I Love a Good Tavern Brawl!

I love Blizzard games, all of them. I play World of Warcraft with my trusty Druid. I have a Witch Doctor in Diablo III I visit occasionally for a nice hop through some rifts. I have faced the Zerg and Protoss in StarCraft II, and I regularly kill stuff and get my butt handed to me in Overwatch.

And of course, there’s Hearthstone, a game that speaks to my love of the world of Warcraft and my one-time addiction to Magic the Gathering and other collectible card games. I play it almost every week, but there is something about the game that continues to annoy me: quests involving classes and decks that I don’t use—a very wide category considering I only play Druid decks.

I don’t buy Hearthstone packs regularly, and play only enough to complete my quests and advance in the ladder to get my new card back and a chest. Only once before have I attempted to climb the ladder and got as far as rank 14. Not really impressive, I know, but for a cobbled-up deck with what cards I have available, I think it’s quite good.

So, with my slim collection and low level heroes—which prevents me from having all the classes’ basic cards—it becomes extremely frustrating to play other people using any class that isn’t druid, which means I often have to cancel the active quest and hope its replacement is something more suitable for my needs.

That’s why the Tavern Brawl is by far my favourite part of Hearthstone, as it often allows me to play a class without even having any cards for it. You see, the Weekly Tavern Brawl brings in a new rule and mechanic every week, and most of the time you don’t even build the deck, but the system takes care of that for you. So for me, I just have to pick a class, maybe a few cards depending on the rules for the week and then just adapt to the cards the game hands me.

Sure, there are weeks where I have to build an entire deck and fight it out, but the weekly gimmick is always there to give me the edge I need to win despite my rather poor collection and lack of skill playing other classes.

Last week’s Tavern Brawl was particularly great and I had a blast paying it. The rule was simple: every minion you summon will cast a random spell at a random target if possible. The results are manic, and very often you saw people summoning their minions only for the random spell to destroy them instantly. Very often I found myself facing a stampede of my opponent’s minions, only to summon a tiny inconsequential minion from my hand that triggers a board-clearing random spell.

It’s awesome. But of course, when the randomness hits you, it’s brutal and during my last play session with the Tavern Brawl, I had so many games where things went sideways for me very quickly and from there they just became worse, from my own cards leaving me without minions to their cards killing off all of mine or boosting theirs to lethal levels. Those moments were bad, but I still enjoyed myself immensely.

I recorded some of the best and worst moments of that session and you’ll find it below, I hope you enjoy my little misadventures at the Hearthstone Tavern Brawl. I can’t wait for the next one and what it’ll bring!