Developer Insights: Pre-Release Tavern Brawl

news.blizzard.com:

Starting next week, on October 29, we’ll be kicking off the Great Dark Beyond Pre-Release Tavern Brawl. This Tavern Brawl will be a place for you to open your pre-purchase packs, try out cards from the new expansion, and earn more new cards to update your decks and try again. We also see this as a way to add value to our pre-purchase bundles without blocking other players from participating in the fun.

This is our first time doing something like this, so I wanted to share a little more about our thought process and open the floor for your feedback.

In the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl, you can build a deck with cards from the following sets: Core Set, Event Set, Whizbang’s Workshop, Perils in Paradise, and The Great Dark Beyond.*

With that card pool, this Tavern Brawl can be like a preview for the upcoming Standard, with a focus on the newest cards rather than just the current Standard meta decks. Doing it this way also keeps the new cards off the Standard ladder until the official set launch, so that people who don’t want to participate in the Tavern Brawl are all still on the level playing field in the main game mode.

* Except that we’re excluding Prince Renathal, who will still be in the Core Set at that time, but not in The Great Dark Beyond, and Splendiferous Whizbang, who would kind of defeat the point of the Brawl if allowed. We may also ban more cards during the event if needed, but if we do, we’ll invalidate decks with those cards and give affected players a refund on their entry for that run. Also, note that Standard Packs will not include The Great Dark Beyond cards until the expansion officially launches on November 5.

Everyone will get one free entry into the Pre-Release Tavern Brawl. After that, entry will cost 2 Tavern Tickets, 300 Gold, or 400 Runestones per run. Each run will last until you get either 6 wins or 3 losses. Prize payouts will be as follows:

Using Arena as the reference point, we increased the entry fee so that we could correspondingly scale up