This week's brawl is Fairytale Brawl!
Rules:
Directeth thine actors, forsooth! Two Players!!
Rewards:
A Year of the Phoenix Card Pack for winning the Brawl once.
How to play this Brawl
This is a VERY unusual brawl. You start by picking one of 5 classes, which will let you "play" with a premade deck. In my case the deck was a fairly standard Quest Mage deck by the look of it.
Then once the game starts, instead of playing your cards like you are used to, you get to pick 1 action from a selection of 3, and that is the ONLY input you have during your turn.
The rest is the AI playing your turn for you. If this sounds like it will be a constant misplay party, then based on the 1 game we played, it seems this will not be the case too much. There's optimizations that could be made (my opponent's AI did not play around Iceblock as well as it could have, it had the option to leave me at 1 health and instead hit me when I was still at 4) but there's also quite clever plays (I chose the option to have my cards reduced by 2 mana, but no less than 2, and my AI used this to play coin + Incanter's Flow on turn 1, instead of the Mage Quest. I lost in the end, but that was a good play and it probably kept me in it.) and all in all it seemed like my actions between turns were more impactful than any good or bad plays the AI made.
The options between turns were, among other things: Reduce the cost of your cards by 2, but not less than 2. Draw 4 cards. Summon 3 random pirates, they have Rush. Copy your opponent's minions. And more!
Honestly the most frustrating experience I have ever had with this game.
I can't believe we came from Co-op brawls and "let's see how much you damage this" brawls to this.
Btw, playing this as mage is atrocious. I'd honestly rather let them play themselves with no involvement whatsoever than forcing me to look at this crap.
We all agree that this Tavern Brawl is the WORST OF ALL.
Who came up with this idea to make AI fight AI? It's like that option to put CPU VS CPU in fighting games, which is fun to watch the CPU play by itself without doing anything.
Played since beta. This is the worst brawl.
1. No input required - most hands-off experience in HS that is NOT PvE, and that's problematic coz my opponent ropes 4 turns and DOESNT get disconnected, coz he clicks once, then ropes me 4 more turns. More toxic than botting for XP with odd rope warrior.
2. It's a skins showcase with NO EFFORT to entice in the fantasy or create an experience. Seeing the chalkboard I remembered Medivh's theater, but no effort was put into bringing the fairytale themes to life. I can't remember the last time they spent significant effort on a brawl (although the half-deck one where you could force Nozdormu-matches was rather brilliant).
3. Mechanically, the "3 random pirates" is the only new element, and it's a tone-deaf let-down, as the meta is already saturated with those, so it furthers the negative impression that the mini-set (i forgot its name already) didn't bring enough to the game, neither in character (birbs are fine, I guess) or in play.
In the wake of this most-hated brawl (just look at the number of comments here) the question I want to ask is: Are Team5 interested in what players want from Tavern Brawl? I see a lot of goodwill and creativity from the community, but if they're looking only at aggregate data (Wednesday log-ins, etc) and not engagement/reaction with "the weekly novelty mode", that's a HUGE missed opportunity.
Here's what I've long wanted to see:
- build a deck using an expanded/curated card collection (i.e. you may only add cards with WIDELY random effects, or build a deck of legendaries, but they are ALL unlocked for you, and you can collect one from each defeated foe, up to 12 wins, casual+heroic)
- use community-generated cards/decks (I know this requires more effort, but it would be SO worth it)
- "Start of Game: Choose a class to Discover from" ; decks are pre-built around the discover mechanic + 10 fun random cards thrown in.
- New types of win-conditions : either in co-op or pvp. Example: complete the most Achievements in one game. All achievements are reset for the brawl (and newly-achieved ones are credited outside of the brawl, obvsly) There would be a "personal best" counter on screen, and maybe even a leaderboard. Also, it would be good if those achievements did something meaningful, but that's another topic.
- getting a unique reward for completing a difficult Brawl challenge would also be nice, such as a non-disenchantable meme-y card, cardback, or portrait. I dunno when they're gonna realize that alternate card arts (and not these stupid diamond frames) are the way to go. Gwent and MtG Arena are lightyears ahead.
There are great ideas by the community, Team5 can tap into, but I need them to acknowledge that Brawl is not in a good way nowadays.
I gave my opponent a Treasure Chest and my AI instantly silenced it! Also, the priest AI is so bad, it uses the hero power to heal enemies, and uses every buff on enemies! I died twice because of that, WTF
Whoever did the AI on this brawl is an imbecile
This is how they want to push the game forwards, they think the answer is more mobile freindly, zero interaction gameplay where the game plays itself.
Blizzard should try to understand that the reason this works in battlegrounds is the sense of being a military commander - this tavern brawl provides zero, and I mean absolutely zero, sense of that. It is boring in the extreme.
The way battleground should be moving forwards is blizzard remeber it's past and trying to create a auto-battle style game with massively improved graphics and scale - think total war - so it's more fun to watch the fights play out.... obviously not something you can do within hearthstone.
I think the fact that they are putting in a building for mercenaries that levels up your mercs for you passively like so many mobile games do is proof that that's the market they are targeting now. That and the whales that can afford to put tons of money into the game to have easy wins in duels, mercenaries pvp, and constructed.
this brawl is a clown fiesta honestly..brawls keep getting worse and worse unfortunately
Once you have your pack, its honestly fun to watch how stupid the AI can be. This Brawl should have definitely gave you a pack for just playing it, though. Not for a win.
This is funny because I had the quest “play a brawl” that literally gave me a pack for playing this brawl. And one I got for winning of course
AI plays evolution on my full board instead of attacking face of opponent. Twice. That's just insult.
This brawl's so stupid. I love it.
You know how you open a game because you want to, you know, play the game?
This brawl decided no. You don't.
Instead, you just watch the dumbest AIs blizzard have ever made. I don't think there's anything more infuriating than watching your own deck get played the worst way possible.
These AIs are so dumb that they will literally cast ignite on their own face while at 2hp.
I honestly think they made the AI intentionally bad to either troll us, make the mode more amusing (while also frustrating), and/or to make the players' heroes more like uncooperative, diva actors. Either way it's just annoying.
Trying to "play" this brawl is the single most frustrating thing I've ever done in Hearthstone. Holy shit is this a goddamn clusterfuck.
I queue in as Warrior. It's a pirate deck. It has the quest in opening hand. "Let's play the 1-drop pirate instead of the quest that is literally the point of this deck!!" R#%(#%Y/(%&T(""!/&t#)%(/&"!(/%¤)"%!
This is trash all the ai does is buff my opponents minions with spells
Unless you have lethal or just one super spell, the AI is straight up stupid. I suppose they've added some mess ups so that no player just wins big from having a more predictable hand. A bit BG like. Good for a first attempt at least
Super retarded AI, even bots are better.
Honestly, it seems like the AI in this Brawl is significantly worse than the Adventure AI. I'm starting to think that they intentionally made the AI do stupid things to simulate the "actors" being uncooperative divas or something. Either that or they just didn't bother coding them for these specific decks/cards, so the AI just play them willy-nilly like idiots.