I had an amazing experience hosting a Fireside Gathering yesterday afternoon. The Brawl for this month is a cool idea: the Innkeeper chooses one card that gets duplicated 15 times, and then everyone else builds a deck around that card. After a couple of false starts (Hearthstone's interface for Innkeeper control of Fireside Brawls follows consistent patterns, but is consistently odd) I got to choose the card I wanted everyone to have 15 of: Azure Drake. I like spell damage buffs, and I figured the card's flexibility would be a good basis for a variety of builds. Little did I know how fortuitous a choice it would be for me personally.
I hadn't come in with a planned deck, but threw together an Even Ramp Druid so I could get to quick Azure cycling faster. One of my last cards in was a pair of Wraths for limited board control, since Druid AOE is so lamentable. It turned out to an incomparably great choice in my deck construction.
It's not clear how widespread this bug is (it may be limited to just the Innkeeper experience), but instead of getting just two Wraths in my deck as expected, instead I got 15 of each of the sub-cards that Wrath spawns: I got 15 copies of a card to deal 3 damage to a minion and 15 copies of a card to deal 1 damage to a minion and draw a card. That would be ludicrous enough, but if you're paying attention when you play Wrath, both the spells you choose between are 0 mana. So were mine.
So all of a sudden I had a ginormous number of zero-cost cards to control the board, half of which replaced themselves, which were then complemented beautifully by my horde of Azure Drakes. It was the closest I've ever felt to piloting a single-player boss deck like the Lich King's; I absolutely flattened every deck I played against. So if you too would like to build an unbeatable deck, go forth and prod this particular problem!
A couple of other observations about Fireside Gatherings follow, unrelated to literally-broken decks. A few of my coworkers and I have set up this monthly Fireside Gathering for an hour over lunch, and it's been a really unexpected amount of fun. There are five of us in the core group from my workplace, and we'll often get a couple of new people rolling up, and another couple of lurkers who don't physically reveal themselves. It's great to get to meet other people who like the game in-person, and it's nice to have gotten Nemsy, but the game designs for the Fireside Brawls are consistently both pretty bonkers and pretty enjoyable. Obviously, the story above indicates they're not as extensively tested as other aspects of the game, and that more often makes for frustration rather than unbeatable decks: crashes are common, and the experience is generally undercooked. Last month there was the collective Beat the Lich King Brawl, which is an amazing idea (albeit a repeat), and when, after half an hour of effort, we collectively managed to beat the boss, there was zero notification, you just started fighting the same boss again. It was an underwhelming conclusion. There are a number of other problems with the Fireside Gathering exprience, chief among them the weirdness of the interfaces, both for average players and especially for Innkeepers.
But if you can brave all that out, I feel like many average players like me would really enjoy hosting these things. This game mode is raw and neglected, but it's consistently fresh, and the added piquancy of you doing it with others in RL and it being on a limited timeframe makes it feel like being in a secret club in plain sight. But, frustratingly, Blizzard's messaging around Fireside Gatherings is that they're intended for hosting by business owners and not anyone else. When you go to set one up, they list requirements for hosting a Gathering that are right out of 2006: e.g. you should be able to provide wifi and power to everyone who wants it. In fact, if people just turn up with their phones and the Innkeeper doesn't require connection to a wifi network, the Gathering works just fine. From my limited perspective as a mere consumer, it feels like a situation where a small group of designers and programmers have made an awesome, dynamic construction that's walled off by unimaginative marketing and lawyers looking to limit liability.
Short story: I'd encourage more average players to host Fireside Gatherings, especially if you have a couple of local friends as a core for the group, because the Fireside Brawls tend to be really fun. And if you do it in the next month...play some Druid! Sploits for days!
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I had an amazing experience hosting a Fireside Gathering yesterday afternoon. The Brawl for this month is a cool idea: the Innkeeper chooses one card that gets duplicated 15 times, and then everyone else builds a deck around that card. After a couple of false starts (Hearthstone's interface for Innkeeper control of Fireside Brawls follows consistent patterns, but is consistently odd) I got to choose the card I wanted everyone to have 15 of: Azure Drake. I like spell damage buffs, and I figured the card's flexibility would be a good basis for a variety of builds. Little did I know how fortuitous a choice it would be for me personally.
I hadn't come in with a planned deck, but threw together an Even Ramp Druid so I could get to quick Azure cycling faster. One of my last cards in was a pair of Wraths for limited board control, since Druid AOE is so lamentable. It turned out to an incomparably great choice in my deck construction.
It's not clear how widespread this bug is (it may be limited to just the Innkeeper experience), but instead of getting just two Wraths in my deck as expected, instead I got 15 of each of the sub-cards that Wrath spawns: I got 15 copies of a card to deal 3 damage to a minion and 15 copies of a card to deal 1 damage to a minion and draw a card. That would be ludicrous enough, but if you're paying attention when you play Wrath, both the spells you choose between are 0 mana. So were mine.
So all of a sudden I had a ginormous number of zero-cost cards to control the board, half of which replaced themselves, which were then complemented beautifully by my horde of Azure Drakes. It was the closest I've ever felt to piloting a single-player boss deck like the Lich King's; I absolutely flattened every deck I played against. So if you too would like to build an unbeatable deck, go forth and prod this particular problem!
A couple of other observations about Fireside Gatherings follow, unrelated to literally-broken decks. A few of my coworkers and I have set up this monthly Fireside Gathering for an hour over lunch, and it's been a really unexpected amount of fun. There are five of us in the core group from my workplace, and we'll often get a couple of new people rolling up, and another couple of lurkers who don't physically reveal themselves. It's great to get to meet other people who like the game in-person, and it's nice to have gotten Nemsy, but the game designs for the Fireside Brawls are consistently both pretty bonkers and pretty enjoyable. Obviously, the story above indicates they're not as extensively tested as other aspects of the game, and that more often makes for frustration rather than unbeatable decks: crashes are common, and the experience is generally undercooked. Last month there was the collective Beat the Lich King Brawl, which is an amazing idea (albeit a repeat), and when, after half an hour of effort, we collectively managed to beat the boss, there was zero notification, you just started fighting the same boss again. It was an underwhelming conclusion. There are a number of other problems with the Fireside Gathering exprience, chief among them the weirdness of the interfaces, both for average players and especially for Innkeepers.
But if you can brave all that out, I feel like many average players like me would really enjoy hosting these things. This game mode is raw and neglected, but it's consistently fresh, and the added piquancy of you doing it with others in RL and it being on a limited timeframe makes it feel like being in a secret club in plain sight. But, frustratingly, Blizzard's messaging around Fireside Gatherings is that they're intended for hosting by business owners and not anyone else. When you go to set one up, they list requirements for hosting a Gathering that are right out of 2006: e.g. you should be able to provide wifi and power to everyone who wants it. In fact, if people just turn up with their phones and the Innkeeper doesn't require connection to a wifi network, the Gathering works just fine. From my limited perspective as a mere consumer, it feels like a situation where a small group of designers and programmers have made an awesome, dynamic construction that's walled off by unimaginative marketing and lawyers looking to limit liability.
Short story: I'd encourage more average players to host Fireside Gatherings, especially if you have a couple of local friends as a core for the group, because the Fireside Brawls tend to be really fun. And if you do it in the next month...play some Druid! Sploits for days!