Hunterace, the Norwegian talent who had become the most celebrated player in 2018, managed to secure his title as the Hearthstone World Champion after displaying exceptional play in the most exciting series competitive Hearthstone had ever seen. That World Championship-technically that of 2018, though it was held at the end of April 2019-concluded in arguably the most satisfying fashion possible. The Winter Championship, one of the most stacked seasonal championships in Hearthstone history, crowned Roger as Winter Champion and selected the final four players for the Hearthstone World Championship. 2019 started with the end of the Masters System, the competitive structure of 2018 which had managed to celebrate player consistency, but proved to be unsustainable and frankly exhausting for players, viewers and Blizzard themselves. Hearthstone esports went through a lot this year. The mode is kept alive with regular updates and new content, and is here to stay. Not only did it make Hearthstone a far more exciting place to visit for existing players, Battlegrounds also brought back people who had left Hearthstone a while ago.īattlegrounds was the biggest success for Hearthstone as a game in 2019, and the developers aren’t letting go anytime soon. There was a new challenge, a new way to think about Hearthstone cards. Though the bad state of the Standard meta definitely contributed to the new game mode’s popularity, the crisp feeling of Battlegrounds attracted many players. From the strategy of building your army to adapting to randomness, Battlegrounds ignited something. It may not look like its autobattler competitors, but it carries over all the feelings one gives, with a strong Hearthstone flavor. In the end, however, Team 5 delivered an impressive product in Hearthstone Battlegrounds. It had to forego many of the visual aspects people had become familiar with in autobattlers. The explosive rise in popularity of autobattlers challenged the Hearthstone development team to think: what would a Hearthstone autobattler be like? Evidently, it couldn’t look anything like Teamfight Tactics or Dota Underlords, which have 3D models hopping across a chess-like board. For years, a portion of the community had hoped for the introduction tournament mode, but that dream was crushed at the end of 2018, when Blizzard announced they had shelved the development of said mode indefinitely.īut through quick adaptation, Blizzard found their new game mode after all. But for years Hearthstone had to make do with Standard, Wild, Arena and the Tavern Brawl, the latter of which was rather trivial to returning players. In Magic: the Gathering, the physical version, there are a wide variety of different formats, all supported by the developer Wizards of the Coast. Hearthstone hadn’t gotten a fully new game mode since the Tavern Brawls were introduced in 2015, and it was high time for one. And though the balance team was frustratingly absent after their Doom in the Tomb event gave birth to an obnoxious Shaman deck, overall the meta was kept in check pretty well. It was a matter of trial and error, of course. It’s a change of pace welcomed by the vast majority of the active Hearthstone community.īut it’s not just in-game events that kept the Hearthstone meta exciting-Team 5 continued to take a proactive stance towards card balance. To top it off, each expansion had its own single player adventure as well. The final expansion, Descent of Dragons, will be followed by more cards early 2020. Saviors of Uldum, the second expansion of the year, was followed by Doom in the Tomb, bringing back twenty-three cards from Wild to Standard. With eighteen old cards being buffed and a whole new legendary being introduced, the meta was shaken up drastically. Two months after 2019’s first expansion, Rise of Shadows, Blizzard held the Rise of the Mech event. Normally, there was a four month dry period between expansions, often spiced up only by balance changes. There being a single story told across the three expansions added an enjoyable narrative, but the developers excelled between the expansions. The rate at which expansions were produced stayed the same, with three expansions being released across twelve months. In 2019, players simply got more content. So when members core to Team 5 like Ben Brode, Yong Woo and Hamilton Chu left Blizzard in April 2018, the ramifications of that change became fully clear a year later. The expansion after that one is in the middle of development, and the one after that just enters the conceptual stage. Once an expansion releases, the next one is almost completed entirely. But how was the year for Hearthstone itself? Let’s recap what happened to the game, and look at the journey its competitive scene enjoyed this year as well.Īs stated by members of the team themselves, the Team 5, as the Hearthstone development team is referred to internally, generally is ahead of the live game state by about a year.
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