Hearthstone

Ravishing · Oct 17, 2016

Brawls have been a testing ground for new features. I hope this is to test new modes, like tournament. I'm hoping they are testing reward structure and interest. I want tournament mode to require 3 or 5 decks, not 1 deck, that's why this mode is really uninteresting but the rewards are going to make me play it anyway

Lightning Lord Rule · Oct 17, 2016

That tournament mode is bullshit. No way in fucking hell I'm paying $10 to likely go 2-3 and get 3 packs out of the deal.

This is basically thinly disguised blackjack without the opportunity to win any actual money or bang any waitresses.

littles · Oct 17, 2016

Or free beer.

Necrath Evilcraft · Oct 17, 2016

they should do this brawl make it half that price and make it best of 3 and give you 5 card sideboards.

Alex · Oct 17, 2016

How is Malygos Druid concerned even a decent deck? It has shit early game unless you blow all the spells that are needed for the end game. Even then, Moonfire fucking blows without any spell power and the deck doesn't run enough of it. Deck is horseshit.

yimmien · Oct 17, 2016

New brawl is more irritating the more I think about it. It is just so lazy to just toss standard in as its format. It should have been sealed obviously, but even something like standard with a restricted card list removing the BS rng cards would have made it far more interesting. Blizzard sucks.

Ravishing · Oct 17, 2016

Just gotta figure out what has highest winrate vs Shaman and go with it I imagine.

Everyone going Shaman will be relying on the better draws to win, need a lot of luck for 12

Angelwatch · Oct 17, 2016

The whole idea gets a big fat bag of nope from me. I'm not touching this super Brawl with a ten foot pole.

Enzee · Oct 17, 2016

Ravishing said:
Just gotta figure out what has highest winrate vs Shaman and go with it I imagine.

Everyone going Shaman will be relying on the better draws to win, need a lot of luck for 12

unless shaman is literally like 75%+ of the field, or you find a deck with a positive winrate against them AND decent chances against anything else, playing an 'anti-shaman' deck that loses to other stuff is probably a bad idea. MTG meta gaming has taught me you'd rather play the shaman deck yourself, with a card or two changed to give an edge in the mirror. If we say 50% of the field is midrange shaman (rock), 25% is mage (paper), and 25% is 'other' (scissors), it's still better to play a rock deck that gets a slight edge in the mirror then the paper deck for getting a 12-3 record. Especially if it's setup like arena where they match players with similar records. If you were trying to win a big tournament, you'd actually play scissors and hope to get lucky for the first few rounds while paper knocked out a bunch of rock, but that's not how this thing is setup. You just want to have a decent winrate in as many matches as possible.

Ravishing · Oct 17, 2016

Enzee said:
unless shaman is literally like 75%+ of the field, or you find a deck with a positive winrate against them AND decent chances against anything else, playing an 'anti-shaman' deck that loses to other stuff is probably a bad idea. MTG meta gaming has taught me you'd rather play the shaman deck yourself, with a card or two changed to give an edge in the mirror. If we say 50% of the field is midrange shaman (rock), 25% is mage (paper), and 25% is 'other' (scissors), it's still better to play a rock deck that gets a slight edge in the mirror then the paper deck for getting a 12-3 record. Especially if it's setup like arena where they match players with similar records. If you were trying to win a big tournament, you'd actually play scissors and hope to get lucky for the first few rounds while paper knocked out a bunch of rock, but that's not how this thing is setup. You just want to have a decent winrate in as many matches as possible.

That analogy is bad because in your scenario you'd be playing scissors which has very favorable match vs paper and toss-up vs other scissors and poor vs only 25% of the field.

As paper you are toss-up vs 50%, favorable vs 25% and poor vs 25%

Gavinmad · Oct 17, 2016

He used a poor analogy but he's right about the MTG meta. It's almost always better to just make slight tweaks to the best deck rather than try to play a counterdeck.

That being said, freeze mage absolutely clobbers current midrange shaman builds because most of the time they're too damn slow, and if you really expect 50% or more of the field to be playing shaman, you'd be insane not to play freeze mage. Yeah, you can't beat control warrior, but in a single deck format I think control warrior is a poor choice because shaman is pretty much a coin flip, and you're at a disadvantage against druid. But if playing in MTG tournaments taught me anything, its that the metagame is a complete tossup for the first couple rounds. Freeze mage isn't going to do you any good against shaman if you get knocked out in the early rounds by random bullshit like murloc paladin.

So now we're back to shaman being the best deck for superbrawl because it has the widest range of positive matchups and the only serious counter to midrange shaman (freeze mage) is unpopular and hard to play.

elidib · Oct 17, 2016

The part about this that bothers me is that blizzard could have made the system a net gain for the community, and they would still be making money (probably more, actually.)

