By ecoutepasca

After months of anticipation and speculation about the competition format that was going to replace Conquest for all official Hearthstone tournaments, Team 5 revealed yesterday the concept of Specialist, their take on a single class competition with sideboarding ala Magic The Gathering.

Reveal video

This format forces building decks with whole new criterias in mind, and every player immediately had ideas about what would be interesting to try. So at No Pros Here, we decided that we wanted to be the first to host a tournament using the new rules, ASAP, in the following hours, so that everyone could come test their theorycrafts.

30 players joined, about half of them NPH regulars and half coming for the first time. Their credentials ranged from rank 8 player to semi-pro, regular top 100 legend with Tespa background. The bracket was double elimination to make sure we got the best players to stand out, and the rules were exactly following what was announced by Blizzard in the video. Because Battlefy still doesn’t handle multiple decks of the same class, participants had to submit their lineup as an image in a folder to be released once the event started.

There were two Paladins, two Druids, one Warrior, one Shaman, and no one bothered to bring Mage. The popular classes were Warlock (Zoo and Control), Rogue (Quest and Miracle), Priest (variations of control) and Hunter (Master’s Call and Deathrattle). This post will feature all the decks that reached the top 8 of the tournament, and some that are interesting for other reasons.

Winner: CoinPingFace (Beast Hunter)

Runner up: TheOzzyVK (Deathrattle Hunter)

3rd Place: MegaHertz (Miracle Druid)

4th Place: ecoutepasca (Quest Priest)

5th Place: Andrew19 (Beast Hunter)

5th Place: AgentPWE (Control Warlock)

7th Place: SuperMurloc (Zoo Warlock)

7th Place: Urmumked (Miracle Rogue)

9th Place: Bereft13 (Combo Paladin)

9th Place: Zeh (Even Paladin)

13th Place: SnakeFawdz (Quest Rogue)

17th Place: Derivus (Combo Druid)

That’s it for today! These lineups obviously need refinement, since the Specialist format was announced little more that 24 hours ago. Feel free to test them for yourself! No Pros Here will run other tournaments, including one on Monday that will go live on our stream, so make sure to join our Discord server if you would like to participate!