2019 in Hearthstone – A Summary of the Passing Year

Today’s the last day of 2019. I hope that you had a great year, and I will take this opportunity to wish you an even better one starting tomorrow. May all of your dreams (including getting to #1 Legend, of course) come true!

2019 was a great year for Hearthstone. Of course, the game had some ups and downs, but overall I have to say that it was the most innovative and dynamic one since the game was released.

Year of The Dragon, Expansions & Decks

While calendar years and Standard years aren’t exactly in sync, 2019 was the beginning of Year of the Dragon. The name is particularly interesting, because for the longest time players have wondered what does it have to do with Dragons. Between the first and second expansion, we had maybe 3 Dragons and almost no Dragon synergies, and now we know why. Everything was “fixed” in the latest set and the name finally makes sense.

A very important part of 2019 expansions is that they’re telling a year-long storyline. Before that, we had some recurring characters or motifs, but each expansion was unique and not directly connected. This time around, all three expansions were a part of the same, long story, which is actually yet to be finished.

Everything has started in Rise of the Shadows (April), where League of E.V.I.L. has attacked Dalaran, succeeded, and flew away in the stolen city (yep, that’s Hearthstone for you). Then, in Saviors of Uldum (August), fan-favorite League of Explorers came to the rescue and defeated the Plagues summoned by Rafaam in Uldum. League of E.V.I.L. has escaped to Northrend, and in the latest set – Descent of Dragons (December) – they decided to revive an ancient Dragon, Galakrond, one of the most powerful beings in Azeroth. We still don’t know what happens next, final solo content of this Standard year will be released later in January. Each of the expansions also had its fair share of overpowered strategies decks. Some of them were nerfed pretty quickly and some remained in the meta for way too long.

Starting with Rise of Shadows – Tempo Rogue was definitely the #1 deck from that expansion. Its early dominance has lead to a rather quick nerfs to Raiding Party, EVIL Miscreant, but also a classic staple Preparation. The post-nerf meta didn’t really have a lot of time to form, because not very long after the patch a new event was announced – Rise of the Mech. It was the first time since Beta that cards were buffed instead of being nerfed. 18 class cards from Boomsday Project got more powerful, many of them becoming staples for the months to come (and some of them still being commonly played). Another “first” was adding a new card to one of the older sets – SN1P-SN4P was added to Boomdsay and given out for free to all players. The card has turned out to be quite problematic even before its release – players have quickly figured out that it will have a crazy synergy with Reckless Experimenter (0 mana Magnetize + Echo), which was nerfed alongisde the event’s release. Sadly, the same strategy became one of the most overpowered ones we’ve ever seen in the Wild format (thanks to Summoning Portal and Mechwarper, you could reduce SN1P-SN4P’s cost to 0 quite easily, and then all you needed to win was a Mech on the board and some APM). Luckily, the Wild version was nerfed recently and it’s no longer playable. Post-event meta started pretty aggressively, with Bomb/Mech Hunter, Murloc/Overload Shaman, Bomb Warrior and Token Druid being some of the best decks. Later into the expansion, decks like Control Warrior or Cyclone Mage were getting increasingly popular, but not to the point of needing a nerf (at least not yet).

Saviors of Uldum was the second expansion of this year and it also had its fair share of powerful strategies. Notably, it re-introduced Highlander synergies (last time we’ve seen them in Gadgetzan, with Kazakus & Co) and they became an instant hit. Highlander Mage and Hunter quickly climbed to the top of the meta, but they were still outclassed by another deck – Combo Priest. Control Warrior was also very popular, and it was a huge annoyance to anyone who didn’t like 20-30 minutes long mirrors (my longest CW mirror during Uldum went on for nearly 40 minutes, but that was mostly because my opponent was roping all the time). It’s no surprise that the nerf patch came out pretty quickly, only ~3 weeks into the expansion. It gutted Mage, hitting both Luna's Pocket Galaxy and Conjurer's Calling, but also affected Priest (Extra Arms) and Warrior (Dr. Boom, Mad Genius). The meta was pretty diverse – Highlander Mage was no longer played, but Highlander Hunter was still strong, and it gave the opportunity for Highlander Paladin to raise. Combo Priest was still good, same goes for Control Warrior. Quest Druid is also a notable build that was starting to became popular (or rather, it was an instant hit on the first 2-3 days of the expansion, but then it mostly disappeared for a while). But then, Doom in the Tomb event came. While in theory the idea to bring some of the Wild cards back was good, it turned out to be one of the most tedious Hearthstone experiences ever and definitely the darkest period of this year. The event was mostly about two cards – Evolve and N'Zoth, The Corruptor. Evolve Shaman completely dominated the meta and it remained that way for two long months. Any deck that wasn’t Evolve Shaman most likely played N’Zoth with a bunch of Deathrattles, including Khartut Defender… and probably a way to play multiple copies of N’Zoth too. Of course, that’s an oversimplification, but that’s how most of the meta felt like. That’s why players were eagerly waiting for the new set, when the event will finish and Wild cards will go back where they belong.

