Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Annoy-O-Tron vs Boom Bot (updated)

Iiiiin the blue corner... He's cheap, he taunts, he has divine shield iiiiits annoy-o-tron!

Iiiiin the red corner... He's the doom from Doctor Boom iiiiiits Boom Bot

This week the Tavern Brawl returns to remade character decks.

Both of these decks as you can imagine have a mech heavy theme with a mix of spells from other classes and a few weapons thrown in too (at least for AoTron, I did not see any with BBot)

I have only played as BBot so far so I shall update the post once I have played AoTron as well.

We have new hero powers to any with this week.

BBot comes with Boom Bot jr.

I found this a very useful little power, it helped me maintain board control early on as well as chipping away at face.

Combining this with the fairly cheap minions allowed me a steady victory.  As long as things were not too critical I would either soften the opponent with BBJ then finish off any minions with mine and face with anything else.  Or clear the minions in my way then BBJ to face.   It has the added advantage of possibly countering AoTrons ability, which it should do reliably if you are winning the board control scrap.

AoTrons power is a bit more utility based.

As long as you are putting minions down this can be a hassle for the opponent giving them minions they have to go through first with a touch of added durability.   If BBot is struggling to keep minions on the board then you can keep topping up minions with divine shield.

From what I have seen this dos not play as much of a role as BBJ but as stated before I have not played it yet.   I shall update once I have had a go with AoTron

That is all for now, just keep on top of the board control side of things and the game should be yours.

Ok got a game with AoTron.

With careful planning the hero power can be very effective, there are cheap minions to put it on early and cards to buff with, having several divine shield taunts that you may be able to re-shield is very good.

The planning is around getting a low attack minion out and boosting it, use the spells in the deck to buff its attack so it is above the attack of any other minions on the table then boost that and repeat as required.

In my game I regularly had two DS/T minions at most times.

All in all a fun brawl but now I have played both sides I cannot see me diving in too quickly again this week.

Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Underdog rules

Welcome to this weeks look at TavernBrawl for Hearthstone.

This week it is titled Underdog rules, the rules this week being if you are losing by 3 or more health a random minion comes to help you!

A few thoughts on this, is it better to start slow and hope to gain this magical advantage and go for a big turn late on or is it a burst the opponent down so quick they cannot gain too much of an advantage from the rules?   How will board control fit into this if there will be free minions bouncing around?

I figured I shall go for a bit of Warlockery fisrt up, the tapping for cards would work well to see how this new ruleset would benefit the underdog.

So I threw together a handlock-ish style deck and dived in...

So that was a lot of fun!   Getting the balance right between keeping the enemies health low enough that they could not gain too much advantage vs keeping mine low enough to gain the advantage but not be killed off was very good.   Using  flame imps early I got the board advantage (battle cry deals 3 damage to me) and jsut kept hitting them enough that I could keep good board comtrol with spells and token minion, defend with the likes of sludge belcher but still build enough of a threat to win.

I will admit to a bit of luck, it was my 6 health vs their 7 and one of the random minions I got had spell damage +1, they had played Loetheb the previous turn but I had enough mana to play a 6 mana drain life for 3 damage and go face with sludge belcher and a random 3/2 I had for the win.

I think tweaking away from the likes of the giants I had in and maybe look for a bit more board control, I did find the minions a little bit delicate and I could have been in trouble if my opponent got a big card.

All in all the RNG felt pretty good on this play through, both sides seemed to get ok minions, usually along the lines of 2/2, 2/3, 3/2, 3/3 minons which felt good for free and not give either player a massive advantage.

Unfortunately my free pack all went to dust!

Fingers crossed my next post will be something of an arena experiment!

Hearthstone: Tavern Brawl 16 September 2015

New edit added to the bottom...

So this will be the first in hopefully a regular blog post about the weekly tavern brawl event in the Blizzard card game, Hearthstone.

These events run Wednesday to Sunday and have unique rules to them and successfully winning a game rewards a Standard card pack, but only one.

So on to this week, it is a repeat of a previous event, or is it?

It is advertised as the unstable portals event but in my two games it was the webspinner event so this is what I shall write about.  

You pick your class and get a pre-constructed deck which is packed full of webspinner cards.  These are 1/1 beasts for 1 mana with a deathrattle of add a random beast to the controlling players hand.  

So you slap down these cheap beasties and hopefully get them killed off to fill your hand with new and improved beasts.

I started with a warlock deck, expecting the portals event, and the deck outside of the spinners had a lot of demon synergy cards but I never saw a demon, not a great start.

The beasts are random so you could end up with Captains Parrot or Ghaz'rilla or anything between.

This event relies a lot on good RNG to be competitive in a lot of cases.   In my 2 games so far first run was a bit poor, no powerful beasts came out so I struggled for board control and eventually lost it in the late game.

The second went a lot better, the RNG gave me King Krush early on so it was a case of holding out for late game, 2 Savage combatants among others helped keep things a bit in my favour until I could get my big dino onto the table to win it.

All in all quite a fun event, may play a few more times for a bit of a laugh but not one of my favourites but should not take long to get the pack.

If it changes back to portals I shall write that up too.

Ok it appears that they have shifted to the portals now.

Still a case of pick a class and get a pre-built deck but instead of lots of spiders it has lots of unstable portals.   This is a 2-mana card that adds a random minion to your hand, the kicker is they cost 3 less (minimum 0).  So you can build yourself quite the stable of cheap high powered minions for some big turns but again watch the board control and hope the RNG favours you!

Enjoy, until next time!