Blizzard doesn't need to weight the rewards to the house like a casino does. The main difference between this and a casino is that if you "win" at a casino, you can take the money and run. If you win in arena, or this tavern brawl, you still lost your money. Sure, you gained more than your money's worth of cards and dust, but those are.... pixels. Blizzard still has the money.

It's actually ironic, they're shooting themselves in the foot by making it such high risk. It may appeal to a very niche group of people, but they're dissuading the majority of the community from participating by setting it up that way. I guarantee you they would make more money/sink more gold out of the economy if they had the 0-3 reward set to something like 5 packs, and balancing out at 3 wins where the rewards are a net neutral, like 5 packs and 500 gold worth of current cards, gold, and dust. This would give average players the incentive to give the tavern brawl a shot, knowing that the odds are they'll break even. Fun for everyone, lots of fun for the select few.

Assuming for a moment, that you are not one of the ridiculously lucky (because the only people getting 12 wins here are the ones with a normal amount of skill and a VERY high amount of luck - about 0.65% of the total entrants) but you make a decent run at 7-3 before you but out. 3.52% chance of this happening to you. less than 4%. This gets you 8 packs, 280 dust, 280 gold.

You're down 700 gold that you could've put toward the next expansion soon to come out that you don't have any cards of yet, got 8 packs from WOTG, which, you probably already have all the commons, rares, all of the very useful epics, and most of the not-so-useful epics, and some of the legendaries from.

Going solely by the percentages, 99% of the players who enter this would've guaranteed a net gain better if they just spent the 1,000 on arena.

100% of players entering this would've just been better served buying 10 packs of whatever the next expansion is.

slippery · Oct 17, 2016

One thing to consider, is that it SHOULD be easier to break 5 wins than it seems. You have to consider, it isn't ladder. You could be #1 legend and play someone who's never been past rank 20. The problem is that with rewards so skewed those rank 20 players don't have an incentive to play it, which is a problem.

That said, with the 1000g ($10) price tag it's pretty high risk. This type of format is a way they could do a tournament mode though, as long as they hard match similar record.

If it happens this week I probably won't be able to do it, spent too much money until I get paid again. If it's the week after though I might throw down like $30 and see how I can do over a few runs. If you could miracle out 12 wins the value is absolutely gross.

Ravishing · Oct 17, 2016

Yea Im not sure what I want to do yet, definitely want to get 1 run in for sure, got over 2k gold atm. Most likely spending 1k and if I 0-3 then fuck the brawl.

Im gonna watch some streams to see how bad the meta is before entering.

Ritley · Oct 18, 2016

slippery said:
One thing to consider, is that it SHOULD be easier to break 5 wins than it seems. You have to consider, it isn't ladder. You could be #1 legend and play someone who's never been past rank 20. The problem is that with rewards so skewed those rank 20 players don't have an incentive to play it, which is a problem.

That said, with the 1000g ($10) price tag it's pretty high risk. This type of format is a way they could do a tournament mode though, as long as they hard match similar record.

If it happens this week I probably won't be able to do it, spent too much money until I get paid again. If it's the week after though I might throw down like $30 and see how I can do over a few runs. If you could miracle out 12 wins the value is absolutely gross.

No way anyone that hasn't made it past rank 20 is dropping $10 on this. You will be playing top 5 rank decks every match.

Overall this idea ranks slightly higher than purge. Just barely. I really have no idea how this is at all considered a brawl, it is nothing at all like what brawl has meant in the past.

Enzee · Oct 18, 2016

Ravishing said:
That analogy is bad because in your scenario you'd be playing scissors which has very favorable match vs paper and toss-up vs other scissors and poor vs only 25% of the field.

As paper you are toss-up vs 50%, favorable vs 25% and poor vs 25%

I oversimplified it, but I think you read it wrong a little too. Paper would be the one that is 50% favorable, 25% poor, 25% tossup to start. Think you meant paper in the first sentence, and rock in the second.

However, when you run it out, the rocks start to thin out a bit from beating each other and losing to paper. So, after the first 2-3 rounds, paper becomes a larger percentage of the field and then scissors is wrecking them. So, if you were a good player that can just out-skill his opponents for the first few rounds, and dodge your counter, other things hate out your counter deck for you and Rock becomes the best deck again. I was envisioning this as a 12 round tournament, and applying some of the things I've learned internally, but I didn't spell it out well.

Yes, in the very first round, paper has the best overall matchups in that example. It beats half the field, is 50/50 with 25% and only loses to the other 25%. But, the decks that have the best chance of having a X-3 record, or better, after 12 rounds are actually rock and scissors. Also, I was thinking that you'd play a rock (shaman) deck that can potentially gain up to 5% in the mirror, which again helps your chances dramatically.

