Introduction
Welcome, dear readers, to another installment of ”Running Wild”, the article series where I cover just about all things related to the wild format.Last week we’ve had yet another Heroic Brawl but this time it was all about the wild format. I’ve mentioned before how I felt about this and how I believe that this brawl might have a huge impact on the wild format meta (I still do). This was the first Heroic Brawl of its kind and I’ve been following in very closely and gathering data so that I can present some wild decks to you but before I do that I will both cover and answer some of the most popular opinions on the Heroic Brawl because I just can’t help myself and I feel the need to say a word or two on that topic.
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
Opinions On Heroic Brawl
Oh, man, there are a lot of opinions and ideas regarding this topic. I feel like every time a Heroic Brawl is released that there is an uproar in the community and sometimes I wish that I was blind so that I wouldn’t be able to read the stupidity that people post regarding the topic of the Heroic Brawl. There are a ton of opinions and ideas regarding this topic that are either laughably wrong or just uninformed or maybe even both. I usually restrain myself from commenting on this because there is no point in arguing with people over the internet but since this is my article which revolves about a format that is very dear to me I will go ahead and state my counter opinion to those, mostly just bad, opinions regarding the Heroic Brawl.
1. Bli$$ard is stealing our gold!
This is by far the single most popular opinion about the Heroic Brawl and it is just plainly wrong. I can’t imagine how anyone could argue about the validity of such an argument but because that it obviously possible I will go ahead and offer my counter opinion. Are you ready for this? I’m warning you, it will be quite shocking. Ok, you ready? Here it goes. No one is stealing your gold! If Blizzard were stealing your gold than what would have happened is that once the Heroic Brawl came out you would have lost all of your gold and you would have gotten that amount of brawl tickets instead…also all the gold that you earn for the week will go into funding the next Heroic Brawl ticket. That would be Blizzard stealing your gold! What a lot of people seem to miss is that no one is forcing you to play the Heroic Brawl! There is no gun pointed to your head. You get to choose, on your own free will, whether you wish to participate in the brawl or not. It is completely optional.
2. No free pack this week!
Yes, this statement is completely correct. For whatever reason, the developers still haven’t made it possible to choose between Heroic Brawl and classic Tavern Brawl which causes a problem for those who don’t wish to play the Heroic brawl. Those players sometimes feel as if they were cheated out of their free pack. Now, is that single pack really that important to you? We’ve been getting a free pack each week for over a year and this is the third time that there was an actual Heroic Brawl. This is the third time that you didn’t get your free pack! Heroic Brawls are made to cater to high legend and high skill players who want a super competitive high stakes format and their wishes have been ignored for a very long time. Even now, instead of making Heroic Brawls a regular format which exists outside of Tavern Brawl, those players get to enjoy that high stakes gameplay on extremely rare occasions. Is that 40 dust really that important to you that you can’t give it up for one week so that players who enjoy a different type of brawl can have their fun every couple of months? The no free pack crowd is just being extremely selfish in this regard.
3. This format sucks! I won’t play it and neither should you!
This statement is a combination of the previous two. It is made by angry players who aren’t good enough to get a lot of wins in the Heroic Brawl or don’t have the necessary gold to try it. Listen, if you’re one of those people, not everything has to cater to you. You don’t need to participate in every single event that there is. It is ok that from time to time other people get their fun and you shouldn’t try to ruin it for them. You can play any other game mode for that one week and the next week things are going to go back to normal. Just because you don’t get to play a certain format or you don’t enjoy that format it doesn’t make it right for you to complain and try to ruin it for other players who have been patiently waiting for another Heroic Brawl. It is selfish and immature of you to act this way.
4. This is just a gold sink!
Yes, 2 out of 3 times the Heroic Brawl has been a complete gold sink. I completely agree with this statement. Blizzard has found a way to try to make players spend their hard-earned gold just before the next expansion hits so that they need to buy packs…but what you need to take into consideration is that those players who have been saving gold for the next expansion most likely won’t risk it in the Heroic Brawl. It is far more likely that players will spend actual money on this brawl and, believe me, those players who spend money on this brawl are the ones who are most likely going to pre-order the expansion as well and those players have, most likely, already put some money aside for the expansion. In short, Blizzard is not taking away expansion money from anyone because most of those players have already set expansion money aside. This is just an extra profit for them and, before you say it, there is nothing wrong with a company trying to make some extra profit. It is a business, after all.
Wild Heroic Brawl data
Ok, now that we’ve got that unpleasant part of the article out-of-the-way let’s jump into something far more fun, shall we?
For those of you who are still around after reading my responses to some of the most popular opinions regarding the Wild Heroic Brawl, I will now go ahead and show you some of the data that I’ve managed to gather so far. If you’ve been around during my last article regarding the Heroic Brawl, which feels like ages ago, I’ve talked about the difficulty of gathering Heroic Brawl data because, just like with regular Hearthstone data, there is no way of tracking games which are being played all around the world which makes data gathering nearly impossible. This is why I need to resort to Reddit for gathering data because there are threads where people try to keep track of different decks that are being played on various streams and give us some idea on what’s going on with the Heroic Brawl.
For this article I will be giving you the data from this thread and from this thread. Those are among the best that I’ve managed to find and I think that they will provide you with enough information so that you can get a clearer picture on what was going on during the brawl.
