you a classic pack per week for your first win. I have problems with this set up, because I seriously wish I could just play the AI. But that\u2019s just my own personal preference.<\/p>\n This idea of the rules shifting each week is good because it presents us with a new meta game that\u2019s solely restricted to the brawl. Each week starts on a Wednesday and the brawl rules in that section of the game are turned on for the next five days, with the brawl interface going inactive on Sunday.<\/p>\n The brawls themselves have no other real<\/em> change on the game dynamic. You\u2019re still sitting down to play Hearthstone. You\u2019re still trying to kill your opponent, but some of the other core principles of the game might change. For example [and this is just thumb-sucking, I have no idea if they\u2019d ever do this] \u2013 they might restrict you to only using cards that cost eight or more mana to cast. So you\u2019d construct your deck with big dudes and duke it out like that.<\/p>\n So far, there have been four of these tavern brawls, and, very quickly, I\u2019d like to relate my experience of each:<\/p>\n A fantastic brawl. Not real balanced unless the Ragnaros player was very savvy. Here we had two Warcraft heavyweights: Ragnaros on one side and Nefarian on the other, trying to solve the age-old question of who was more powerful.<\/p>\n Nefarian started out with five mana, a zero cost hero ability that let him put a class card into his hand that would cost nothing to play, he also had thirty health and <\/em>thirty armor and some crazy, crazy cards. All of this is pretty broken. Especially since, occasionally, you\u2019d just draw into ridiculous hands like Vaelastrasz, a dude that lowered the cost of EVERY card in your hand by three. Or maybe you\u2019d trip over Razorgore, a dragon that made all your other guys get +3 attack whenever your turn rolled around. It was silly.<\/p>\n Ragnaros, by turns had a quite serious disadvantage, starting at zero mana, the ability to put a 5\/1 into play for his hero power and a 2\/6 weapon called Sulfuras that changed his hero power to do 8 damage to a random enemy when Sulfuras lost all its durability.<\/p>\n The Ragnaros player had their work cut out for them, and this made many a Ragnaros concede, but I loved it. [I played something like 45 games of Tavern Brawl that first weekend.] I loved the idea of playing the underdog and winning.<\/p>\n This was pretty lame mainly because it devolved into \u201ceveryone built Flamewake mage.\u201d The rule was: whenever one of your guys dies, you get a random banana. Bananas had different effects, like giving +1\/+1 to your minions, or doing one damage to your opponent\u2019s minion. The big problem, though, was that the bananas were absurdly cheap. At a cost of one gem per banana, the mage would just load up on sorcerer\u2019s apprentice and \u201cgo ape.\u201d [Pardon the pun.]<\/p>\n Another pretty lame week, because we\u2019d seen this one already. Way back in Curse of Naxxramas there was a Hunter Challenge that pitted you against Loatheb. Your deck consisted of 30 webspinners there, and the plan was that you would smash those into Loatheb\u2019s men to get actual beast cards you could play. Blizzard basically copied this hunter challenge word for word with the addition of seven random class cards. Not very exciting. It basically boiled down to face rush strategies everywhere. You could pick your own class, though, so you need not have picked Hunter, but Hunter and Mage were the pretty obvious choice.<\/p>\n Another fantastic brawl: Whenever you cast a spell, the game randomly gives you a creature of that cost, too. So a zero cost spell would give you a zero cost minion, while a spell that cost ten would give you anything that cost ten or more mana. This was great, because it meant that you could build a variety of decks.<\/p>\n The one downside of this particular brawl was that it wasn\u2019t very new player friendly: If you were a mage and you had access to pyroblast, you absolutely ran it, because it was a near-guaranteed Deathwing, a guy that would then wreak havoc on the opposite end of the table.<\/p>\n But the variety of decks was fantastic, and the amount of strategy once your minions were summoned was neat to see. You could tell that someone had studied the board and their position when they knew how to trade upward, or knew when to hold off casting their Mind Control.<\/p>\n If it had been a little<\/em> more new player friendly, I think this might have been my favourite brawl.<\/p>\n PS:\u00a0 True story:\u00a0 When Hearthstone started up, I tried making an all spells deck.\u00a0 You can imagine how that went.\u00a0 This week completely redeemed that idea.<\/p>\n Another yawntacular week. Sometimes, Blizzard can get excessively lazy. And this week was the laziest week by far. Copying the spider battle? Eh. That was sometimes funny. I might give it the ghost of a pass, but Crossroads? Crossroads is banal. Essentially: You pick a class, the game builds you a deck and you pilot that particular monstrosity against random opponents. Randomness everywhere. And sometimes, just to add insult to injury, the autogenerator would generate the biggest pile on the face of the planet. Especially if you opted for playing Shaman. Shaman has this concept called overload. Overload gives you powerful spells that are pretty cheap, but then you lose that mana next turn. [so, say you got a card that cost 1 to do three damage, overload 2 would then \u201clock away\u201d two of your mana crystals in the next turn, so you couldn\u2019t use them, effectively giving you \u201cone mana\u201d again.]<\/p>\n Overload \u2013 in small doses \u2013 can be OK, but when the game saddles you with a ton of it, and when all the cards it gives you with overload aren\u2019t especially helpful, well…you\u2019re going to die. Also, there\u2019s a murloc subtheme running through the autogenerator\u2019s shaman decks. Urgh.<\/p>\n Lazy.<\/p>\n But also a lost opportunity. The Crossroads was the scene of many a fierce battle against the Horde and the Alliance way back when and it would have been fun to see the characters being reskinned as \u201ca Horde hero\u201d or \u201can Alliance hero\u201d and for us to know the battle statistics at the end of the week. Did the Horde win? Or the Alliance? We will never know because blizzard are sometimes lazy.<\/p>\n Blizzard has definitely taken small baby steps to help people find their feet in the game. The inclusion of Tavern Brawl gives new players a chance to get into a game mode that doesn\u2019t require them to [always] build decks or have the most powerful cards. They get a classic pack for their trouble [the first time they win] and they get valuable experience learning how to use cards that they may not have had access to before. [Occasionally, the autogenerator will give you bomb after bomb in the Crossroads event. Just don\u2019t count on it.]<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t do everything<\/em> right, of course, but a lot out of five isn\u2019t terrible.<\/p>\n How do I feel the Tavern Brawls stand?<\/p>\n![\"What's](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/hearthstone_tavern_brawl_poster-150x150.png\")
<\/a>What\u2019s A Tavern Brawl?<\/h2>\n
Week 1: Showdown At Blackrock Mountain<\/h2>\n
Week 2: Banana Brawl!<\/h2>\n
Week 3: Spiders, Spiders EVERYWHERE!<\/h2>\n
![\"This](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/hearthstone_tavern_brawl_flamewaker-150x150.png\")
<\/a>Week 4: The Great Summoner Competition<\/h2>\n
![\"When](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/hearthstone_tavern_brawl_great_summoner_competition-150x150.png\")
<\/a>Week 5: Encounter At The Crossroads<\/h2>\n
Rankings and Conclusion:<\/h2>\n
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