And finally, Descent of Dragons. While this set has been out for only 3 weeks, there’s already a bunch to talk about. Galakrond Shaman was one of the most popular decks in the history of Hearthstone. Looking at the stats, at one point over 65% of the decks played at Rank 1 were Galakrond Shaman – crazy, isn’t it? The whole situation lead to the quickest balance update ever – it was released just 9 days after expansion. The meta has been quite balanced ever since (we have some strong decks, but nothing stands out as broken), but it’s probably too early to tell yet. There’s still a lot of Descent of Dragons left for 2020 – a new adventure is coming later in January (which will, for the first time, include 35 new cards in the middle of expansion cycle), then we might get another balance update or event, and then there are all of the cool announcements of new Standard year, possibly Hall of Fame rotation and – obviously – a new set ahead of us. All of that still during Year of the Dragon, but not during Year 2019.

Competitive

2019 was also the year of big competitive changes. The entire esports system was re-designed (and not for the first time). Hearthstone Grandmasters have became the highest level “league” for pro players, where they’ve been spread into three major regions, then into two groups in each region, and fight each other weekly. Best players go into play-offs, where they play for their chance to qualify into World Championship, while players with lowest score face relegation. Below the Grandmasters league, there is a series of Hearthstone Masters tournaments. This year we had three – Las Vegas (June), Seoul (August) and Bucharest (October). Each of them was attended by more than 300 players, all of which had to go through one of the few ways to qualify (such as qualifier tournaments or high ladder finish). In other words, all of them are amazing players to begin with, so as you can imagine, the competition was fierce. Then, players with highest earnings from all three Masters Tour events would qualify into Grandmasters… which created another issue.

So far, the new system has very mixed reception. On the one hand, viewers in general like the idea behind Grandmasters and the fact that they can root for their favorite players every week. On the other hand, pro players and esports writers alike dislike the new system for being top-heavy, and too exclusive – rewards for qualifiers and smaller tournaments were nearly non-existent, and it’s very, very difficult for anyone to even dream of qualifying into Grandmasters with only two spots per regions opening every season (with no slots during the first season, which had no relegation). The fact that players qualified to Grandmasters based on money prizes, which were very top-heavy (e.g. one first place and then not even qualifying to other two Masters Tour events is apparently better than finishing 3rd three times and showing amazing consistency) was also received pretty poorly.

Another issue with 2019 esports were formats. And 0h boy, it was a ride. First, Blizzard has decided to get rid of Conquest, the official tournament format for the last few years. Instead, they’ve introduced Specialist. In that format, players did not bring three different classes, but instead three slightly different (up to 5 cards changed) instances of the same deck from a single class. It was basically a limited version of sideboarding – you had your regular build, then let’s say one version optimized against Aggro and another that counters some popular matchup. In theory, it doesn’t sound bad. But in practice, it was a disaster. It doesn’t help that Control and Bomb Warrior were particularly popular in tournament meta at the time, so players (and thus viewers) often had to sit through three Control/Bomb Warrior mirrors. But it wasn’t the only issue – since each player could only bring a single deck, the diversity (and viewer numbers) suffered heavily.

After just a few months of Specialist, Blizzard has decided to announce a different format. It was a Conquest… but with a twist. It featured a so-called Shield Phase – at the start of each match, even before the opponent had a chance to ban one of the decks, player could “protect” one of their decks against bans, guaranteeing that he will be able to play it. As you can imagine, players have always protected the strongest meta deck, which also reduced diversity AND made bans a bit pointless (because the point of ban is to get rid of strongest deck).

Finally, pretty recently, Blizzard has decided to change formats again and… go back to regular Conquest. Yeah. It really do be like that sometimes – we had a whole competitive year of experimentation followed by going back to the format we’ve started with.

