What do you get when you combine arena and tavern brawl? A brand new mode that Blizzard is planning to roll out soon(tm)! Details are below:

• The entry fee is $9.99 USD or 1000 Gold.
• You will build a Standard deck using your own card collection. No changes once it is locked in!
• Your deck can be played up until you hit 12 wins or 3 losses. You will earn rewards based on your total wins.
• Rewards featured up to 50 packs for a run, multiple legendaries, and the usual gold + dust.
• The Heroic Brawl only lasts for the duration of a regular Tavern Brawl week!
• When this special mode is running, there will not be a regular Tavern Brawl.
• You can only run Heroic Brawl a certain amount of times during the week.

Original Blizzard Post: http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20324471/introducing-heroic-tavern-brawl-10-17-2016

This mode is guaranteed to crush my soul, but look at those rewards, man.

I can't watch the video for the features right now but it sounds neat. Is there anything preventing someone from just building the flavor of the month mid range shaman and just spamming it until they happen to get a lucky streak, or is it basically just paid ladder with better rewards?

Huh, not sure how I feel about this. I think 1000g for admission is too high and it's going to end up pissing people off who do poorly with such a high price. On the other hand it might be fun; I'm definitely waiting to see what exactly the rewards are like before I even think about entering though. Hmmm, the more I think about this, the more I think that they are looking for something where people can drop $$$ into and basically gamble it.

I feel like the competition level is going to be too high and this is going to end up being poorly received. We'll see though, should be interesting.

The full reward structure hasn't been released yet, but I think the important thing to note here is that zero wins will get you one pack. As anyone who plays ladder knows, three losses in a row is entirely possible even with the most well refined decks.

This is a great idea in concept but utterly atrocious the way they're presenting it right now. The best Ranked players in the world have like a 65% win rate, most hover around 55-60%, 12-2 is an 85.7% win rate, certainly possible but mostly based on sheer luck even for high end players. If it was a special ruleset or Wild then that would be fine, but you're just looking at a bunch of midrange Shaman and counter midrange Shaman decks ultimately. This is straight up "Oh hey! Are you an idiot? Want to burn money or gold before our next expansion comes out? Well then gamble your soul away!" or "Hey let's watch streamers mostly fail to get to 12 wins and even if they get 12 wins they don't actually get anything because they already have all the cards." It's not even hard to make this interesting, how about you can only play priest, or something to that effect? The meta right now is almost universally regarded as the worst of all time, so who the fuck would burn money on it other than idiots and people that profit from pretending to be idiots? I have 17000 gold, if this was even vaguely compelling I'd certainly try it at least once, but it just seems like a total shitshow.

Yeeeah... no thanks. I'll skip this one. Even if you're good at the game, this is straight up gambling.

Looks sweet. I've been losing interest with HS for the past couple of months and will sporadically play for 1-2 hours to get the saved-up quests. It's just been kind of boring. Playing a tournament every couple of weeks (probably no less than 4 I'd imagine) with massive potential rewards sounds like it could finally get me excited about the game. The price is high but since my collection is pretty broad I'll be happy to bet a 1000 gold, if anything else the gambling pool alone will make things more interesting. I don't imagine getting 12 wins but since I can go over 7 wins pretty consistently in arena I imagine I could probably count on getting 5 wins.

I don't get the concerns that this will just be a midrange shaman fiesta, I think people skipped the part when this is actually a brawl.

@imsh_pl: Well, I mean... the post says you build a deck from your standard collection. Why wouldn't someone make the highest win rate deck when they payed $10 to get in. The whole point would be to maximize your chances of getting rewards back. Anything else would be a high risk of wasting your money by comparison. (Disclaimer: I haven't read anything more than the original post's bullet point description of the mode so feel free to correct me.)

If the competition for ladder rank is a shaman fest I don't see why the competition for more tangible rewards like legendary cards would be any better.

Because it's standard tavern brawl, not standard ladder.

I really enjoy Tavern Brawl (most of the time) but this seems like something I'll never get into.

1) 1000 gold is a lot of gold for someone who plays Hearthstone f2p. In a week I can make 700 gold just by playing to game if I'm dedicating a LOT of time to Hearthstone. So if you see i Heroic Brawl you like in the beginning of the week and you don't have enough gold, you are unlikely to make that much gold in time outside of putting in real money. Paying 10 dollars for essentially a more random version of arena sounds crazy, no matter how good the reward tier is.

