Tavern Brawl Week 50

Hello fellow Hearthstone players.

I greet you from the state of Texas. I have been playing card games since 1990 and I have played Magic, Warlords, L5R, Warcraft, Wrestling and just about every card game that came out during the past 25 years. I have done the tournament scenes, been a judge, sponsored events and fully immersed myself in the current game of the time. I started playing Hearthstone in beta and I have played regularly ever since. I am new to writing for Hearthstone players and this is my first article. I hope you enjoy my efforts, comment on my articles and I encourage everyone to join the site and I am a premium member. I encourage you to become one due to the benefits and minimal cost that comes with a wealth of information on the game that is the leader in my opinion on content and the people who give their time to help the players.

Welcome to my insights to this Weeks’s Tavern Brawl. I will cover what I have seen and the results of play week to week. The goal of this column is to players a heads up on what the theme is for the week. I will provide key aspects, what I played, who I played against, and my opinion on all the data I accumulate resulting from the games.

Tavern Brawl Experience

Let’s get started. I have played Tavern Brawl’s since the concept started in Hearthstone. I am glad it has evolved and become much better since its first inception. The randomness and theme changes are fun and exciting. I look forward to the Brawl every week. It is a nice changed from the ranked grind and trying to draw the cards you know you need to win. The Brawl promotes new thinking, new play, new ideas and a great change of pace.

Tavern Brawl Week 50

This week’s theme is gift exchange. The game starts with a crate on one player’s side and at each turn a crate will appear if one is not on the table.

The crate is

The card is a zero casting cost creature with stats of zero attack and four health. The text on the card is “Death rattle: Give current player a gift”. Basically when this card is destroyed it will provide the player who destroys it a one casting cost spell.

The gift is

This card gives you a choice of three cards with reduced casting costs. The card choices are from the opponent’s class. The twist on this scenario is that either player can kill either’s crate. The player who destroys the crate on his side or the opponent’s side will be rewarded with the one casting cost gift card. Each player can kill his own crate or the opponent’s crate. The reason behind killing your own is preventing the opponent from getting the gift card. The other twist is each player can also silence his own crate preventing the opponent from getting a gift. The rest of the game is as normal with cards you selected plus the cards you get from the gifts.

Hero Selections

Now for the game play. Based on the theme I decided to go with a Priest deck due to the availability to silence multiple ways, kill the crates, and the ability to heal as the games tend to go long from my experience playing this week so far. I do not mean fatigue play per say but that the games tend to go to turn ten and beyond. Do not get me wrong; in fact, I had games that ended in as quickly as seven turns depending on the gifts you draw and your opening hand. One game I had a king-krush with a zero casting cost which was shocking to play on turn four which led to a very quick game since the opponent did not have an answer. During the several games I played that was an astonishing event that did not repeat itself mainly because I did not see that many Hunter’s the rest of the day. The interesting thing about the three card choices is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason other than completely random but associated with the opposing player’s hero. So while it is difficult to have a plan set going in, the randomness means constantly adapting to each turn.

Deck Construction of Choice

I’ll start now with my deck construction concepts. I chose the hero I thought best to utilize silence. That would be Priest for me. The Priest has the following options when it comes to silence: silence, mass-dispel, Ironbeak-owl, Light’s Champion (not selected since only affects demons), spellbreaker , and wailing-soul. All can be used on you or your opponent except Wailing Soul which silences your minions only which can beneficial since you may want to silence your own crates. I decided to go with the following cards at the beginning: two copies of silence, and two copies of Ironbeak Owl.

This gave me the option of silencing my own crates and the opponent’s crates hopefully early on depending on card draw of course. The next concept I wanted to do was have the ability to destroy crates either with direct damage or spells. This led to the following choices: two copies of confuse  which switches the attack and health of all minions using sparingly as long as I could kill my own crate first, two copies of shadow-word-pain which kills a minion with three attacks or less for crates, two copies of divine-spirit to double the health of my crates to make more difficult to destroy, and two copies of velens-chosen to use on my crates to make it more difficult to destroy. The rest of the deck was made up of Dragons to utilize the synergy Priest has with them due to the Dragon cards available for the Priest only such as twilight-whelp and wyrmrest-agent.

I did a decklist but I also wanted to cover principles and concepts not just give a list because everyone has different thoughts and ideas as what is necessary but also to have options and ideas to make informed choices. The final deck list is what the deck evolved to and I made a run with it to twenty three wins with losses of course.

Results of Games Played

The time now is for the results of the game play. Once my deck was built I entered the Tavern Brawl with high expectations since I thought I had the right cards, concepts and ideas to rake in the wins. The beginning went well as I went six wins and zero losses. That string was comprised of Hunter, Hunter, Priest, Priest, Warrior, Priest, and Hunter. Then I met my first Warlock. That turned out to be the least favorable matchup due to the gift cards I received based on the hero type. The game took forever I gave in at forty five minutes with both of us at thirty life. I thought fatigue Warrior was rough but to my astonishment this was more brutal. I continued playing and started to see more Warlocks and finished the evaluation with a fifty percent win rate on the first day. I will continue playing and post comments on my article with updates as the days and games go by. The only drawback to this type of Tavern Brawl is that once you pick a hero that is what you have to play until the next week of Tavern brawl. When you are left with created your own deck the choice of hero becomes a crucial decision. I look at the theme and description to make a choice which is not always optimal but always leads to at least one win to get the free pack.

Wrapping Up

I hope all of you enjoyed my insights, concepts and discussions. I encourage all players to check the website Hearthstone Players dot com for more articles from me and other players who do have a passion for the game that goes as far as taking time to write articles for the players. I will check the comments section regularly and reply to you the player as quickly as possible. Add me to your favorites list and check back every week for a new article on the Tavern Brawl for the week. I have committed to providing a new article every week we have a new Tavern Brawl to experience. Keep in mind some articles will be free and some will only be available to premium members so I encourage all players to sign up for a premium membership if you can to get all the articles and you get to see the premium articles before anyone else which can be beneficial in ranked play which is what I researched the website for in the beginning.

I want to thank Hearthstone player’s dot com, the players, and my friends for this opportunity and I hope to provide some kind of help going forward with information on Tavern Brawl aspects of Hearthstone. Until next week play, post comments on my article, share the information and encourage your friends to check out the website.

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