Another important competitive news from 2019 is that a new Hearthstone World Champion was crowned – VKLiooon has beaten Bloodyface during the BlizzCon finals, becoming the 2019 Hearthstone World Champion (or 2020? I honestly have no clue how they count it, because it was the second World Championship we had this year) and the first woman getting that far in Hearthstone. Honestly, she took the entire tournament by the storm, losing no matches and only two games throughout the group stage & play-offs (finishing with a very respectable 10-2 score). Congratulations!

Oh, and Hearthstone Global Games also made a comeback… And that’s all I can say about it. It was short, rushed, the games were pre-recorded and played during pretty terrible metas (late Saviors of Uldum & early Descent of Dragons). As someone who was a big fan of that tournament format, I was pretty disappointed. But we did have some nice games, at least.

Overall, I have to say that competitive HS was a mess in 2019, but lots of the issues were fixed over time, so I hope that 2020 will be much better.

Battlegrounds

Going into BlizzCon as a Hearthstone-only player is not always exciting, because you know what to expect. A new expansion will be announced, we’ll see some new cards, maybe a panel about art / sound / design in general and that’s it. Of course, it’s all cool, but not as much of a surprise, so it doesn’t generate lots of hype. But this time, Blizzard was one step ahead of us. While everyone expected just another expansion, maybe some small announcements, we’ve got a completely new game mode that released right after BlizzCon – Hearthstone Battlegrounds.

Battlegrounds is the Blizzard’s take on “Auto Battlers” genre, and HS made a perfect sense for it. Of course, they could go for HOTS and make another “Auto Chess” clone, but instead they’ve decided to tackle the topic from a different side – possibly a more casual one (although the entire genre is pretty casual in the first place). You start with a single minion, and then buy more, buff them, fight opponents randomly, upgrade Tavern to get access to different ones, utilize your Hero’s strength to gain advantage and so on. Probably everyone reading this has already played or at least seen how the mode looks like, so I don’t think there’s a need to explain how it works.

I just want to say that I’m really, really glad that they’ve decided to do something like that. I always hoped for more formats, especially custom ones with very different rules. But ever since Tavern Brawl (introduced back in 2014), we haven’t seen anything like that. Hearthstone has so much potential for new formats – they’ve already proven it with Dungeon Run solo content, which imitates dungeon crawler deck builders (a genre that I really like, by the way. Battlegrounds is still in Beta, so it has a long way to go, but the game is really fun and even small balance changes impact the meta heavily, making it feel fresh all the time. I hope that after they already introduce all of the features, tribes, minions etc. and – of course – get the game out of Beta, they will eventually start working on another mode. It doesn’t have to be as big and different from regular game as Battlegrounds, but the more ways there are to play, the more interesting the game becomes (e.g. if you don’t like Standard meta, you can just play BG or vice versa).

Hearthstone Top Decks

And finally, here’s a quick summary of this year on our site. 2019 was a very important year for me personally, because I took over Hearthstone Top Decks as an admin back in January. Of course, it wasn’t my first time on this site – I worked with Evident (the previous admin, to whom I send my best wishes!) for nearly a year prior, I even wrote some articles and guides as a freelancer back in 2016-2017. But it was a big change nonetheless – I had to shift my focus to different things, get to know the site’s backend better (although I still need a lot of help from our devs, thank you guys!) and – of course – get a bit better at time management 🙂

It was an amazing year, I learned a lot, made some mistakes, but in the end our site is doing quite well. Over 7.5 million people have visited us in 2019, many of them multiple times (massive shout out to everyone who visits our site regularly – it’s thanks to you that we can grow). They spent a total of roughly 2 million hours looking through the deck lists, articles, news and guides.

But of course, I’m not the only person creating content for the site. We have a team of amazing freelancers, who constantly contribute their expertise, share their thoughts in articles and cover new decks through guides. Thank you Old Guardian, Tharid, Yellorambo and JimmyRaynor for always being ready to cover all kinds of topics. We’ve also hired two new writers back in August (since some of our previous freelancers became inactive for different reasons) – J_Alexander and Corbettgames. While they haven’t been writing for us too long, they’ve already created a bunch of amazing content!

Talking about the content… In 2019, we’ve added almost 2000 deck lists (not counting all of the decks added by our community), as well as around 600 news, articles, weekly tavern brawl posts, deck compilations, and – of course – all kinds of guides. Hopefully we’ll be able to at least match, or even surpass those numbers next year. Either way, we will do our best to stay as (or become) your #1 Hearthstone site! Happy New Year to all of you!