2) the fact that it eliminates normal tavern brawl the week it comes out sucks too.

And just to be clear, it's 10 dollars for ONE go at the brawl right? It doesn't get you a pass for the week or something like that?

Definitely 1 trillion percent not participating in this. I think it's good and important to note that they came straight out and said that if you aren't a proper ass competitive player, this mode is NOT for you. For the average person it looks like this could be akin to just tearing up a 10 dollar bill for grins.

Nope. Nooooope. NOPE. No way is blizzard getting 1000 gold from me for an Arena run. Not a chance. Thanks for the offer, but I'd rather have my free classic pack worth 40 dust with a 1% chance of getting a legendary over my guaranteed 100% 0-3 win rate and jack to show for it. No thanks Blizzard, this just seems dumb and only for the crazy pro players who want more golden legendary's and more twitch subscribers.

It might be asking a lot, but if they gave you 10 packs (the price of admission) just for entering I might be coerced into playing it once or twice. Because with my luck i'm going to get wiped of the board in 2 or 3 turns by some insane meta deck and be out 1000 gold with nothing to show for it lol. I'll wait to render further judgement, but from what that video shows, i'am not interested. I need to see the reward structure first.

This seems REALLY BAD and very ill-advised. 1000 gold for one entry that could potentially only net you crappy rewards seems like its being tailor made for streamers who already have everything and have ridiculous surpluses of gold. No thanks Blizzard.

This is basically high rollers table. Can't wait to think it is a bad idea until I have a few beers then try it anways.

Seems like you need about 5-6 wins to break even?

I have updated the original post with the full reward structure. If you look at the numbers, there is a huge leap from 11 wins to 12 wins. If you don't count dust and legendaries, 12 wins is the only tier where you break even on your gold investment of 1,000 gold. So, when they said they are putting all the rewards at the end, they really meant it.

@acura_max: That is a huge discrepancy. Looks like just covering the entrance fee requires 5-6 wins (depends on how much you value dust). They weren't kidding when they said this isn't for the average player.

Can't wait to play against nothing but tier 1 meta decks, as anybody who is willing to spend 1000g is definitely going to try and maximize their chances of winning. Maybe it needs a ban class/card feature?

@acura_max: You break even at 6 wins. 7 packs = 700 gold, then 250 gold on top brings you to 950, and the dust is worth at least one average pack.

Still, the risk/reward of this thing is just bad. It's gonna drive most people away, so even if you wanted to try your luck you'll most likely be facing top tier players. Hell, with that kinda cost to admission I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being so underpopulated you might run into queue time issues.

If you count the dust as a pack its 6. Otherwise it's 7 wins (8 packs + 280 gold nets you the equivalent of 1080 gold). I don't really consider dust to have a monetary value.

6 or 7 wins to break even? I think i'll stick with my original answer of: Nope. Have fun people with insane amounts of gold and or real world money to gamble, this one's all you lol. I'll be stock piling gold in advance for the next expansion.

@imsh_pl: I suspect the first one will just be standard and ones after that will be Batstone-esque. Either way you're looking at a 50% win rate past 5 wins for basically everyone involved; the truest of coinflips. Protip: Aggro wins, or Flamewaker if there's a special condition. But the people that are willing to spend on this who are also competent enough to get 5 wins are going to know that already.

This looks a lot like testing for a more permanent mode to me. A way to play competitive constructed that isn't a 100's-of-games grind to Legend is something people have been clamoring for for a while. With that steep entry cost it's definitely only for very confident players though. Good way to make streams dramatic.

@internetdotcom said:

It really does seem like they've learned some valuable lessons from casinos on this one. We'll have to wait and see which style of Tavern Brawl they make "competitive", but as much as I like Tavern Brawl, it's such crazy random bullshit 90% of the time that I don't feel great about the idea of burning 1000 gold just to go like, 4 wins 3 losses and not even get many packs for the amount of gold.

That buy-in fee is absurd, and incredibly greedy.

