Yeah, people who play the game a lot are around 30 already. Like streamers who play it for 8-10h per day. So I can imagine that some people are already at 33+, but definitely only a few.

Don’t make assumptions based on the first 3 days of the expansion! A meta might look completely differently 2 weeks from now. And slow decks are always harder to optimize than fast decks.

Just so you know, it’s 100% not esports money, it’s marketing / advertisement money. A small competitive tournament would never had such high stakes. E.g. the latest Blizzard-sanctioned EMEA Cup for BG had $10k prize pool. $200k is more comparable with big-time events like Masters Tour (which has $250k base prize pool), and then it’s spread over hundreds of participants.

Instead of directly paying those popular content creators to advertise the new mode, they do it in a form of a tournament. That’s what they’ve been doing for a while.

Not sure if that will make you feel better or worse, but that’s how it is. Marketing always has much more money than esports.

Lol, did you pick it for the memes?

When the deck is named ETC OTK, has 29/30 card and doesn’t have ETC… The missing card is definitely Elven Archer 🙂

But I fixed it already.

We didn’t include Highlander, because we don’t think that the new lists will be different enough from the current ones. When theorycrafting, we try to focus on potentially new builds or builds that will be impacted most.

Yeah, I don’t like her that much, but I consider picking her, because I’ve been using Maiev for 3.5 years :/

Yes, I believe that’s the case. Although I would like to be pleasantly surprised.

Annhylde does have new voice lines and emotes. Other of them are just cosmetics with base voice lines as far as I know.

And Horseman Uther will also get new emotes, by the way 🙂

Tavern Pass last expansion gave you Battlegrounds upgrades like selecting 4 heroes, access to stats etc.

This time they’ve renamed Battlegrounds stuff to “Battlegrounds Perks” and Tavern Pass is the “premium” rewards track.

$80 pre-order gave you Battlegrounds Perks and not Tavern Pass. But I honestly wish it was the other way around :/ If someone is buying 80 packs pre-order then he probably isn’t mainly a BG player, so perks are less useful.

No, this Tavern Pass is for Darkmoon, so it will only expire in the next expansion (~4 months from now).

It shouldn’t be that hard if you’re a BG player, right? And if you aren’t, you can just re-roll any BG Quests.

The expansion after Darkmoon, of course :p We’re already on the Darkmoon patch (19.0), it’s just that the expansion wasn’t released yet.

Yep, that’s right. All Arena Tickets have turned into Tavern Tickets. They can still be used in Arena, but also in Heroic Duels.

Oh yeah, I obviously meant until Level 150, sorry about that. Fixed it already.

I’m only at 10, but I didn’t have time to play much yet because of all the coverage 😀 I usually have more time to play in peace like two weeks after expansion’s launch.

Exactly – I’ve hidden it, because scrolling through it is a nightmare, especially on mobile.

Glad that you liked it! 🙂

Tavern Pass – yes, it will be valid all the way throughout Darkmoon Faire expansion! So if you want to buy it, it’s better to do it as soon as possible so you don’t miss on the extra XP.

But don’t buy Battlegrounds Perks by mistake (they were called Tavern Pass previously) – they will need to be re-bought after expansion launch.

Right now – there isn’t one. They just help you track how many achievements you’ve completed, and you can compare them to other people’s.

I hope that in the future there will be some extra rewards tied to them. E.g. for getting to 10k / 20k etc. achievement points you get some cosmetic rewards.