Blizzard is trying something new for the release of The Great Dark Beyond. From October 29 to November 5 – right until the launch of the expansion – there is a special pre-release Tavern Brawl. It is a competitive Brawl with an entry fee: either two Tavern Tickets or 300 Gold. However, it offers some new packs and cards as rewards with a fairly flat payout structure.
Even if you go 0-3, you will get one new The Great Dark Beyond pack and one pack of Perils in Paradise, and you start making a profit at 4-3, which offers 3 The Great Dark Beyond packs and one The Great Dark Beyond Common card. The rewards cap out at 6 wins, which gives you 4 The Great Dark Beyond packs as well as one Common and one Rare card from the new expansion. Overall, the rewards can be characterized as mediocre. The expected value is nowhere near as bad as Heroic Brawls have been, but you’re not going to get a ton of packs from this one either. This is good news! It means that if the mode is fun to play, it’s worth playing. If it’s not your cup of tea, you can skip it and not feel too bad. However, the card pool in this one is really interesting and potentially a lot of fun.
The card pool in the event ditches the 2023 expansions already now, even though they will still be around in Standard until early next year. You can build your deck with cards from Core Set, Event Set, Whizbang’s Workshop, Perils in Paradise, and The Great Dark Beyond.
This will have a major effect on the meta. There are no Titans. There’s no Reno, Lone Ranger. Almost every deck in the current Standard format is going to lose a lot of key pieces. Some of the biggest cards that stay are Zilliax Deluxe 3000 and Marin the Manager.
As for The Great Dark Beyond, you are limited in what cards from the new set you can acquire. You cannot buy packs with Gold and you also cannot craft any The Great Dark Beyond cards yet. Do not open your Standard packs for this event either, as they will not include any The Great Dark Beyond cards until the expansion has launched. Your sources of The Great Dark Beyond cards will be rewards from the event itself, Twitch drops, and the pre-order bundles. No player will be able to have a full collection for this event, and your odds of picking up a build-around Legendary or Epics are also limited. If you manage to get some, that’s great, but you will largely rely on the existing sets and Common and Rare cards from the new set.
This will be a major deck-building challenge and should provide a new-expansion-like chaos in the meta in the early days of the event! We will keep a close eye on how the event develops and report on what works as it progresses, but you may also need something to get started, so let’s take a look at some decks that may have hope of success in the event.
Aggro Pirate Demon Hunter
Pirate Demon Hunter is the Standard deck that loses the least for the event. Quick Pick and Burning Heart are not legal under the event rules, but other than that the deck is completely intact. There is a good chance that Pirate Demon Hunter can be played even with no new cards whatsoever.
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
10,080
Zilliax: Pylon Module + Ticking Module
It is also interesting to see whether the deck can benefit from new cards. The Great Dark Beyond has a one-cost Space Pirate in it, but as you are losing Quick Pick, it might not be useful in the deck. However, the Demon Hunter Starship just might be good with Pirates. With Shattershard Turret and Felfused Battery you can have a Starship with Rush and Windfury that buffs all your other minions by +1 Attack every time it attacks. Grab some charging Pirates to go alongside that, and you can hit some face. Using some Common and Rare The Great Dark Beyond cards, Aggro Demon Hunter could turn into something like this:
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
- 8,640
Zilliax: Pylon Module + Ticking Module
Undead Handbuff Death Knight
Another deck that could be playable without new The Great Dark Beyond cards is Rainbow Death Knight. The deck is losing most of its top end with Reska, the Pit Boss and The Primus both unavailable in the Brawl, but with most other decks also losing a lot of power, we could try to return to the Undead Handbuff style, as all of those cards are still available. Make big Undead minions and win the game. If you replace the Rainbow Seamstresses, you can even build this fully on a budget. Alternatively, you can also add Airlock Breach from the new expansion, it looks like a phenomenal card.
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
- 2,520
Elemental Mage
Elemental Mage has been the top budget deck in the Standard format during Perils in Paradise. The Standard list will lose a number of pieces in the Pre-Release Brawl because cards like Aqua Archivist, Flame Revenant, Rolling Stone, and Overflow Surger are from 2023. However, there is plenty of new Elemental/Fire support coming in The Great Dark Beyond, and Lamplighter is still around, so it should be possible to rebuild the deck using fairly cheap cards still.
Even if you do not have Dreamplanner Zephrys and Blazing Accretion, there are some Elementals and Fire spells left that you can use, whatever you happen to have available. You do need some of the new commons though, as too many old Elementals are leaving.
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
- 3,000
Elemental Shaman
Like Elemental Mage, Elemental Shaman will also lose a number of Elementals for the Brawl, but it will also get a bunch of new ones from The Great Dark Beyond. Shaman has particularly strong Asteroid synergies, but they are hampered in the Brawl by Bolide Behemoth being an Epic card. This makes it harder to build a fully combo-oriented list or a full aggro list, but perhaps a more midrange list with a large Elemental package will do. If you happen to open a pair of Bolide Behemoths, you have some really interesting opportunities to go full Asteroid.
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
- 9,120
Zilliax: Pylon Module + Ticking Module
Draenei Warrior
While many The Great Dark Beyond archetypes are better if they have their core Epic or Legendary cards, there might be something to Draenei Warrior even without them. Without the 2023 sets, Warrior looks much more midrangey than it has been on the ladder and going in with Draenei might be good enough in the lower-powered meta. Admittely, the real powerhouse of Draenei Warrior is Stalwart Avenger with Exarch Akama coming close second, and those cards are Epic and Legendary. If you get them, adding them to the deck should work wonders, but even without them, you can attempt to overpower your opponent with an endless stream of Draenei. Hologram Operator just might give you some copies of them, but if you have the real deal, you can cut the Operators.
- Format: pegasus
- Season: season-127
- Posted By:
- 5,400
Zilliax: Pylon Module + Ticking Module
It’s Time to Brew!
While working on this article, I was repeatedly amazed by how many cards from 2023 see mainstream play and how the ladder experience is defined by them. Titans are obviously powerhouses, but even something like Handbuff Paladin loses 14 cards from its current list when you remove all cards from 2023 from it!
There are so many questions remaining. Control Warrior with some resurrecting Taunt minions could be good, but how do you survive with most of your board clears gone? Overheal Priest gets some interesting pieces, but you lose your main three healing cards, how can you come back from that? Hunter gets a new super Egg in Extraterrestrial Egg, but what do you have left to buff and activate it? Yelling Yodeler is not part of the Brawl, either. Wheel of DEATH!!! is available in the Brawl, but how does it work without Sargeras, the Destroyer, Loken, Jailer of Yogg-Saron, and Fanottem, Lord of the Opera?
The Pre-Release Brawl is going to be the most fresh Hearthstone experience you can get this year, even more so than the expansion launch itself!
Old Guardian
Ville "Old Guardian" Kilkku is a writer and video creator focused on analytic, educational Hearthstone, and building innovative Standard format decks. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
“The card pool in the event ditches the 2023 expansions already now, even though they will still be around in Standard until early next year.”
ffs why?? I assumed this was a mindless glitch like they forgot it was still one expansion until the yearly rotation. The entire point of this brawl is to tinker with new stuff. Who wants to do that without half of the sets?? The decks won’t even match the meta. I’m not even playing the brawl due to the huge hassle of trying to figure out how to remake a valid decent deck. This is very stupid of them.
‘…No player will be able to have a full collection for this event, and your odds of picking up a build-around Legendary or Epics are also limited. If you manage to get some, that’s great, but you will largely rely on the existing sets and Common and Rare cards from the new set…’
Which makes those kind of events unfair by nature. 1st it’s somewhat pay 2 win (albeit limited), 2nd there will be players that get ‘lucky’ in what they open and others will be ‘unlucky’. Idk what to think about this … well, at least one attempt is free.
The Brawl is inherently unfair because of collection differences that can’t be mended with crafting, that’s an undeniable truth. For example, if Libram Paladin turns out to be the best meta deck, people who managed to open 2x Libram of Divinity (Epics) and even more so Yrel (Legendary) will be at a big advantage compared to other players.
However, that’s also a part I kind of like about it. It means that people will have to use resources available to them in the best way. Utilize cards they open as much as they can without being able to purely netdeck the strongest builds (unless, again, they get really lucky with what they open).
It reminds me of the MTG games – we never had full meta decks, we just played what we could build with the cards we had. Yes, there was nothing on the line back then, but I think that the stakes are low enough this time that it might be fun to get a few runs in even if I don’t come out ahead. Doubly so with one free run and free Tavern Tickets from the event. I would never recommend it if the entry cost was as high as with the Heroic Brawl.