We have an official announcement to what could be Hearthstone’s answer to tournament mode in the future. It will be 1,000 gold or $9.99 to enter, you lock in a Standard deck, then you play against others in a race to 12 wins or 3 losses (just like Arena). Getting 12-Wins gets you 50 packs, lots of Gold and Arcane Dust, and three Golden Legendaries while 0-Wins gets you 1 pack (rewards are heavily skewed towards the high end of wins). Heroic Tavern Brawl replaces the normal Tavern Brawl for the week, and will be the same length as a standard Tavern Brawl.
Update 2 – Rewards for Heroic Tavern Brawl!
$10 USD gets you 7 packs and 1,000 Gold gets you 10 packs.
How-to Break Even w/Gold
At 5 wins you get 6 packs equaling 600 gold. You get 220 gold flat so that’s 820, then you get 220 Arcane Dust. If you check the average dust per pack it’s at 98.25 (I’m going to round it to 100 for simplicity). So the value of the dust is around 2 packs or 200 gold which gets you to 1,000 gold.
How-to Break Even w/Cash
It looks like you’ll need 4 wins to break even with real money. 5 packs = 500 gold + 190 flat is 690 gold, which is almost enough for the 7 packs. Then you add the 190 Arcane Dust which gets you to about even.
This is clearly not for the faint of heart, and if you are looking for value it’s best to just save your money and gold for Amazon Coin deals or playing Arena.
Update – Here’s some more information from Blizzard:
“This brawl is pretty different. We want it to feel more like a tournament, and so the rewards are weighted heavily towards the high end of wins. The reward for 0 wins is a single pack. If this scares you, you may want to wait for next week’a Brawl and just enjoy the fun on Twitch. :)” – Ben Brode [Source]
Will there be a normal Tavern Brawl during Heroic Tavern Brawl?
“No, Heroic Tavern Brawl will take over the normal Tavern Brawl. Free Brawls will return once Heroic Brawl is over!” – CM Zeriyah [Source]
If I don’t finish my Heroic Tavern Brawl at the end of the week will it just pay out the amount of wins I have at the end?
“Correct.” – CM Zeriyah [Source]
Which packs will we receive as a reward?
“The pack rewards are from the most recent expansion – so it would be Whispers of the Old Gods. The Legendaries are random.” – CM Zeriyah [Source]
How many times can you enter this Tavern Brawl?
“The current limit is five runs.” – CM Zeriyah [Source]
Here’s the official announcement:
Ready for the ultimate competitive Tavern Brawl experience that will test Hearthstone’s best in an all-out battle for glory? If you think you’re up to the challenge, get your deck ready and dive into the fray, because Heroic Brawl is coming!
Heroic Brawl will challenge even Hearthstone’s most experienced players as they vie for glory and in-game rewards! Participants will create a Standard deck from their existing card pool and lock it in before their first Heroic Brawl match. No changes can be made to your Heroic Brawl deck once you’ve locked it in, so be sure to do a bit of testing before you finalize your deck.
Once you’ve locked in your Standard deck for Heroic Brawl, you’ll be pitted against other Heroic Brawlers in heated battle. Just like the Arena, you want to shoot for 12 wins to get the best rewards—but if you get three losses, you’re out!
For Hearthstone’s best brawlers, 50 packs, a heap of Gold, piles of Arcane Dust, and three golden Legendaries sit at the end of the 12-win rainbow. The rewards are significantly different than what you have come to expect in the Arena, and the more games you win, the better they get. Are you ready to take on the best and brightest of competitive Hearthstone?
Heroic Brawl is not for the faint of heart, and is a unique experience meant for the extremely competitive and experienced Hearthstone player. To speak more on Heroic Brawl and the philosophy behind it are two of Hearthstone’s game designers for Tavern Brawls, Dan Emmons and Pat Nagle.
Are you cracking your knuckles in anticipation yet? Here’s how you can participate!
Heroic Brawl lasts for only one normal Tavern Brawl week and has an entry fee of $9.99 USD or 1000 gold. You can participate in Heroic Brawl for a limited amount of completed runs. As mentioned above, Heroic Brawl rewards scale depending on how many wins you get, so be sure to do your best each run!
If you’re not ready to throw down during Heroic Brawl week, you can watch your friends Brawl with Spectator Mode or cheer on your favorite streamers as they go for the gold. We’ll return to our normal Tavern Brawl schedule after the conclusion of the Heroic Tavern Brawl week.
