After just one match of Dota 2’s new Year Beast Brawl game mode, I don’t know if my regular crew of competitive friends is interested in joining me for another. Its reliance on players spending money prior to playing has soured enough of us that we’re likely to avoid playing altogether next time the New Bloom Festival ’s signature game mode appears in our playlist.

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“ How are we supposed to win against a team that can buy their way into our base?

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Year Beast Brawl is a modified game mode, accessible only in Unranked All Pick playlists, and only at specific times. Valve notifies players in-client that the Year Beasts — mythical, Chinese New Year-themed dragon-dog-monsters — will awaken in an hour. For 10 minutes following the awakening, anyone queueing into an All Pick game will join a Year Beast Brawl, a standard game of Dota 2 with a major twist: Each team frequently spawns a deadly Year Beast , and each player can upgrade it with Support, Combat, and Speed bonuses.The currency players use to increase the lethality of their Year Beast comes in the form of Ability Points , the most offensive microtransaction in Dota 2 history.Rather than, say, strategically allocating a limited number of equally distributed Ability Points, Year Beast Brawl gives the edge to the team who’s paid for more New Bloom's Ability Points.Mercifully, your Ability Points are yours, and they refresh when a match ends, so each Year Beast Brawl at least makes each player contemplate the weight of their worth. Should I worry about healing the Year Beast and my team, or spend everything to upgrade the animal? That’s interesting, tactically, but if you’re entering a Year Beast Brawl without a huge amount of AP, you’re at an immediate disadvantage. Even the 2400 earned from purchasing Crystal Maiden ’s new Frost Avalanche Arcana item set isn’t enough to accomplish much.Year Best Brawl certainly has its upsides. The Ability Points will presumably vanish into the ether once the New Bloom Festival ends, but if I win Year Beast Brawl games, I’m guaranteed to unlock new item sets for my Heroes.As creatively limited as it seems to apply this mode to a simple All-Pick game type, rather than build the mode around it, I enjoy the interesting Year Beast dynamic in its own right. It’s essentially a limited-use, high-powered Hero. Instead of killing enemy creeps to farm gold and XP, your team may need your right-click or magic damage to annihilate the Year Beast wrecking your towers. It makes you play Dota differently.But what if you don’t?In our game, the enemy team bundled up as five, pushed as a unit, and entered our base after 15 minutes — that’s almost unheard of. Our under-farmed Storm Spirit didn’t have his core items because he spent so much time coming to his team’s aid. Because the enemy team fought alongside the Year Beast, they weren’t farming items either.Their advantage came in their Ability Points. They upgraded their dragon (5000 AP), as well as purchased numerous expensive add-ons — I counted three Aegis of the Immortal resurrections (1000 AP apiece) and two Global Silences (1000 AP each). Our team of five just laughed each time. How are we supposed to win against a team that can buy their way into our base?At 15 minutes, most enemy Heroes were too under-leveled for a base siege without the aid of the Year Beast. So, when our Storm Spirit recognized this flaw, ignored the Year Beast, and wiped the Radiant assaulters, he turned the tide of a losing game. That sounds a lot like regular Dota.In the end, we won because we ignored Year Beast Brawl’s biggest hook. Playing it like a regular game of Dota, and then using the Year Beast when everyone is dead, led us to a swift late-game victory. Why didn’t we just play a regular All Pick game, then?The enemy Tidehunter concluded the game with the traditional, sportsmanlike “gg,” followed by a predictable comment.“Pay2win lol.”

Mitch Dyer is an Editor at IGN. He hosts IGN Arena , a podcast about MOBAs. Talk to Mitch about Dota 2, movies, books, and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch