Hearthstone might be a free-to-play game, but it does offer quite the selection of items selling for real cash. Sure, some of these are purely cosmetic, but others offer gameplay. One such product is the Tavern Pass, going for $20. What do you get and is it even worth it?
Hearthstone has a very steady stream of new content. The recent road map that the card game devs made public shows a wide variety of expansions, solo adventures, and little improvements to the game both in terms of gameplay and quality of life upgrades. And that free content doesn’t make itself. In order to support the game, Blizzard has to make money somehow, and card packs in far from the only cash avenue they have.
Enter the Tavern Pass, a product aimed at serious players of the game’s Battlegrounds and Arena modes. We are talking about a very specific type of Hearthstone fan - one who’s not as excited by collecting cards in their portfolio and building to best Tier 1 decks that happen to be dominating the metagame right now, but prefer to be hit with random, even slightly less powerful cards, and tasked with the challenge of combining them in the best possible way on the path to victory.
The Tavern Pass sports a price tag of $19.99 or your local equivalent and gives you access to
For Battlegrounds:
- Discover Four
- Hero Early Access
- Advanced Stats
- Visual Emotes
For Arena:
- 4 entry tickets.
This could be significant. Another Hero pick in Battlegrounds may not be strictly stronger (for those people who like to yell “pay2win” every time they see a microtransaction in a game), but is a significant boost. Not only does it provide better opportunities to play only the Heroes you like every time, but if a certain class happens to be more powerful at the time (which is bound to happen), you get a very slight edge. The early access thing is a nice feature for super-fans and aspiring pros who want to stay on top of the game at all times. The same goes for stats, and the visual emotes are purely for joy.
As for the 4 Arena tickets - 1 of these costs 150 gold (or about an hour or two of play), or about $2 per ticket, so there goes $8 out of the Pass’ price tag of $20.
So, back to the original question - is it worth it? Of course, that strictly depends on your needs and style of play. If you like to enjoy Wild, Ranked, or Solo Adventures - you know, like most players - this pack is practically worthless. If you play Arena, those tickets sure get expensive.
If you love Battlegrounds - the fraction of the community that this product is designed for - it still depends on your level of involvement. If you are serious about your competitive ranking and want you to see your game improve those early heroes, additional pick and stats will probably help you. However, if you just like to swing some cards during lunch break, there are much better uses for those 20 bucks.
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