Ahune, Your Brawl Sucks

Anthony Shelton
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

“Perhaps you would like to try my Frost Brawl?” Ahune confidently suggests in his multi-layered, echoing voice. “It is much cooler than Ragnaros’s Fire Brawl!”

No. No it’s not, Ahune. Your Brawl sucks.

How do you go from a Brawl where you can choose your own class and pick your cards with a funny win condition to a Brawl where you are given only one of two classes (Mage or Paladin), a preset deck, and a confusing — and mostly uninteresting — win condition? And then have the confidence to believe that it will be fun. It’s not. Where’s the self-awareness, Ahune?

For Ahune’s Frost Festival Brawl, your goal is to destroy a Rag dummy to deal four damage to your opponent because the face is immune. There’s one dummy on your side of the board and one on the other. What the rules don’t implicitly state is that on your turn, you can destroy your own dummy (a 1/4 that can’t attack) to hurt your opponent. That win condition isn’t that bad of an idea. Boring but not bad. What’s bad is that you can only play Paladin or Mage because Blizzard made a win condition that doesn’t fit with the rest of the classes.

In Ragnaros’s Fire Brawl, you got to make your class and build your deck. It was fun to experiment with how to deal with a buffed Mini-Rag that switched sides of the board on every turn with a deck you created. Didn’t win? That’s fine. You could try a different strategy and see how it worked. It was also fun to see what others came up with. Was it frustrating at times? Sure. But because it was so outlandish, it was tolerable.

Not so with the Frost Brawl. You have preset decks and quite frankly, Paladin’s deck is better suited for the Brawl than the Mage deck. So not only is there no sense of experimentation, if you get stuck with Mage, you have to think about your moves even more carefully. Keep in mind, you may not play with the same deck two times in a row. So once you’ve finally found the strategy for the Mage, you may end up playing with Paladin next. Or you may never play Mage and have an easier time winning.

The best Tavern Brawl’s include two things: 1.) the ability to choose your class and cards and 2.) an absolutely zany win condition that you don’t have to think too hard about. The more I have to sit and think about what I’m doing like I’m in a regular Standard match, the more I think I should probably play Standard. We spend our entire time of Hearthstone thinking. Give us a break with Tavern Brawls.

“What about those who have a small collection?” you may ask. Remember the Tavern Brawl where you pick one card and get 24 copies of it and the rest of your cards were class cards? That was insanely fun. And all you needed was one card. The Fire Brawl didn’t require a deep collection to have fun or win because you could let the Mini-Rag do all the work. There are workarounds. Can Blizzard figure them out is the question.

To be fair to Blizzard, it’s not easy coming up with a new Tavern Brawl every week and make it a hit. I understand that. But they whiffed bad on this Frost Festival Brawl. And it’s more disappointing that I had to waste my time with it after the last two Brawl’s were much more entertaining.

Step your game up, Ahune.

TheHearthZonePodcast

Welcome to The HearthZone Podcast website! This publication is dedicated to Hearthstone and features the highly educational HearthZone Podcast, opinion pieces, and training materials related to all things Hearthstone.

Anthony Shelton

Written by

Also goes by sirkibble2. Co-host of The HearthZone Podacst, freelance sports play-by-play broadcaster, and lover of basketball, video games, and my wife.

TheHearthZonePodcast

Welcome to The HearthZone Podcast website! This publication is dedicated to Hearthstone and features the highly educational HearthZone Podcast, opinion pieces, and training materials related to all things Hearthstone.

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