New Tavern Brawl gives Hearthstone Biggest Prize Yet

Every week or so, Hearthstone, the popular online trading-card game from the folks over at Blizzard, hosts something called a Tavern Brawl, an off-the-wall wacky mode where players throw the meta to the wind (kind of) and enjoy battling with wacky rules, random decks, and a whole lot of unbalanced junk... which has become a standard for Blizzard titles. It's good, harmless fun, but Blizzard has just revealed that an upcoming Tavern Brawl will change all that, and bring high stakes (and high rewards) to the once friendly, competitive mode.
 
Called "Heroic Brawl", this Tavern Brawl will operate much like the standard Arena, in that you'll draft a deck out of cards chosen randomly and presented to you in groups of threes. The catch, however, is that rather than the cards being pulled from the pool of all existing cards, only the cards you, yourself own will be able to be drafted. What's more, in order to participate, you'll have to shell out a huge sum of gold, a first for the Tavern Brawl: if you want to play, you'll have to pay 1000 in-game gold.

What would prompt players to participate, then? The rewards: in addition to glory, any player who manages to snag 12 wins before losing three games will get 1100 gold, 1k+ dust, and 50, yessir, 50 packs of cards. The biggest reward you could imaginably get in the game, outside of being a pro player and earning real money.

This seems cool, but between the high cost of entry, and the fact that you'd already need a pretty big collection of cards to do well, it seems kind of silly that a reward that less-experienced players would need most would be out of their reach. But, then, Blizzard's got to pay for its disgustingly opulent statues SOMEHOW, right?