This week’s Tavern Brawl is “All-Star Squad”!
Discuss this Tavern Brawl on our Discord!
Official Description for All-Star Squad
Spiders and Portals have had their chance, now you choose! Pick one card for your deck, and you will get 22 copies of it plus 8 random class cards!
All-Star Squad Chalkboard
General Information
- You get one Standard pack for winning your first game this week.
- This is the ninth time we see this Brawl. Last time we’ve seen it on April 19, 2023.
- It’s a PvP Brawl.
- The Brawl’s format is Wild.
- It’s a “Constructed” Brawl. You pick a class and make a deck with a single card only.
- Your deck is filled with 22 copies of the card you’ve chosen AND 8 random class cards.
- The goal is to pick a card that’s most consistently going to win you the game. Given that you get so many copies of it, you’re nearly guaranteed to get multiple copies of it during your first few turns.
- The best card choices are: a very aggressive card (to rush your opponent down), a card that synergizes with more copies of each other or a versatile card that’s usable in the early game, but has late game scaling too.
Tavern Brawl All-Star Squad Card Choices
Here are some ideas from previous Brawls. Some of them are more fun/meme and others are actual viable competitors. Let us know what worked for you in the comments and we’ll add it to the post!
- Any Class – Patches the Pirate – Self-explanatory, every time you drop Patches you summon a full board of them.
- Any Class – Elwynn Boar – You can usually trigger their effect by Turn 4-5 (assuming your opponent plays minions you can trade into) and then kill your opponent over the next 2 turns.
- Any Class – Murloc Tidecaller – Aggressive snowball strategy.
- Any Class – Mogu Cultist – If you survive until Turn 7, you’re all but guaranteed to summon Highkeeper Ra.
- Any Class – Annoying Fan – Solid Neutral minion strategy counter, you just target anything they play with it and they have to either destroy it with Hero Power or spells – otherwise their minions can’t attack and you grind them with 1 damage attacks.
- Hunter – Doomsayer – Counters some minion strategies + you slowly grind your opponent down with Hero Power.
- Mage – Frost Nova – Counters minion strategies + you rely on whatever extra cards you get + Hero Power to win.
- Mage – Varden Dawngrasp – Basically a better version of Frost Nova start, it counters most of the minion strategies. Sadly it’s a Legendary.
- Mage – Lightshow – It starts slowly, but really ramps up after a few uses.
- Mage/Paladin/Rogue – Ice Block/Time Out!/Cloak of Shadows – If you want to annoy your opponent and force them to concede.
- Paladin – Feast and Famine – Burn strategy, it’s also worth saving them until Turn 4 so you can benefit from Lifesteal.
- Priest – Mind Blast – Classic burn strategy, although keep in mind that you might lose to some fast minion tactics.
- Priest – Astral Automaton – Very good minion strategy, while it snowballs slower than Pogo, all of the copies already on the board also get buffed.
- Rogue – Flik Skyshiv – If your opponent went for a minion and you survived until Turn 6, you can just delete all the copies from his board, hand and deck.
- Rogue – Pogo-Hopper – One of the best strategies, snowballs very well.
- Shaman – Earth Shock – Pogo counter, but you rely on other cards to carry you. Useless if you don’t face Pogos.
- Warrior – Upgrade! – Starts slowly, but after a few turns you swing with a huge weapon.
I would like to see a twist season designed as follows:
it starts as all star squad tavern brawl, but after 24 hours, the card with the most wins is banned.
in addition, the matchmaking forbids mirror matches.
This way you can crown the “king of all star squad tavern brawl” on the first day, and then you get a 30-steps-stairway down with each card a little bit less effective/powerful than the last.
The meta would automatically change every day
some nice opposing strategies that i ran across recently:
Chaotic Tendril (surprisingly effective, because you can level up to high cost spells very quickly)
Flight of thr Bronze (can be a lot of fun, provided you hit Nozdormu the Timeless quickly so you ramp everyone to 10 mana, activating manathirst and giving you the mana to cast the discovered dragons)
still pogo conquers all, and should therefore be banned in this brawl
Lightshow works really well.
Yes, of the new cards Lightshow works best.
Groovy Cat also seems to be popular, but has only mediocre power level.
