Tavern Brawl



Tavern Brawl is one of Hearthstone 's lighter game modes. A weekly event, a new Tavern Brawl begins each Wednesday (Thursday in Asian regions). See the schedule for this week's times.

Each Tavern Brawl presents a limited time opportunity to face other players in special matches with unique rules. These might be requiring players to use special pre-made decks, adding random cards or minions, or changing the very rules of ability activation or mana use. Some Tavern Brawls allow the player to construct special decks especially for the challenge from within the game mode itself, while others provide powerful premade decks, or entirely random decks, and some Brawls even see players take control of special heroes with their own Hero Powers. Some Brawls feature Tavern Brawl cards, special cards not playable normally, as well as boss cards from adventures such as One Night in Karazhan. Each week sees a fresh Tavern Brawl, with its own unique rules.

As well as being matched against other random opponents, players are able to challenge players on their friends list to a Tavern Brawl, as a special type of Friendly Challenge.

An intentionally "fun" game mode, Tavern Brawls offer unique limited time experiences, with far less of a competitive focus than other game modes. This makes them good for quick matches, friendly games and cumulative wins. With many Brawls incorporating random card generation or minion summoning, winning a Tavern Brawl often involves a fair amount of luck, as well as the ability to adapt to and deal with the situation at hand. Tavern Brawls help to break up the focused rigours of Hearthstone 's other game modes by providing a fresh twist on the game's rules each week.

Tavern Brawls are intended to be highly accessible, even for players without extensive card collections. However, Tavern Brawls are not unlocked until the player reaches level 20 with at least one class (including Demon Hunter class which is level 20 after completing the prologue).

For a compact list of unique Tavern Brawls, see Brawls list.

Schedule
Each week, the Tavern Brawl is open for nearly the entire week, with only one hour of downtime, according to the following schedule by region:


 * Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. starts on the 2nd Sunday of March and ends on the 1st Sunday of November each year.
 * Daylight Savings Time in Europe (CEST) generally starts on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October each year.

Repeated Tavern Brawls
While most weeks see a brand new Tavern Brawl, just under half are reprises of previous Brawls. Since each Brawl is only available for 7 days (originally 5), this allows players to enjoy old favourites again, and avoids Brawls becoming overly similar due to a desire to explore past mechanics. Most reprises are simple repeat outings, identical to the original Brawl, but some involve changes, such as fixing bugs or balance issues, or even adding in extra elements.

The following table lists Tavern Brawls that have appeared more than once, including brief notes of any known changes.

Access

 * Tavern Brawls have free admission. Very rarely, a Brawl such as Heroic Tavern Brawl may charge an admission fee.
 * Tavern Brawls are only available to players with at least one level 20 hero.
 * Players can play each Tavern Brawl as many times as they like while it is active.
 * Only the current Tavern Brawl is accessible to players. Players are not able to access past Brawls, or challenge other players to take part in them.
 * While each Brawl has a limited run, some Tavern Brawls are repeated later on. Reprise selection appears to be largely based on popularity.

Decks

 * Tavern Brawls use unique decks, which do not take up any of the player's regular deck slots. Players create Tavern Brawls within the Tavern Brawl interface, and the deck is lost when the Brawl is retired.
 * The composition of Tavern Brawl decks depends on the Brawl. Many are constructed partially or wholly from the player's own collection, with some seeing random cards added to the deck made. Other Brawls feature premade decks, either with specific (and often unique) cards, or entirely randomised.
 * Brawl decks will not require or allow the player to use more than 2 copies of a card from their own collection, or more than 1 in the case of legendaries.
 * Most Brawls require the player to choose a class, either during deck construction or in place of deck construction, but some instead randomly assign players to take control of special heroes, with their own decks.
 * Tavern Brawl cards are similar to Boss cards, special cards specific to Tavern Brawls are not available in other types of play. See below for more information.

Matchmaking

 * Unless specifically challenging a friend, players will be randomly matched against other participating players "of similar skill level".
 * Initial player seeding is apparently based on rankings in other types of play. This is most likely based on Casual or Ranked mode play, or a combination of the two.
 * After the initial placement, player matchmaking is controlled by the player's success in Tavern Brawls, using a hidden MMR. Tavern Brawl MMR is ongoing, and carries over from week to week.
 * Cooperative Tavern Brawls are an exception, and do not use any MMR.

