The first blog post never explicitly states a release date for this brawl, though Brode stated that "you may want to wait for next week's brawl." So this does seem like a retraction due to the backlash. EDIT: Designer insights linked by /u/bjaelke also confirms it was supposed to happen this week.

Hopefully they come back with a better format. I personally had no issues with the reward system but I would have liked to see more options to increase competitiveness (i.e. more deckslots and deck bans before matches).