the rule of thumb for this brawl has always been:
choose minions when you are ahead on board, choose spells when you are behind on board

other rules are:

it is better to use all your mana of a turn for a minion and discover multiple times during another turn.
example: T1 discover a 2 mana minion, T2 play it, T3 discover a 4, 5 and 6 mana minion, T4,5,6: play minions on curve.
The worst play is probably to discover every turn once and play an off-curve minion.

you will probably not be able to overrun your opponent by aggro, so prepare for a longer game than usual

apart from that it is still a luck-heavy brawl, just not as bad as some other brawls we already had

as an achievement hunter i would like to have the option that after my opponent concedes on my turn, the game is not over for me but instead i can still finish the turn and then the game is over.
Technically a bot would have to take over in my opponent’s place, Blizzard may call it “the innkeeper” for flavor reasons.

Many achievement completions are thwarted by players who concede the game before the deciding card has resolved, especially those who require you to win in a certain way.

By allowing the active player to finish his current turn, the disappointment of being robbed from the achievement after jumping through several hoops can be avoided.

since the opponent cannot make any moves during your turn, it would not make a difference from winning/losing gameplay anyway (if you kill yourself after your opponent concedes, your win should still count.

Of course the option should not be mandatory, but rather a toggle in the options menu
(game menu – options – other, just below “allow spectators” and “enable screen shake” there could be the option “keep game going until end of turn after opponent concedes on your turn”)

I really think Blizzard should care more about achievement hunters, which are often creative players who want to try out unorthodox things in hearthstone. Completing a tricky achievement can often give you more satisfaction than just winning, and players who are willing to sacrifice win rate for creativity are in a natural symbiosis with players who only care for their win rate.

something else that bothers me is that the emotes of some heros are quite unfriendly.

when i want to greet my opponent at the start of a game because i am a freindly person, and my death knight avatar says something like “i grant you the permission to speak”, i just feel stupid because i feel like i have just insulted the other player.

just give us the choice to use standard phrases like “hello” / “thank you” (too often used sarcastically anyways) / “well played” to make a minimum of common courtesy among players possible.

I would love to see the following feature in hearthstone:

every player gets to name two cards (choice can be edited at any time):
1.) i love to play with card XXX
2.) i hate to play against card YYY

once a card gets too many “hate” votes, it should get nerfed because it diminishes the play experience.
i guess Quasar would probably get some of those “hate” votes because it is so non-interactive.

“love” votes could point designers where the should go in the future.

sure, many players will vote “love” for an overpowered card that helps them win more, but some people just like cards for the design idea. I, for example, like the “gift” cards that give you additional flexibility in exchange for reduced efficiency. Also the “tradeable” mechanic, etc band manager, and the deckbuilding constraint cards (reno, renathal, benedictus) are very interesting concepts.

deathrattle in general is the most powerful machanic in this brawl, because it triggers automatically.

many good deathrattle cards for this brawl are neutral anyway, like Sylvanas, Sinrunner, Pozzik, …

I would love to see a twist season with this!

I wonder which cards would be banned, and which deck would turn out to be the best

For new sets to be relevant there are only two options:

1.) eternal power creep

2.) nerfing the old cards so they are weaker than the new ones.
The problem blizzard has with this is that by nerfing the old cards (that players already own) they have to give the players a lot of dust refunds, so standard players will just disenchant the old cards, craft the new cards and they do not need to spend any money this way.

I still think that 2.) would be the better option if timed correctly, and if the refund window closes 3 weeks before the new set is released, the strategy above would be thwarted because it would mean 3 weeks without competitive hearthstone for anybody who disenchants their standard collection in expectation of the new set having superior cards.

The only ones who would benefit from this policy would be the players who spend real money for large bundles that give them 10 of every common and 4 of every rare card, so blizzard would reward those who spend real money for the game.

Blizzard mainly fails in identifying the different groups of player preferences.

Arena is the best example:
There are those who like to play play arena on and on, and there are those who want to mix gold+playing effort to more packs and cards than opneing packs alone.

A smart marketing division would offer players a choice between card/pack-heavy payout and ticket/gold heavy payout, so e.g. at a certain point you would get either a epic card or a tavern ticket depending of which payout style you chose beforehand.

Another example are players who want to climb the ladder quickly (playing quick decks that allow for more games) vs. others who want to play longer games with control style decks or game-ending but mana-heavy combos vs. achievement hunters who maybe have less interest in climbing the ladder upwards (where harder opponents await them)
Giving players choices to adapt the way they are rewarded for playing (eg: high number of wins / high number of turns spent in games that have been won / high number of games or turns played regardless of outcome) could make them feel happy about the way they like to play the game without forcing them into a certain play style to reap the rewards.

I agree

Last week’s brawl (Ragnaros’ Fire Festival) would have deserved its own month of Twist (just give the mini-rag more starting power), but this one is just … random

new cards:
City Defenses fit it there well.
Stonecarver probably too, but I do not own it yet

this time the most important innovation is customs enforcer.

either you have a quick answer for it, or you lose in short manner.

thanks for the article!

do you know by any chance from which sets the rewarded epics are chosen from?
last expansion?
standard?
any expansion?

what happens if i have a full standard epic collection, but wild epics are missing – will i get a duplicate standard epic, or a new wild epic?

i beg to differ.

cooperative brawls really need good understanding of the game and gives you many options to decide correctly or incorrectly. the only downside is that you sometimes get paired with an unskilled teammate.

there are a lot of awful brawls, and this is definitely not one of them

“always pick the cheaper card” still holds true in 2025.

since hearthstone developers did not eliminate the draw step for this brawl, everyone effectivley draws 3 cards per turn. from turn 4 on you never get the card you pick, because you start the turn with a full hand. you still get to give your opponent a bad card, and now he has a full hand and loses his pick too. both players see their draw step card explode, end only get the bad cards their opponents gave them. oh what fun! does anybody ever playtest these brawls?

druid has access to inervate, overgrowth and sometimes wild growth, making it the superior class in this brawl.

ways to fix that brawl (ideally all four suggestions are put into effect):
– eliminate the draw step !!! (players still get 2 cards per turn)
– give all players 2 extra mana from the start (as they did it with the zombeast brawl)
– make the offered cards of equal mana cost (otherwise the cheaper card will automatically be picked)
– limit the mana cost of offered cards. (I would radically suggest a limit of 3 mana, because the brawl only makes sense if you can play multiple cards per turn). Another option would be that only cards are offered that can be played with the available mana, but that would still make hands full quickly.

maybe he has superior equipment so his animations run faster?

i think that turns with many cards played / many attacks declared should get some extra seconds of time, and turns with no action should lose some seconds to spare waiting time for the opponent, but the game is as it is

p.s.: wildfire replaced ice lance in the ice block deck

pounce druid has two weaknesses.
the first is that you never have the time to win T1, because time always runs out.
the second allows me to win every time agianst pounce druid if i am warrior, priest or druid

also works well with embalming ritual and raise dead

the real patches deck was druid – embiggen + patches.
that was really broken

but while i get the patches ban, i do not get that soularium and pogo hopper (and automaton to a lesser extent) can roam around unharmed.
if you want to try a strategy that is slightly off, then you have to auto-concede whenever the first card your opponent plays is a soularium or a pogo (or an automaton), which at times seemed to be 90 % of all games