Incidentally I've heard from several different people that their friends that like Poker like Hearthstone a lot, maybe that's the audience they want to please the most right now since it's a little more esoteric and also more profitable per player drawn. Pisses off the dedicated playerbase, doesn't do anything to casuals, but pleases a small audience. I suppose if you're Blizzard you figure the fans are just your slaves for life at this point anyway. Probably not a good strategy right now since no one likes the state of the game, but I could see this being a smart move in the future.

Here's an interesting look at the stats behind the rewards. https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/582pqj/the_heroic_tavern_brawl_is_taking_a_rake_of_289/. Spreadsheet of stats here http://imgur.com/a/kojmq

TLDR version: for every 1000 gold being put into this, 712 comes back to the players, so about 300g is removed from the economy. That's way more of a cut than any casino takes.

I might actually end up trying this once just to see how I do. Of course, going in with the mentality that I am almost certainly going to lose and just having some fun.

@bisonhero: It isn't perfect but Tavern Brawl is essentially for ideas like this that they can test out.

At worse some people don't play Tavern Brawl this week, I think they will live without their free pack

I've never looked at the data, but I assume the return on investment in regular arena is similarly bad, is it not? The entry fee on the new format is ten times higher and the payouts are kinda proportionally higher to match, and I assume a roughly proportional amount of players get underwhelming returns from regular arena when compared to this new format. I don't think that it's so much worse, unless the numbers say I'm way off base. Again, haven't explicitly looked.

@bisonhero The numbers for arena are *way* more in favor of the player at low winrates, although the rewards have been reduced over time. I used to be able to pretty easily do infinite arena and have gotten 12 wins about 20 times. The number of times I have gone the equivalent of 12-3 at, well lets say I think the average skill level of this brawl will be rank 5, is, uh, maybe once? The buy in is so high there isn't going to be enough "fodder" to be able to win at a reasonably high rate.

As for the rewards, if you go 0-3 in this you lose 90%!!!! of what you put in. 80% at 1 win, 70% at 2, and about 40% at 3 wins. At 4 wins you are only down about 100g and 5 is about breaking even. *If* the average skill level is rank 5, you pretty much need to be able to get legend rank to not lose out. Now let's say we go 7-3 once, then go 3-3 the next time. Pretty decent right? Great, we broke even, 7-3 and 3-3 and we break even. The risk reward for this is soooo high, god forbid you get less than 3 wins ever, then you are really boned.

Now let's compare this to arena. First, we go 0-3 in arena, the most you can possibly lose is 33% (if you need the card pack. Honestly one of the reasons I quit playing arena is because they changed it so you get a random card pack.) You can technically go 0-3, get the highest gold reward you can 40g, and the only thing you lose is 10g. You basically have a chance at losing almost nothing losing all your matches, compared to losing 90% of what you put in in this brawl. On average you break even at 3 wins.

So, after scanning the numbers, the rewards become better in the brawl at 9 and up wins, with everything below favoring arena rewards. 50% of people in arena break even or do better, while 33% of the people in this brawl will break even or do better.

The glaring number that stands out to me though is that 50% of the people that enter this brawl will earn 300g or less of the 1000g they put in. 50%! All these numbers are assuming that everyone is of equal skill level so keep that in mind.

@noobsmog: I agree that the biggest issue is that "The buy in is so high there isn't going to be enough 'fodder' to be able to win at a reasonably high rate", which just heavily skews the perception (and reality) of the whole format, because presumably the only people who will take that risk are real killers, or pro players/streamers who have gold to burn, and then maybe like <5% of entrants will be whale players who pay real money to enter this format despite being generally unskilled at the game, and that last group will be the lion's share of the 0-4 wins category.

I guess I don't know the numbers on who actually pays real money for stuff in Hearthstone, but anecdotally it seems like any other F2P game where the vast majority of players subsist on the free currency and make few/zero money transactions, and only a very small percentage of players regularly pay their way into packs/adventures.

@bisonhero: It's easy enough to just look at old reddit polls on the subject, if you've been playing since beta/vanilla then it is feasible to be a free to play player, in any other circumstance you're going to have to spend money if you want to have a passable winrate in ranked (in every region now there are full control warriors between ranks 25-15). Obviously if you're an arena player this doesn't apply. As someone who has played since early closed beta and hasn't really spent any money I have about 65% of the cards and only 25-30% of the legendaries. Of course I have more than enough dust to make almost any viable deck but since I have no interest in Ranked aside from early season stuff that's simply due to accumulation. If I wanted to be a competitive (i.e. tedious legend grind every season) player I would have to spend $50-100 most likely, and that's with years of daily quests and hundreds of arena runs.