I even encountered Wicked Stab, which is clearly inferior to Mind Blast
(I had to complete the 5 tavern brawl wins weekly quest)
why didn’t they ban pogo?
i did not even have to play a card to get my pack this week.
my opp conceded before the game even started.
that’s how ridiculous pogo is in this format, and everyone knows it.
if blizzard ever wants to bring back this tavern brawl, they’d better ban pogo or don’t bring it back at all
Mind blast.
1.) Pogo is by far the superior strategy. It usually wins turn 4 and is very hard to counter.
If the Tavern brawl ever returns, I would advocate to ban Pogo Hunter from it
2.) The Pogo counters are mainly silence effects (Earth Shock, Smothering Starfish, Magehunter, Showstopper, Consume Magic). They still only work sometimes against pogo and lose to almost everything else.
3.) The bunker strategies (Ice Block, Time Out, Shadow Cloak, Doomsayer, Frost Nova) suffer from the fact, that you a) only have 22 of these cards and b) only have your hero power and random class cards to close out the game. You usually lose when you run out of defensive cards, especially against Warrior, Priest and maybe Druid which can defend against your hero power, or if you do not have a damaging hero power yourself. Shadow Cloak also falls prey to the Hunter Hero Power, Forst Nova loses to certain silence strategies targeted against Pogo.
Varden Dawngrasp is probably the best strategy in this group because it also has a win condition but it loses to Flik Skyshiv (as does Doomsayer)
4.) snowball strategies other than Pogo work very well, but lose against Pogo. Jade Idols, Wailing Vapor and Glow-Tron both can kill turn 5 and have quite resilent health stats. Murloc Tidecaller, Grimescale Oracle and Timber Wolf can theoretically also win fast, but the minions are too fragile in practice. Except for Jade Idol these strategies can also struggle against the silence strategies targeted at Pogo.
Mechwarper tends to start quickly but run out of steam before it can close the game with its 2/3s.
I personally like Firemancer Flurgl, because it can win on turn 5 (as Demon Hunter), controls the board well, has reach, and has some resilence to silence strategies too if you collect 3 or 4 Flurgls in hand to unload them on turn 6 or 8.
5.) Flik Skyshiv has a lot of “ifs” attached: you have to survive until turn 5 (on the draw) or 6 (on the play), only good against minion strategies, and if you are too low after flik hits, you might die to spells or hero power activations of your opponent. Still a lot of fun.
6.) weapon and spell based strategies (Mind Blast, Curse of Agonies, Upgrade, Elwynn Boar) circumvent the anti-minion strategies (Doomsayer, Frost Nova, Varden Dawngrasp, Flik Skyshiv), but usually fail against Pogo and maybe some other snowball strategies too. Priest, Warrior and Druid can steal a turn from Mind Blast by a single hero power activation
7.) Patches seems to be a case of its own: it can rebuild the board for 1 mana and can kill turn 5 (Hunter, Mage, Druid, Demon Hunter), but also loses to Pogo and struggles against taunt minions.
8.) Last but not least there are a lot of discover-type strategies that are too slow to compete against snowball strategies but win in rock/paper/scissors-fashion against some strategies that try to beat snowball (like silence). Examples are Nature’s Studies, Babbling Book, Reconnaissance, Sky Raider, Palm Reading, Wand Thief, Runed Orb, Dragon’s Hoard, Blazing Invocation, Asharan Scroll.
9.) Priest “card steal” decks (Psychic Conjurer) are usually ineffective at doing what the opponent tries to do, because they only get a few of the key cards for which they have to waste mana on 1/1 creatures.
Has there been any mention of a fix for the text not showing on tavern brawl on Android I’ve had no descriptions for the past month or so which I suppose makes it a fun guessing game about the mechanics.
On PC in only shows the first you enter a new brawl intro screen. Nothing for the rest of the week
Twin Slice Demon Hunter. +2 attack AND another card
Happened to have Flik on me, so tried that. Instantly forfeited against a mage, but then got matched with a warrior attempting to go for Cargo Guard armor strategy. Getting to turn 6 felt like instant win with him having only 5 cards left and deleting what’s left with other Fliks.
Pogos Activate. If your a new player I strongly suggest crafting at least 1 pogo. It will make this and many other brawls very easy.
Priest’s Madame Lazul is fair enough as you can basically copy whatever your opponent uses.
