You may have wondered why there's space for a fourth button on the Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft main menus screen, turns out those tricksters at Blizzard have been working on a secret-squirrel new game-mode for their ever-popular CCG called Tavern Brawl.

Here's a direct rundown of what's happening in your Hearthstone world from Blizzard:

New Heroes
With the latest patch, several new Warcraft heroes will be making their Hearthstone debut. Announced so far is Magni Bronzebeard, the Warrior king of Khaz Modan and Thane of Ironforge. More new heroes will be coming in the future.

These new heroes will be available for purchase from the in-game Shop for $12.99 AUD. Each Hero features custom portrait art and a bold thematic border, a signature card back, a set of personalised emotes, and special entrance animations as well as unique animations for their class’s Hero Power.

Tavern Brawl
Patch 2.7 also heralds the launch of Tavern Brawl—solving the mystery of Hearthstone’s missing fourth game-menu button. Tavern Brawl provides Hearthstone duellists with a different way to play the game by challenging them to go head-to-head against other players or friends using special rules or custom decks. Some Brawls will provide you with a preset deck, while others may have you build a new deck based on certain surprising guidelines. You may have to toughen up before entering the fray—Tavern Brawl is unlocked once a player has a level 20 Hero.

Tavern Brawls will be free to enter when the new mode becomes available, and you'll even earn a free card pack for winning your first Brawl every week during the launch period! The innkeeper is always stocking new things, so future Brawls may come with a different set of rewards. Tavern Brawls will be available Thursday–Monday each week, and the opportunities for new challenges are endless!

Customisable Card Backs
Not spicy enough for you yet? Well, prepare to be spiced. The ability to assign card backs to specific decks is also now available with Patch 2.7. This means that instead of manually changing your card back to suit your style whenever you play a new deck, you can now select different card backs for all of your decks in advance. For example, your oozy, Naxxramas-minion-heavy Warlock deck can now be preset to use the Heroic Naxx card back, while your pristine Mage deck remains in Classic chic. Or you can just stick with the Pandaria card back for every single deck, because you like red and that’s how you roll.

Tavern Brawl sounds like what the game has needed outside of its vanilla competitive base for a while, and given how much fun a lot of the boss battles have been in the single-player adventures, with their specific win and engagement setups, it's a mode a lot of people are going to jumping into pretty quickly methinks.

What are your thoughts on the above? And if you feel like a game, add me: lanikpaul#1362.