Not this again....

The most fair brawl.

No.

"Equal Access" =/= Fair AND several other premades are about tied with this one for amounts of rng and fairness.

Edit: In case you don't know, the 3rd crossroads brawl has shown up, and the massive (literally none for me) amount of new cards showcased in it is astounding.

It's fair over a larger sample size.

Yeah I don't see how randomness isn't fair.

Not a fan of the crossroads either, I'd say it's the brawl I dislike the most among those that don't use players' collections. When you use Warlock, you replace all your starting cards because their mana cost is high, and you get 2 Sacrificial Pacts... that's not pleasant. (Unless your opponent is also a Warlock, but that wasn't the case.)

My definition of fair is fair on a game by game basis. Anything that can lend itself to extremely lopsided matches having nothing to do with skill is inherently unfair. How "fair" it averages out to be over a large sample size doesn't matter, because the premise theoretically accepts the entire thing can be dramatically unfair as long as everyone gets a 50% win rate from switching sides (my opinion on a couple of the other brawls). This one is not that bad, but it's still kind of really bad.

Yeah but then you end up with like effectively 0% of games being considered fair, most commonly because of start player dis/advantages that permeates every turn based game.

hearthstone is a game that has heavy elements of rng. the vast majority of games are going to be heavily influenced by luck, and wouldn't be fair by your definition.

In the worst case, on Constructed ladder, you have at least a 1/3 chance of winning any of your games (bar the EXTREME matchups like fatigue warrior vs freeze mage which are more 80-20), assuming you are good at the game. That is "fair enough", and there is a huge amount of skill involved.

Tavern Brawl is not that way. There are games you go into with <10% chance of winning (there is always a chance the other player is that bad at the game) because rng is just going to **** on you. Even then, this brawl is particularly bad since there are at least common strategies you can use from game to game in some brawls like the portal one.

Thus, this even if we assume that none of Hearthstone is fair, this is particularly "unfair" in my opinion and, as the original point was, almost certainly not the "fairest brawl of them all" the way the original comment said it is.

I'm assuming what makes the difference in who wins and loses between freeze mage and fatigue warrior is RNG involves in card draw and the like. This tavern brawl should favour both participants roughly evenly since they are both basically running the same deck, no?

Who wins and lose between freeze mage and fatigue warrior involves a certain amount of decision making, but generally if they are equally skilled the fatigue warrior should have a much better matchup. This is a matchup where the freeze mage can win, but usually won't, if both players are equally skilled. <- The reason this is fair, or more than other situations, is that it's your own stupid fault if you are running a freeze mage in that kind of meta, and even then you still have a chance to win.

There are some tavern brawls where your opponent can just steamroll you and there was absolutely nothing you could have done about it, and this is LIKELY to happen, not a contstructed god hand. That is something I consider to be much less fun, much less fair, and all around too random for me.

Do people at high ranks not use perfect or near perfect play?

Some people at high ranks are playing "subpar" decks, or ones that are bad for the meta.

in which case, RNG should almost entirely determine who wins a game after being weighted by the matchup.

deck choice is a skill

anyway I don't believe that even high-ranked players play perfectly, there's too many decision points and too much potential for variance.

Hearthstone seemed to me a pretty simple game. I do not necessarily mean absolutely perfect play, just that almost every play made would be seen as optimal by the vast majority of players at that level.

And certainly deck choice is a skill.

The way the brawl works this week.

1) You get an animated Christmas Wreathe card back instead of the weekly pack.

2) If a box (they have 0/4 stats and you get a new one at the start of your turn if you don't have any) dies, the turn player gets the gift.

3) Gifts are one mana spells that give a 5 cost discount off of whatever you discovered. There is also a chance to discover a 0 mana "return 3 random enemy minions to the opponent's hand" card.




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Turn 2 [hs]Power Overwhelming[/c] seems to be all sorts of overpowered in this brawl. Gifts are op compared to whatever you have for most of the game, and this gives you two and lets you crack one for a free 5 drop your opponent probably won't be able to answer. <- A basic zoo deck with max copies of Void Terror is actually pretty good this brawl. The gifts seem to be all high cost cards so far (at least for me), unless I'm just getting really lucky.

On a side note, a 5 mana discount on 5 cost cards is a bit too much.

instead? awful.

Yeah, way to get into Xmas spirit, Blizzard. Oh wait, maybe they are representing Scrooge... well done then.