#1 There are no Hunter and Rogue 12 wins decks!
According to the data presented in the latter reddit thread, there are no hunter and rogue decks which have made it to 12 wins. Now, I’m really not a fan of rogues and I strongly dislike the class, but I still find it at least a little bit odd that no one have managed to pilot a miracle rogue deck to 12 wins. I say miracle rogue because, to be honest, it is the only truly competitive rogue deck in the wild format and has been the only truly competitive rogue deck for years. Hunter, on the other hand, is a bit less of a surprise because hunter has been bad for a very long time. The current standard version of midrange hunter is actually very good and I thought that maybe someone will manage to pilot that deck to 12 wins but apparently that didn’t happen, which is a shame. There is something very interesting to keep in mind. When I did my last Heroic Brawl report (click me) I did gather the necessary data the exact same way like I did now and once I’ve compiled it into a list I’ve noticed that there haven’t been any hunter decks that managed to get 12 wins. Not a single one! I know that back then hunter was in a very difficult spot in the standard metagame but I’ve just wanted to mention how history repeats itself and hunter is, apparently, the worst class to play Heroic Brawl with. Poor Rexxar 🙁
#2 The most played class of the brawl was shaman!
Shaman may have fallen from grace in the standard format but it is still a very good class in the wild format. There are 10 different shaman decks in the first reddit thread, greatly outnumbering any other class, which goes to show that shaman was indeed the top dog of the brawl. I’m a bit surprised by this because, for those of you who don’t play the wild format, shaman was never an issue there and it isn’t an issue even now. Yes, it is strong but it is not a huge thread like pirate warrior. I’m completely caught off guard by this information because I’ve expected shaman to be one of the least successful classes in the Wild Heroic Brawl. Maybe, maybe quest shaman because it is currently doing extremely well on the ladder, but not N’zoth Control shaman. That one caught me completely off guard. Also, another fun thing because I’ve already talked about it just now, if you compare this data to the data from my previous Heroic Brawl article you will notice that shaman was the top dog even back then. History really does repeat itself 😛
#3 The lack of pirate warrior
Out of all things it is the lack of pirate warrior which really shocked me. There are only 3 recorded pirate warrior decks. 3!!! If you’re new to my articles then let me first welcome you to the ”Running Wild” series and now let me tell you why I’m so shocked by this. Ever since the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan was released I’ve been covering the wild format and the one thing that I’ve complained about the most, other than the warrior quest, were the ever growing numbers of pirate warrior in the wild format. Wild is the only format that I play and I like it because here I can play some of my favorite powerful decks from across the entire Hearthstone history. Pirate warrior ruins this for me. Honestly, I’ve been playing less and less Hearthstone because I keep running into this deck which makes it difficult for me to play some of my favorite decks. Now I sound like a common official forum complainer, I know, but I’m really getting tired of this xD
Back when this brawl was announced I had extremely high hopes that pirate warrior will be everywhere. Why in the world would I want that, you ask? Because I’ve believed that if the deck made a huge impression during the Wild Heroic Brawl that the developement team will notice that having an extremely powerful deck, which is absolutely everywhere, in an eternal format where cards don’t rotate out, isn’t a really good idea for the future of the format and they will nerf it but that didn’t happen. Why didn’t that happen? I will tell you a short Magic: The Gathering because I think that it is a good comparison. A couple of months ago an expansion called Aether Revolt came out and in that expansion there was a cat creature card that could blink one of your cards. Blinking is when you remove a card from the game and then immediately return it back. Then there was another card which could create copies of creatures. Those two cards combined made the infamous infinite copycat combo where you would copy the cat with the second card, blink that card with the copy of the cat, return it into play, make another copy of the cat, blink again and so into infinity. This combo was talked about so much that when the first big tournament came everybody came prepared to face it. There were almost no copycat decks present at the tournament and those that were present were obliterated in the first day. Why am I telling you this? Because this is what I think happened to the pirate warrior deck. Everybody came in expecting to see the pirate warrior deck and they have teched their decks to counter it resulting in a total lack of pirate warriors. Even pirate warrior players have most likely came with a different deck because they were expecting to get countered a lot. Regardless of the lack of pirate warriors in this Heroic Brawl I still wish for Blizzard to nerf the deck to the ground.
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of yet another ”Running Wild” article. I know that I might have angered some of you with the first part of the article but I had to be brutally honest with you, my readers, and if anyone found himself/herself offended by my words than I am sorry. Tell me how would you respond to those popular opinions regarding the Heroic Brawls? I would really love to hear what my readers thing about it.
Did you play this Heroic Brawl? If you have then what deck did you use and what was your end result? Did you pay gold or money to play the brawl? Leave your comments and feedback in the comment section below and I will reply to you as soon as I can. I’m a bit busy all the time but I read each and every of your comments and I do my best to respond although sometimes, due to personal reasons, I respond a few days late 😛 I am really sorry for not responding lately, I’ve been extremely busy with my new jobs and they’ve kept me too occupied to thing about anything else (let alone do anything else). I’m getting a hang of it so I will hopefully have more time to respond to you!
As always if you’ve liked this article do consider following me on twitter https://twitter.com/Eternal_HS. There you can ask me all sorts of Hearthstone questions (unrelated to this article) and I’ll gladly answer them as best as I can 🙂
