As of this writing, Tavern Brawls – the new game mode for Blizzard’s free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone have started up.

This week – at least in the European Union region, the battle is between two Blackrock Mountain Stalwarts, Nefarian and Ragnaros.  The battle is on to see who’s the tougher boss.

Skip past the break and I will explain how it works.

When you get into the game, an extra tile has been added to the menu – this new tile is the “tavern brawl” mode.  Clicking on it brings up the brawl screen – there’s a large banner declaring what you have to do, a little treasure chest off to the left letting you know what you’re going to win this week, a counter of how many brawls you’ve won, a big “brawl” button and a timer up at the top telling you how many days remain in the current brawl.

There’s nothing specifically difficult to understand here, but it is interesting to note that it only tracks your wins and not your losses.  We’ll talk about that more in a moment.

This week, the brawl is free [though that might not always be the case, of course – this is Blizzard and they do love their Macro Transactions [go and look at the prices for the new hero trays and tell me I’m wrong.  $10 for an animated .gif?!  Thanks, but no.]] – all you have to do is have a hero of Level 20 or above to access the game mode.

This week’s particular brawl – as mentioned – is Nefarian versus Ragnaros.  If you stick with the brawl for long enough, you’ll see that after each win/loss, you trade places.  So in one game, you might be Ragnaros and in the next you might be Nefarian.

The decks you get are pre-made and the hero powers are pulled directly from those boss fights in Blackrock Mountain.  [For those still playing through that, I won’t spoil anything.]

What I will say is that this doesn’t seem like it was beta tested very well, because the Nefarian deck is absurdly strong against the Ragnaros deck – plus:  Nefarian just starts off stronger, with armor, a four mana head start and an ability that gives him access to more cards.  It’s almost unfair wrecking the Ragnaros player in this set up, because they don’t really get long enough to respond.

The prize for this week is a classic pack with the standard five cards [one of which could be rare or better] – so, for folks new to Hearthstone, this is an easy-ish way to getting a free five cards for your collection.  Given that this is a PVP mode, [at least, it is this week] if you win three brawls [it’s possible to do the brawls as many times as you like as long as the brawl “window” of four days is open – you just won’t get the initial pack you got for wining this particular week’s brawl] you will get the usual ten gold for that win streak.

The mode seems interesting, but balance does need to be addressed – particularly because Blizzard are doing a somewhat very Blizzard thing here and stripping you of “your cards” and “your heroes” and giving you a new set of abilities and cards [a thing they enjoyed doing a great deal in Wrath of the Lich King – and which they later said they regretted.]If you are about to try the brawl, good luck and feel free to let us know in the comments how annoyed you feel whenever you're Ragnaros ;)