Might be an accident but the description in the “official description” section is incorrect. Hope I can help!
Consume Magic is added to the list of pogo counters this time.
i just love it when Brawls allow you to play the Mogu cultist combo. its such a satisfying combo to execute.
I recomend doing it with warrior, so you can have some help surviving thanks to the HP (Priest’s HP can also help you in the same way, but the warrior has the advantadge that it helps even when you are still full). This is more for the fun, not a very succesful strategy. Cos you are going to lose to any stratedy that plans on killing you before turn 6-7, but you can win against other ppl that are not playing super effective agro strategies. (btw if you see a pogo, just concede, there’s no way you will last long enough to execute the combo).
Oh I got one. For rogue do the 1 cost discover a legendary. I have had some crazy fun games, including summoning a bunch of stuff from my hand at once with the priest legendary
Easy wins with Pogo.
I read above that’s a slow start? As soon as turn 4, if you are “lucky” enough, you have a 1/1, 3/3, 5/5, 7/7 and 9/9 on board.
Maybe your weakest Pogos are dead, but no card can counter the 7/7 and 9/9 Pogos at turn 3 and 4. Lame. No one plays Silence Shaman and still, that’s a winnable matchup that depends on RNG Hero Power and class cards.
I wrote slow start when I thought that the Brawl is Wild like it was last time. In Wild there are faster strategies like Patches (full board of 1/1’s on Turn 1) or let’s say Mechwarper (full board of 2/3’s on Turn 2 when going second).
Changed it since the Brawl is in Standard and Pogo is basically the best strategy.
The Brawl is Wild and both Patches and Jade Idol (slower than Pogos but can’t be silenced) are very strong. I played a Priest with Imprisoned Humunculus and won something like 80% of my games with it. Counters Patches perfectly and wins a lot of other matchups on the back of those nice stats alone.
Eventually I lost to a Priest with Renew and switched to that. Very flexible and great against aggro. Completely destroys Demon Hunter with Twin Slice, which I faced a lot.
I feast on Pogos with Frost Nova. I see one Pogo and I just send the Good Game and coast to the win!
Tried the Flik strategy and went up against a Warlock. He was only playing the random class cards until I burgled a Mind Vision, which gave me a Mogu Cultist. Turn 6 I played the Cultist and killed it with Flik, then I watched as the rest of his hand and most of his deck faded away.
It was awesome
Wow! Mogu Cultist! That was fun.
I played Chameleos in priest to basically take everybody else’s strategy
Pogo tempo is too fast. any counter deck?
even Doomsayer hunter couldn’t beat it.
one rush or destroying spell, auto concede.
and, no, even shaman earth shock is losing to rogue only 1/2 weapon from hero power
easiest priest mastery and priest dominance dailies in my life… 100% win rate with cancerous mind blast
easy win by RNG with babling book
Just won 15 in a row with a Jade Idol deck. Encountered mind blast 4 times. Easy win. I can see what could win against this….
patches.
Explosive Trap is pretty funny against Aggro, but looses to Mindblast.
Played around with Shaman and Finders Keepers isn’t all that bad if you can get through the early game! Lost mainly to Jade Idol Druid, otherwise Mind Blast Priest isn’t all that scary since you can chain Jinyu Waterspeakers through discovers.
Mind Blast Priest? Did anyone forget about Forbidden Healing?
First try… I chose Grimscale Oracle, on turn 2 I had 3x 3/1, opponent conceded.
sorry, but I’m pretty sure that will lose against a turn 2 1/1, 3/3, and a 5/5…
If all you’re seeing is Patches, Power Word Glory is a pretty fun counter. Won’t save you from Mind Blasts though.
No one’s mentioned it here… I have had a lot of fun with I Know A Guy warrior card. Beat patches with it. He simply ran out of them. Just get some cheap 0/4s or 0/7s out first and you’re golden. And it’s pretty solid vs all the other meta ones. Cept mindblast ofc.
Played some matches against a friend, and he tried out Nerubian Prophet with Warlock. It doesn’t really work against things like Patches, but it was still fun to try.
Armorsmith is such an awesome troll of Patches. Wins every time (as long as they don’t kill your early armorsmith). It’s useless against anything else, but seeing as 90% of ppl are running patches it’s hilarious!