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!

Ready for Vappafaux?

Unfortunately things have been very bust my end so the plan for regular crew updates went out of the window.

But this is how things worked out:

~ 15/16Jan the gamin, golem and wendigo were completed

You can provably just make out the snow falling in the glass! Appropriate eh!

Then ~ 23Jan the acolytes and some bases were finished.

And lastly Rasputina herself and the last bases were completed on 30Jan

This is everything complete, painted and varnished

The bases were a mix of ones done myself and the wyrd inserts, they all utilised crackle medium paint for ice and/or snow effects, the wyrd bases used were the western ones, town and sewer bases with the ice and snow tying them together, the idea being that it showed no matter where you were Rasputine could brig the powerif December against you!

I shall go a bit more in to the painting and bases in a later post, the next one will likely be a Vappafaux wrap up and crew impressions as I am going into the event with 0 games under my belt!

Arcanist update

So a week on from the last post, how has progress been?

Unfortunately fairly slowly, on the plus side my 3 gamin are done and the wendigo is not far behind.

The golem needs a bit more layering before I can finish it too.

That will just leave Rasputina and the three amigos, I mean acolytes!

The acolytes will need a bit of exit work as their poses are asking for some more elaborate style bases, that's all I need now, a modelling project as well.

Any way once the last few bits on the first set of models are done there will be pictures.

Fail to plan...

Well all the crew has been built and ready for undercoating, yay!

Forgot to check if I had enough undercoat, d'oh!

Oh well can pick up some tomorrow so it will not hold me up too far.

In the mean time I shall start to have a proper look into the abilities of the crew and what it means on the table.

Malifaux challenge update

Brief update:

Rasputina, ice golem, wendigo and 2 ice gamin have been built.

The wendigo is in 3 sections to aid painting.

The December acolytes have also arrived so full steam ahead tomorrow, hopefully get everything built and undercoated if at all possible.

Currently feeling positive.   Cannot forget though I need to get some 40k painting in this month as well.

New Year Challenge

About this time last year I was getting ready for the Vappafaux event, part of Vappnartak, a hobby convention in York.   Vappafaux is a 40 soul stone 3 round Malifaux event.   Vappa14 was my first event in several years, my crew (outcasts) had been fairly ignored for a long while.   I managed to get some practise games in and paint up some of my crew.   The event came and went and was a great deal of fun, I did not place too highly after a close game, a bloody draw and a final game I struggled to compete in.

The months came and went, my daughter came into the world and hobby stalled, not to a halt but to a major slow down.

Then the announcement if Vappa15 came out, I put my name down in a flash and paid my fee, I figured I had months to get really ready so no pressure.   Work, family, time away, other hobbies getting new stuff (WoW, SW:TOR, Tyranids, Blood Angels, End Times) and moving out of my house for major refurb followed by Christmas and New Year has left me in my current predicament, I am barely any further on from last year.

So I currently have 28 days to knuckle down and get my crew sorted.   Normally should be fairly easy you may say, especially as some of it has been started.

In 2013 I signed up for the Through the Breach Malifaux kick starter, when it came through, much later than originally planned the lovely people at Wyrd also gave the backers a free, random starter box.   Mine was The Children of December Rasputina crew.   Not a crew I had considered in the past but hey, free is free!

I have decided in my great wisdom and habit of "oh look! Shiny!" I am planning to try to get my Rasputina crew built and painted for Vappafaux.

I have my initial starter box and some December Acolytes on the way so I shall hopefully updating my blog regularly with updates

The ice gamin and ice golem will get the standard ice paint scheme I think.   I may try to give the wendigo a Wampa look if possible, Rasputina will be the trickier one, whether to go full ice look with blue coat etc or something a bit more utilitarian.

The acolytes may get some sort of snow camo thing.

Fingers crossed :)