Developer Insights: Pre-Release Tavern Brawl

Starting next week, on October 29, we’ll be kicking off the Great Dark Beyond Pre-Release Tavern Brawl. This Tavern Brawl will be a place for you to open your pre-purchase packs, try out cards from the new expansion, and earn more new cards to update your decks and try again. We also see this as a way to add value to our pre-purchase bundles without blocking other players from participating in the fun.

This is our first time doing something like this, so I wanted to share a little more about our thought process and open the floor for your feedback.

Eligible Sets and Cards

In the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl, you can build a deck with cards from the following sets: Core Set, Event Set, Whizbang’s Workshop, Perils in Paradise, and The Great Dark Beyond.*

With that card pool, this Tavern Brawl can be like a preview for the upcoming Standard, with a focus on the newest cards rather than just the current Standard meta decks. Doing it this way also keeps the new cards off the Standard ladder until the official set launch, so that people who don’t want to participate in the Tavern Brawl are all still on the level playing field in the main game mode.

* Except that we’re excluding Prince Renathal, who will still be in the Core Set at that time, but not in The Great Dark Beyond, and Splendiferous Whizbang, who would kind of defeat the point of the Brawl if allowed. We may also ban more cards during the event if needed, but if we do, we’ll invalidate decks with those cards and give affected players a refund on their entry for that run. Also, note that Standard Packs will not include The Great Dark Beyond cards until the expansion officially launches on November 5.

Entry Cost and Prize Structure 

Everyone will get one free entry into the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl. After that, entry will cost 2 Tavern Tickets, 300 Gold, or 400 Runestones per run. Each run will last until you get either 6 wins or 3 losses. Prize payouts will be as follows:

Using Arena as the reference point, we increased the entry fee so that we could correspondingly scale up the prizing, giving you more new cards per game played and more new options to consider after each run. We made the runs shorter because the fun part of the loop is getting and trying out those new cards rather than being locked into the familiar 12-win run structure.

Even though we reduced the max number of wins, we kept the max losses at 3, meaning you don’t need as high of a winrate to hit the max prizes. At the same time, we also flattened the prize payouts. Both changes were aimed at getting more value out of each run and so that players would get rewarded for doing well, but still feel safe to experiment with unproven or incomplete strategies. Unlike Heroic Brawliseum, which is meant to simulate a high-stakes tournament-style environment, the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl is meant to be about exploration!

The bulk of the prizing cards and packs are from The Great Dark Beyond because those are the freshest rewards we could give during this period! This also lets players who didn’t get pre-purchase bundles play to earn more The Great Dark Beyond cards. We’ll also have a few other things taking place during this time to complement the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl, like Tavern Tickets as part of the rewards for the Darkmoon Faire’s Frightful Fantasy in-game event, and pack drops during Theorycrafting and Community Days.

Plans for the Future

We hope you check out the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl when it starts on October 29. This is just version one of this idea, so we’ll be watching for your feedback—and your decklists. We’ll see you in the Tavern, and in The Great Dark Beyond!

- Tyler