Rewards and quests

 * Players earn a free Classic card pack for their first Tavern Brawl win each week except some Tavern Brawls before new expansion launch - those Tavern Brawls rewards a pack of the upcoming expansion.
 * No additional rewards are offered after the initial win. This is intended to prevent players from feeling they have to play, and may also be in order to allow design space for unusual and potentially uneven arrangements, which could otherwise prove frustrating for those seeking to earn repeated rewards through wins.
 * Very rarely a Brawl will offer other rewards, such as a unique card back, in place of the usual card pack.
 * The card pack reward was originally announced to end when the "launch event" ended. However, having begun in June 2015, it seems likely the reward is now intended to be ongoing.
 * Tavern Brawls are eligible to count toward daily quests. Wins also count toward the "10 gold per 3 wins" reward.
 * There is one Brawl-specific quest, "Everybody! Get in here!", which awards 60 gold for playing 3 Tavern Brawls.
 * Challenging a friend to a Tavern Brawl will not be eligible for most quests, as these matches are considered Friendly Challenges for these purposes.
 * Players can earn experience in Tavern Brawl.

General

 * Tavern Brawls are released in the Americas region first, followed by the Europe, Taiwan/Korea and China regions, simultaneously, around 4 hours later. As a result, the Americas region sometimes experiences technical issues following the release of a new Brawl, serving as a testbed for the latest modifications. Despite not directly modifying other game modes, the release of a Tavern Brawl nevertheless involves changes which can cause disconnections and extended downtime for the entire game, making this testing period necessary to limit disruption to a single region. The four hour delay following the Americas release is intended to allow time for the developers to attend to any stability issues or severe bugs, before launching the Brawl in other regions.
 * As of December 2015, additional testing measures are planned, to reduce related stability issues. However, the changes will "take some time to implement".

Tavern Brawl cards
Tavern Brawl cards are special cards, heroes and Hero Powers only available to players when participating in a specific Tavern Brawl. These are usually provided through pre-made decks, although they may be granted to players directly during matches. Tavern Brawl cards usually match the theme of the Brawl, and often feature fun or outlandish powers not seen in regular cards.

For a full list of known cards, see Tavern Brawl card. Featured Tavern Brawl cards for each Brawl can be found on individual Brawl pages, or in the Previous Brawls section.

Fireside Brawls
Fireside Brawls are special Tavern Brawls that can only be played at Fireside Gatherings.

Each month there will be a different Fireside Brawl to try—check the Fireside Gatherings website to find out about the brawl that’s running this month. These special brawls run the whole month with no breaks, and they co-exist with the weekly Tavern Brawls.

The first Fireside Brawl that got a large amount of attention was Tavern vs. Lich King.

Design

 * "I'm not exaggerating when I say that each week, people tell me that we've created the greatest brawl ever, at the same time that others are saying it's by far the worst." - Ben Brode 

As of October 2016, Tavern Brawls are primarily designed by Pat Nagle (the namesake of Nat Pagle) and Dan Emmons. The two designers "sit in a room and brainstorm", with additional inspiration from the internet and other team members. The ideas are then playtested and iterated upon with the rest of Team 5. Tim Erskine serves as producer for Tavern Brawl content.

According to designers Emmons and Nagle, the most important goal of Tavern Brawls is to provide variety and freshness, "mixing up" the standard game experience of ladder or Arena play, and providing players a reason and reward for logging in regularly. The "Surprise" of the new Brawl each week is also "really big" for the developers.

The designers originally considered having a ranked ladder for Tavern Brawl mode, including a Legend rank. However, they decided not to in order to avoid players feeling pressure to play, instead adopting a strong focus on "fun". For example, the card pack reward for a single win provides a reward for trying each Brawl, without creating any sense of compulsion for players who didn't that week's Brawl.

The Tavern Brawl mode is also designed to help with the game's accessibility. This is partly achieved through Brawls that don't require players to own a lot of cards, and also in the 'free' card pack reward each week, helping players to build their collections.

Tavern Brawls allow for experimentation, and are sometime used to test or develop new mechanics, allowing the developers to observe player reactions. This time spent developing the required technology makes it relatively simple to then implement the mechanic elsewhere in the game. Examples of this process include Discover. However, the developers balance the ease of experimentation with a desire to keep new mechanics fresh for players to discover in new sets. Ben Brode explains:


 * ''"There are pros and cons. The pros are obviously that we would get more confidence on balance. One of the cons is that part of the fun of card games is exploration. If we are putting it out there and a lot of it gets solved or figured out, then when we release a set it isn’t as crazy and exciting as it could be."

The brevity of Brawls also frees the developers to experiment with a variety of designs, since "even if [the developers] make a really bad one" it will only last a few days. This allows the designers to create Brawls that target specific groups of players, and take risks with their designs.

The designers learned from early Brawls like Spiders, Spiders, EVERYWHERE! with decks composed solely of minions, incorporating a small number of random spells into later minion-focused Brawls such as ShiftCon.

History
Tavern Brawls were being discussed by the developers prior to the launch of Hearthstone. However, it was not until June 10, 2015, more than a year after the game's release, that the feature would be announced to players.

