Battlegrounds

**Hearthstone Battlegrounds** is a "new" game mode that has been stolen straight from Riot's cesspit that is League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics. Instead of being like other autochess variants, with animations, proper design and an actual distinct game, this just plays off as a less interesting Dalaran Heist where your choices matter even less than the regular game.

## Things to know

* Divine Shield is absolutely broken on taunts
* Poisonous is absolutely broken on everything that can get it
* Following the previous rule, murlocs are the go-to tribe if you really want to cancer it up
* Every minion is retarded. This means even if you *have* the best comp of the 8 players, you might still lose because your dumbass 20/20 hyena chose to munch the poisonous murloc instead of any other of your enemy's minions
* Nobody in the history of anything has ever managed to pull off the menagerie strategy and win
* That being said, the Curator is absolutely broken
* ~~Everyone either gets Nightmare Amalgam or loses~~
* It is humanly impossible to get Brann Bronzebeard and Amalgadon and lose in the same match
* The left-most minion always attacks first
* By giving Bob some cocaine money, you can upgrade his tavern and increase the odds of getting good minions
* If you buy three of the same minions, you get a golden one with twice the stats
* Amazingly, Blizzard has let them save the enchantments they had before upgrading
* After you get a golden minion, you also get to discover a minion from a higher tavern tier than your own
* Until there are no taunts, there is a certain predictability to everyone's attacks. Things devolve into an RNG-fest as soon as the last taunt dies, though
* Once played, you can't put minions back in your hand. This is half because lazy coding, other half because battlecries exist in this game
* You can't sell minions in your hand, for whatever reason. This means that, if your 7-minion comp is perfect, you cannot sell shit because that would require selling part of your comp. Fun!
* Bob reserves the right to fuck anyone in the ass. The 1-gold refreshes you will be forced to pay for will make and break most players that make it to the final
* The minions are not infinite, meaning you might just never get a third one to upgrade to a golden, just because some long-dead asshole decided to buy it right before going AFK and dying
* No matter how cranked and upgraded Bob's tavern is, he will never stop checking if you don't want that 1-star Murloc Scout that he's been spamming to you all game long. He is charmingly persistent like that

## Tribes and keywords

It might seem balanced, but that's just because you aren't seeing the 40/40 poisonous windfury divine shield minions gobble up your crappy horde of RNG-given diverse 1-star turds. When that happens, you see the game mode for what it truly is.

## Updates

Blizzard has descended and improved the game again! For the first time in HS history, a card was actually *removed* from a mode! We can only hope certain other tumors follow suit in the main game as well.

What the updates have done so far includes:

* Removing Nightmare Amalgam *and* Brann Bronzebeard (the hero)
* Introducing the League of Explorers as heroes
* Printing a retarded broken murloc for no reason at all
* Not nerfing mechs
* Giving demons a way to avoid sucking so much
* New heroes such as Sylvanas and The Lich King (Hint: Edwin VanCleef is disgustingly OP)
* Giving players a reason to do more than just mindless stacking of a single tribe

## ZOMG Battlegrounds is finally pay2win?

As Blizzard keeps sapping players away from the dying Arena and much of Standard and Wild too, they quickly notice that, hol' up, these players will not need packs to have some fun here! Oh noes!

Enter Perks! A system of... ahem... "advantages" to help players enjoy the full scope of Battlegrounds. For only ~~1500~~ **2500 (!)** gold, these perks can be yours. What you get is:

* 4 Arena tickets, because there was no way to justify this fucking price tag other than outright giving you something out of Battlegrounds. Also, yes, this is for the mode Battlegrounds is killing off
* Access to the game mode's emotes. You will only use two of them, most of the time, one to express rage at your minions' sheer retardation and another to wave away the murloc-exploiting cunts you manage to knock out.
* A doubled pool of heroes to choose from at the start of each game. Finally, you can avoid the many coincidental scenarios where you could only watch helplessly as your hero would either be Queen Wagtoggle or Pyramad.
* Early access to upcoming heroes while the plebs have to play with the shit ones they already know, and probably kick your ass with them.

So... let us do the math for the price, shall we?

600 (4 Arena tickets) + 500 (let's assume non-hero cosmetics are worth slightly less than that) + 700 (comparable to an adventure wing which also grants advantages in-game) = 1800 gold

This means the remaining 700 gold are entirely devoted to upcoming content not yet in anyone's hands. I guess we should be grateful while Blizzard doesn't charge everyone that just for the chance to play Hearthstone in the future too.

Alternatively, if you prefer, we can say that 1200 gold is spent on emotes *and* future content, which anyone on the street will concede is a pretty alright deal.

But wait, there's more! Blizzard is not happy by ripping you off once. Oh, no. This is Activision Blizzard we're talking about here. You have to pay this price *thrice* a year! Blizzard will happily take away your perks whenever they shit out another full expansion, so this means you get to spend 7500 gold per year on perks. *That* should fix Blizzard's losses by having most people play BG instead of HS. Combine that with the new rewards system and you get a really juicy, profitable combination (plus unaccounted for side-effects).