Again, this is ignoring a lot of other variables, as no deck is 100% against any other deck. If you can find a deck that is favorable against shaman while still being close to 50% against everything else, then that would become the ideal deck to play, for sure. I was just saying that in the hypothetical situation of a deck beating shaman but losing to everything else, it would be a very bad idea to use that to try and go 12-x because while shaman is popular, it would need to be a ridiculously huge amount of the meta for that to work.

Famm · Oct 18, 2016

elidib said:
It's actually ironic, they're shooting themselves in the foot by making it such high risk. It may appeal to a very niche group of people, but they're dissuading the majority of the community from participating by setting it up that way. I guarantee you they would make more money/sink more gold out of the economy if they had the 0-3 reward set to something like 5 packs, and balancing out at 3 wins where the rewards are a net neutral, like 5 packs and 500 gold worth of current cards, gold, and dust. This would give average players the incentive to give the tavern brawl a shot, knowing that the odds are they'll break even. Fun for everyone, lots of fun for the select few.

They could have just made 0-3 grant five classic packs even. Simply start the most recent pack rewards at higher tiers.

Ravishing · Oct 18, 2016

Enzee said:
I oversimplified it, but I think you read it wrong a little too. Paper would be the one that is 50% favorable, 25% poor, 25% tossup to start. Think you meant paper in the first sentence, and rock in the second.

However, when you run it out, the rocks start to thin out a bit from beating each other and losing to paper. So, after the first 2-3 rounds, paper becomes a larger percentage of the field and then scissors is wrecking them. So, if you were a good player that can just out-skill his opponents for the first few rounds, and dodge your counter, other things hate out your counter deck for you and Rock becomes the best deck again. I was envisioning this as a 12 round tournament, and applying some of the things I've learned internally, but I didn't spell it out well.

Yes, in the very first round, paper has the best overall matchups in that example. It beats half the field, is 50/50 with 25% and only loses to the other 25%. But, the decks that have the best chance of having a X-3 record, or better, after 12 rounds are actually rock and scissors. Also, I was thinking that you'd play a rock (shaman) deck that can potentially gain up to 5% in the mirror, which again helps your chances dramatically.

Again, this is ignoring a lot of other variables, as no deck is 100% against any other deck. If you can find a deck that is favorable against shaman while still being close to 50% against everything else, then that would become the ideal deck to play, for sure. I was just saying that in the hypothetical situation of a deck beating shaman but losing to everything else, it would be a very bad idea to use that to try and go 12-x because while shaman is popular, it would need to be a ridiculously huge amount of the meta for that to work.

Oh yea, the analogy was so bad I didn't even double-check what you called Shaman. Anyway, how I see it is like Arena, and it's the complete opposite of what you envision. The first few rounds will be a huge clusterfuck of many types of decks until by round 6+ you see mostly Shaman.

This happens in Arena when you get 7+ it's all Mage/Rogue/Pal

So if you play a deck that is favorable vs Shaman you still need to get past the early rounds where you might play Maly Druid, Anyfin Pal, C'Thun Warrior, etc etc etc.

The meta could surprise us and Shaman WON'T be everywhere. People play decks that are easy to pilot and can get quick wins on ladder, we might see something completely different here.

Personally I'm contemplating playing my N'Zoth shaman deck.
Best part with playing it is that people assume it's the current crop of meta decks and play against you wrong.
The only issue I have is the Tuskarr nerf. I need to spam it on ladder to make sure it still performs. I achieved Rank 1 with the deck in August but didn't play much HS last month at all.
Most of my other decks are like 55% win rate decks.

Amzin · Oct 18, 2016

Maybe it is just an experiment, but it seems kind of obvious that arena and standard have different winrate expectations. The very top arena players average ~7 wins a run, or about a 70% winrate. No constructed deck in standard has ever had anything approaching a 70% winrate, much less the at least ~85% winrate required to get 12 wins.

The lack of ranking actually compounds this, as your wins are going to be determined as much by what random jackass or pro you get matched up against almost more than the deck you create. It's adding in an element of RNG to matchmaking that the ladder is specifically created to remove, and making you pay to add it no less. And as a final dumb move, the rewards are weighted WAY too heavily at the top to draw in many people. Again, in arena, you can come out even in only a few wins, and have a much better chance of doing so.

So, worse scaling rewards, compounded with more RNG in matchmaking, compounded with a format with inherently worse winrates for any possible deck... I don't play anymore, but I thought it sounded like maybe a cool way to spend my last saved gold but it really isn't. It's a terrible way to spend gold for basically everyone.

Ravishing · Oct 18, 2016

Difference with Arena is that Arena is front loaded where most skill (and RNG) is in the draft. But because of this, a Rank 25 player can end up winning vs a Legend player due to draft/luck.

On the flipside, Heroic Brawl eliminates the required skill/luck up front which yes, it means better skilled players will advance to higher levels, as it's intended since it's being sold as a "competitive" mode.

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