The Tavern Brawl system was added with Patch 2.7.0.9166 on June 15, but was not activated until June 17, when the first Tavern Brawl, Showdown at Blackrock Mountain, went live. In the interim period before the first Brawl, the as yet blank fourth button on the game box would begin to sparkle each time the player entered the main menu.

Captain Blackheart's Treasure was planned for release in October 2015, in order to debut the upcoming Discover mechanic. However, technical problems prevented this, and the keyword was instead announced at with its accompanying adventure, The League of Explorers.

On November 4, 2015, the first cooperative Tavern Brawl was released, Unite Against Mechazod!, marking the first cooperative two-player experience within the game. At the time of its creation, this was the most difficult Brawl to create yet.

In December 2015, with disconnections and downtime in the Europe region coinciding with the release of the latest Tavern Brawl becoming a regular occurrence, Blizzard announced that they would be adding additional testing measures to help prevent this in the future. Shortly afterwards it was announced that the release times for Tavern Brawls in each region would be changing: instead of debuting in the Europe region at 4pm UTC, followed by Americas at 6pm and other regions at 7pm, new Brawls would now debut in the Americas region at 5pm UTC, then in all other regions 9pm.

In October 2016 Heroic Tavern Brawl was announced, marking a new hybridisation of the Tavern Brawl and Arena game modes. This was also the first known Brawl to use Standard format, rather than the usual Wild format. The first explicitly Standard format Brawl followed in December 2016 with Clockwork Card Dealer - Standard, a simple variant of the original Clockwork Card Dealer.

On July 1, 2019, a new schedule was implemented for Tavern Brawls, reducing the weekly downtime from roughly 2.25 days to a short time span of 1 hour.

Trivia

 * As of October 2016 Randomonium is "by far the most popular Brawl", both in terms of number of games played and hours in total spent playing. Designer Dean Ayala explains, "[Randomonium] continues to be one of the mostly highly played brawls by unique user in addition to one of the most highly played brawls by individual user. Basically this means a ton of people play it, and the ones that do play it play a ton of games."


 * The developers considered placing the Tavern Brawl button in the third slot (currently occupied by the Arena button), which would have provided a more symmetrical appearance given the smaller amount of space available for lettering on the fourth button. However, they decided against it, possibly due to length issues in languages other than English.


 * The unique chalkboard art for Tavern Brawls are created by Jomaro Kindred.


 * On July 29, 2015, Showdown at Blackrock Mountain was mistakenly reprised as the seventh Tavern Brawl, sparking widespread complaint from players, who assumed this to be the intended Brawl. The correct Brawl, Too Many Portals!, replaced it around an hour later, but not until many players had already played and won games in the former Brawl, earning their weekly card pack. Zeriyah remarked, "Sometimes when you play with dimensional space, the wrong Tavern Brawl gets sucked through the portal. Whoops." A similar error has taken place with subsequent Brawls. On July 20, 2016, Battle of the Builds was reprised as the fifty-eighth Tavern Brawl, but bugs quickly became evident. Blizzard announced a few hours later that the Brawl "wasn't behaving" and replaced it with another reprise, Idols of Azeroth.


 * Following the Gift Exchange Tavern Brawl, the 2015 winter break saw a repeat of Randomonium rather than another new Tavern Brawl. Ben Brode explained that this was partly due to there being "nobody in the office over the break to fix things if they go wrong, which new brawls are more likely to do."
 * The 5th reprise of Encounter at the Crossroads was the first Brawl that didn't offer a Classic card pack, but instead a card pack from an upcoming expansion.
 * The popularity of the Tavern Brawl game mode in Hearthstone has led to its adoption in other Blizzard games. Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm saw the introduction of the "Weekly Brawl" and "Heroes Brawl" game modes on March 22 and April 10, 2016, respectively, less than a year after the Hearthstone format's launch; while "PvP Brawls" were added to World of Warcraft on April 5, 2017. While the Tavern label is specific to Hearthstone, the term Brawl has thus become shorthand for an "alternative way to play", featuring special and regularly changing twists on the game's normal ruleset, with an emphasis on fun, "crazy" and "unique" matches.
 * Before the patch update on July 1, 2019, Tavern Brawls originally would end the following Monday and be unavailable from Monday to Wednesday.

Patch changes

 * Tavern Brawl now awards a pack from the previous Standard format year instead of a Classic pack.
 * The Tavern Brawl now lasts all week instead of five days and the gap between brawls is only one hour.
 * The Tavern Brawl button on the main menu now lights up whenever there is a Brawl available that the player has not yet played.
 * Players can now challenge their friends to Tavern Brawls from any game screen. Previously the player had to be on the Brawl screen when issuing the challenge.
 * Added.