Card games are gambling inherently, the payout structure of packs has always been like that; though Dust helps negate the issue there's still a definite issue of compulsive buying (reinforced by the ridiculous popularity of pack opening streams).

@bisonhero: @noobsmog: I definitely think this is mainly developed with streamers in mind. There's a much higher incentive for high wins and I imagine its going to be way more exciting to see pros fight for 3 golden legendaries and 50 packs instead of equovalent arena rewards.

@imsh_pl: I really wonder what queue times are going to be like, assuming the matchmaking tries to match you up against people with a similar record. The 1000-gold buy-in is already a considerable roadbloack, and once you have 9, 10, or 11 wins, I can't imagine there will ever be that many people with that record in queue at the same time. I suppose they could just fudge the matchmaking if they need to since you don't get to see your opponent's current win/loss.

This does look like a cool idea that I hope pays off (also ways of earning crazy high rewards is cool - there was always something disappointing on how difficult 12 wins in Arena was to what you got out of it)... but sadly I dropped off from Hearthstone last year, and Whisper's of the Old Gods only brought me back for a few fleeting weeks.

I'm firmly back into collecting Pokémon cards like I did from the Base Set until around 2007 after returning to them in 2015... and honestly, I'm enjoying collecting them (and casually playing the Pokemon TCG) a lot more than any of the expansions in Hearthstone since Goblins V Gnomes (not including the solo-adventures which were mostly enjoyable). Hearthstone just became like too much work at some point, and I think the card's lost some of their wonder in order to focus more on gimmicks for the competitive scene to (as it seemed every expansion) mostly ignore. It's really disappointing because when I like TCG's/CCG's I get incredibly invested: I've put hundreds into the Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Hearthstone, and hopefully the Final Fantasy (if that does in fact come out at the end of the month) TCG's... and yet Hearthstone has fallen by the wayside because the thematic design seems a little lifeless, and the mechanics/competitive scene seems stagnant. Maybe if they brought in these high-risk-but-high-reward type of modes earlier, my interest would have stayed... right now though, I'm still questioning if I should jump back in and get the One Night in Karazhan Adventure (usually I'd be stoked for more solo-stuff but now I'm just wary investing anything in this game).

Sorry for the downer... in other news, I think right now might be one of the best times in about a decade to be into Card Games in general though!

Edit - I should point out I like the idea of an expensive mode that has the chance of insane prizes if you do well - not necessarily the way they are implementing this specifically: people seem to be pointing out how bad value it is but it's been long enough that I've forgotten what the value of gold, packs and money is in Hearthstone so I don't have much of a sense of how good this is. Still, a mode you can bring your own decks into, staking a non-superfluous amount of gold on, to compete is an idea I find intriguing.

@dixavd: @imsh_pl: I honestly like the idea of a high stakes game mode like this a lot. I think it will be fun watching people go for 12 wins. But maaaaaan, the reward system really, really rubs me the wrong way. This almost 100% feels like it was designed with the sole purpose of draining people of their gold.

The house always wins.

Welp I went ahead and gave it a shot, got 7 wins with tempo mage, not too bad. Did anyone else give it a shot?

@noobsmog: I used my control priest that's been doing well in ranked and went 1-3. Lost to 3 shamans and beat a face hunter. So I got 2 packs for 1000 gold. Going to go cry now.

@beefygrandmole Yeah that thing is crawling with shamans. I don't have much experience with midrange shaman since its the only class I have golden so that's why I was playing tempo mage. It does pretty well against shamans and hunters.

@noobsmog: Yeah I should have looked into what decks were popular before committing to a deck. It was my own fault really. If I do it again I will do some research first but I probably won't. The rewards really don't seem worth it and I'd prefer to save gold for the new packs next month.

1000 gold to play ranked and get a few packs! What a deal.

Play Shadowverse

If I wanted to lose to midrange Shaman, I could just go play ranked for free. Which I do.

After some consideration, Blizzard has decided that their gold sink was a great success! Now you can do 100 heroic brawls instead of 5.

@acura_max: How generous of them.

Whether Blizzard is doing. It's working!