Hearthstone

[Sir Bruce]

This week's tavern brawl taught me that Malygos (and all spell damage) works with the Paladin secret Eye for an Eye. Rag hitting my face for 8 turned into 13 damage on him (for lethal woo!).

[Dantski]

Also its possible to have more than one of a legendary in your deck. 2 Malganis' claiming to be turtles.

[Azoth]

This week's brawl is really degenerate. Players start with 10 mana.
Turn 1 Alexstrasza, Turn 1 Antonidas + Coin + Mirror Image + Counterspell, etc.

I had fun playing a modified Combo Druid and Feign Death Hunter to polish off some quests, but there were so many Turn 2 concedes. I can see this getting old, fast. Strangely, while I'm usually more excited for the build-your-own-deck brawls, it's the premade-deck brawls that have more staying power.

[Cheater Hater]

This week's brawl is really degenerate. Players start with 10 mana.
Turn 1 Alexstrasza, Turn 1 Antonidas + Coin + Mirror Image + Counterspell, etc.

I had fun playing a modified Combo Druid and Feign Death Hunter to polish off some quests, but there were so many Turn 2 concedes. I can see this getting old, fast. Strangely, while I'm usually more excited for the build-your-own-deck brawls, it's the premade-deck brawls that have more staying power.

It's a lot easier to balance premade formats, either by having many fewer possibilities or by adding a greater-than-normal amount of randomness and hoping it's self-correcting. Deck-building formats require work on the order of the actual game to balance, and Blizzard obviously isn't going to spend that much time for something that's only 5 days.

Honestly, I think this was a fine Tavern Brawl--simple concept, and lots of possibilities. Admittedly I only played 2 games, but it's certainly the best deck-building one so far.

[SevenSpirits]

From my perspective, I like the alt-format deckbuilding the most. That means that so far:

Bananas > Spells > The preset deck formats.

The spells format was honestly pretty lame for deckbuilding, since after you pick a class, 95% of your deck is picking from the same small set of class spells. Bananas was a much smaller change and therefore didn't restrict deckbuilding as much.

I'm not sure yet where the 10-mana brawl fits in. I only played a few games. I suspect I will still prefer banana brawl which had gameplay that was actually harder and more complex than regular hearthstone. (IMO it was the only one so far to do that, and so it's not surprising to me that it was the least popular or at least one of the least popular ones.) 10 mana brawl on the other hand makes you super powerful at the start of the game which makes the opening draw luck dominate. But on the other hand, I sure haven't figured out the best deck yet.

[Sir Bruce]

I played a few games with Priest + big minions and it seemed ok but really draw dependent and then I played miracle Rogue and if you draw Gadgetzan by the 2nd turn (something like 60% if you mulligan for it) you can draw your whole deck in the next couple of turns and smash everything. Haven't tried Patron but it's probably similar.

I agree that this and bananas are the only brawls so far where it felt like you had important deck-building decisions to make.

[Cheater Hater]

Bananas was bad because of the spell-synergy stuff I mentioned earlier, spells was semi-random (especially with the very limited pools), and DC10 (what a similar format in MTG is called) is still interesting but potentially broken with the full card pool.

Also, nothing about the new expansion yet? Inspire is interesting, even if it continues to centralize the game around hero powers (which isn't the best decision ultra-long-term).

[uberfish]

starting on 10 mana as rogue and mulliganing for sprint is hilarious, these modes are fun because card valuation is totally changed. Summoner version was also really fun because of all the random creatures flying around.

Wish they would keep the randomness in Brawls and stop making cards like Piloted Shredder (personally, this card has overtaken Dr Boom for most irritating OP card in game after a string of Patient Assassin enemy spawns.)

I didn't really like bananas because it ended up as normal ladder-type aggro decks with a few cards teched in to exploit the banana mechanic.

[SevenSpirits]

This brawl is more interesting than I expected. This is the best I managed to come up with today. By the time I finished, more than half my opponents were running rogue too. So maybe we're close to done here.



Yeah that seems like a lot of draw, but even with 6 draw cards and hard mulliganing for them, most of my losses are from whiffing on those 6.

Faceless is sick in this format by default but it's especially sick with arcane golem and attack buffs. So, might as well have those cards in your super-draw-heavy combo deck, right? I think this is better than the versions that run stuff like Malygos or Sinister Strike. Also I think Backstab is pretty awful. When I was running it I was backstabbing my own auctioneer almost half the time. And Fan of Knives is pretty silly.

I had to craft back my second Gadgetzan. GG blizzard.

Sickest turns:
*t1 auctioneer coin faceless prep shiv.
*t1 sprint dagger southsea. t2 arcane cold blood x2 faceless coin shadowstep for 4 over lethal.
*After opponent gets me down to 1 life, attack sylvanas into an 8/8, stealing it, then play tree of life.

Opponent's sickest turn:
*Ends the turn at 13 life vs my force/roar hand, but queues up enough actions at the end with a nozdormu out that I can't physically do more than 3 clicks before my turn is over.

[Cheater Hater]

Wish they would keep the randomness in Brawls and stop making cards like Piloted Shredder

Again, having top-tier cards like Piloted Shredder and Webspinner is the price you pay for Hero Powers and removing mana screw/flood. Some randomness needs to exist, or you get Chess (which is a fine game in its own right, but is stagnant and certainly wouldn't sell packs).