2019 has been a tough year for Hearthstone esports. Blizzard sought to increase interest in the game by making sweeping changes to its esports by introducing Grandmasters, a 48-player league with handpicked players, and by changing the competitive format to be a faster, single-deck, best-of-three Specialist. Neither change can be called a success.

Looking for a Competitive Format

Specialist was a dull viewing experience with the three top classes facing each other time and again. Every time there was a new expansion or balance changes, people hoped that the format would have hidden potential and that it was just the game balance that was holding it back, but every single time the format failed again.

As a result, Blizzard changed the Grandmasters league format for season 2 to a new Conquest with Shield format. I was cautiously optimistic about the return of a multi-class format in my earlier analysis, but with the new Shield phase always allowing the best deck through and best-of-three remaining as the format of choice, the potential worst-case scenario was that “we may end up with the same top meta face-off as we did in Specialist, but at least we do not have to watch the exact same matchup three times in a row.”

We are close to the worst-case scenario now after a few weeks of experience with the format. Classes for week 6 of Grandmasters were:

47 Priests

42 Druids

41 Warriors

28 Shamans

18 Paladins

7 Hunters

6 Mages

3 Warlocks

0 Rogues

There are always classes that are better than others in any meta. That cannot be changed. However, the difference between the top three and others is significantly higher than it ever was in the days of best-of-five Conquest. Furthermore, for no one in a group as large as 48 players to bring a class is extremely rare when looking back at the history of competitive Hearthstone. It has typically only happened when a class is completely in the gutter, and current Rogue has at least two ladder-viable archetypes (Quest and Tempo), so this is a worrying sign.

Blizzard’s line of thinking has been that the best deck in the game should always have a competitive presence: if it does not, tournament decks may diverge from ladder decks, because they do not need to take that matchup into account, as the best deck can always simply be banned. However, bans have an important function in protecting the integrity of competition. Overpowered decks can be created, and they are not always easy to fix. Many other esports use bans to ensure a level playing field: if there was an auto-win hero in Dota 2, for example, it would not break the tournaments, because it would always be banned before the first pick.

Tournament formats without a ban (Specialist) or with a ban but also with a way to protect your best deck (Conquest with Shield) failed in Hearthstone for two reasons: they failed to protect the integrity of the competition by removing potential outliers, and they greatly reduced strategy in lineup-building. In the old Conquest format, bringing the best decks was a viable strategy. However, because of the ban, it was often also possible to create lineups that counter the best decks strategy by identifying a weakness in most of them and banning one that does not share the same weakness. The current Grandmasters has sometimes ironically been called a best-of-one after Priest games are out of the way. While that is not entirely true, it perfectly captures the fundamental problem with the format.

Ultimately, Blizzard had to acknowledge that the format experiments of 2019 did not work out. Starting with Masters Tour Bucharest on October 18-20, Tour Stops are moving back to best-of-five Conquest with ban. This is great news! The biggest open competition in Hearthstone is moving back to a format that rewards lineup-building and where more games are played in each match to more reliably determine the better player.

Solved or Unsolved Meta

Another major aspect of competition is the state of the meta. Any card game will be figured out given enough time, which is why developers need to release new cards periodically to keep things fresh. I’m sure they do not mind the money either, but this is an occasion where profit and what is good for the game align nicely.

There is a lot of information available about Hearthstone meta down to individual card performance thanks to deck trackers gathering information and various websites collecting that data from thousands of players. In an era of such rapid information flow, planning the pace of new card additions is a difficult task: things are being figured out quickly, but if you add new cards too often, casual players cannot keep up.

Hearthstone has chosen to add three new expansions each year, which is a fairly slow pace compared to competition; four expansions per year for Magic, for example. This might be an appropriate pace for Hearthstone, given that it is perhaps the most casual-friendly card game in terms of how easy it is to just pick up and play. There is something to be said about the cost of any card game if you want a large collection, but on a superficial level Hearthstone is very simple to just launch and drag some cards around.

Three expansions per year make life difficult for high-quality esports though. If the meta gets too stale, innovation stops, and people bring the same lineups time and again, and with a four-month lifespan per expansion combined with the high availability of information, a stale meta for much of the year is inevitable.

Blizzard has put in a lot of work on the issue this year in the form of multiple balance changes and the introduction of SN1P-SN4P to shake the meta. The biggest thing is coming soon, just in time for Masters Tour Bucharest: 23 Wild cards are returning to Standard format for a limited time, and they will all be tournament-legal for Masters Tour Bucharest!

There have been tons of timing issues in the past between Hearthstone development and esports, but this time they have nailed it with the schedule: the cards are revealed on October 4, and Masters Tour Bucharest begins two weeks later on October 18. This is just about the perfect amount of time to experiment with the new meta: if the gap was much shorter, the decks would be horribly unrefined and many ideas would not have been tested at all, and if the gap was longer, the meta would be largely solved and there would be no surprises at all.

The New Coming of Hearthstone Esports at Bucharest?

Masters Tour Bucharest has a good chance to become the second-best Hearthstone tournament in 2019 – I’d still reserve the #1 spot for the Worlds competition that took place at the start of the year, before the experiments started. With the return of a competitive tournament format and two weeks into a new meta, this will be the most interesting Hearthstone competition for the past six months. I know I will be watching it closely!