We hope that our Heroic Brawl scratches the competitive itch of the players looking for a high risk, high reward experience. Heroic Brawl is coming soon, so keep an eye out for updates.
We’re always looking to try new things in Hearthstone, so let us know what you think of Heroic Brawl on the official Hearthstone forums!
[Source]
I’m not understanding the hate coming from folks about this. The cost to play in organized tournaments has always been high, and that is all this is with greater flexibility and minus the opportunity to “get your ticket” to a national tournament. There are plenty of options for the free-to-play crowd (that’s what Standard, Arena, and all of the RNG is about, which I largely fall into BTW), so I don’t understand why allowing opportunities for the pros to have some new options is frowned upon. Will this be meta heavy? Sure, but so is every regionals/nationals tournament I ever attended with physical card games. Enjoy a new option and move on. I may buy in just for the competitive nature of the event and to support a vendor that provides new and interesting options to play.
cancelled ;/
It’s not a Tavern Brawl, there’s no special rules. It’s just a Constructed Arena with a big deviation of prizes.
I don’t see a problem in it, it’s a new kind of game with a competitive player focus; I see a problem in not having the regular Tavern Brawl during the week.
I consider myself a competitive player (struggling to get legend any time soon) but I’m probably not playing this “Brawl”, the current meta and the proximity to a new expansion makes more reliable to just buy 10 packs of the new expansion (1k gold).
Even if I get 9 victories, which I think it’s very hard to happen, what am I going to do with 16 Old Gods packs? It gets much worse when you think about 5-6 victories, which is much more realistic (talking about myself).
Good point of view, a new expansion is coming so it could make us think a little bit.
16 packs would be only for dust and maybe some golden cards for collection (for people who like to collect goldens with extremely nice animations or extra dust if not).
I like the idea to have a big challenge with a deck of my own creation to deal against popular decks (shamman, warrior controls, etc).
In my opinion $10 is cheap to have fun, I mean, how much do people usually spend per month in pleasures like beers, drugs, restaurants, nightlife, etc? I definitely would prefer to spend $10 to try this heroic brawl, even if I lose the first 3 games in a row.
So as expected COMPLETELY not for the average pleeb such as myself who would be lucky to get 3 wins, the rewards should be alot better, at least a few packs for not winning at all.
Seriously, couldnt they announce that like 2 weeks earlier so ppl could actualy save on that 1 k Gold to participate?
Looks a lot of fun, but as we know how the meta is going, this tavern brawl will be full of shamans, and theres no fun on facing the same damn deck
Well, it will be a lot of Shaman and Shaman counters.
In the current meta you can call this “Midrange Shaman duels” as well.
Having a gated tournament mode excites me but it is overcosted. Imagining running into your counterdecks ruining a 19 dollar run. I would love to see a 6 win run costing half. This way you are not forced to play the top meta deck everytime.
8 wins to show a profit? yikes. probably be wrong for me to buy in. i dont like the fact that it has to takes over the regular brawl spot.
They should do a format like where the more people who enter the better the prizes are for everyone instead of “high risk high reward” type format
Awesome! Finally a new in-game challenge!
The only way to see if this is the best tournament mode is testing, so let’s give it a shoot. The cost in my opinion is fair in comparison with other TCG tournaments like Magic.
I agree Safari! I’m super pumped for this new challenge and have no qualms with it replacing the silly Tavern Brawl for the week. I knew saving my gold was going to pay off down the road. And now it has! So much negativity comes out when the designers launch a new thing. If you don’t like it, don’t play it and play a game mode you like. Pretty simple!
I have been waiting for HS to do this for a long time. But, since the entry fee is so high with so little promise of a reward, I am afraid that only the best people will pay to play, and that me.
I have a feeling that there are many casual players sad to see this as well.
that’s what the intent is. for the best of the best to scratch their high stakes competitive itch
They did make that clear, yes… I suppose I should be happy for the pro players. If I were pro, I would be super excited about this opportunity.
So hearthstone is officially turnining into gambling, Feelsbadman.
This is going to be SICK!!!
The rich will get richer.
This looks great and we can only assume that this will be this new feature coming (possibly around Blizzcon) but i feel its just going to be flooded with people who aren’t interested in having fun, but more about playing annoying tier 1 decks (looking at you midrange shammy) and going to be a waste for many people. That doesn’t mean its a bad idea, we just need some more balancing to make this a fully fledged and fun thing.
What does 9 wins net you?
We don’t know for sure, it would be a pretty good reward at that amount of wins I would imagine.