Blizzard has just announced a whole new competitive format, which will be played throughout “Hearthstone Masters” series of tournaments (it seems that it will replace HCT – Hearthstone Championship Tour). The format is called “Specialist”. The format will be the main competitive format going forward.
Players will pick three decks from the same class. They will assign one deck as “Primary”, while the other two will be “Secondary” and “Tertiary”. The Primary deck will have no restrictions, however the other two will have to share 25 cards with the Primary. It means that they can only have up to 5 different cards.
Whenever a new match starts, both players will have to start with their Primary decks. When the first game ends, players MIGHT choose a new deck. The choice doesn’t have to be announced (meaning that opponent doesn’t know that you’ve swapped them) and is not mandatory – players can play their Primary deck again if they want to.
The current format (Conquest) will still be played all the way until HCT World Championship, and “Specialist” will be used for the rest of 2019 official tournaments.
More information about the format in the video below:
[…] and players within the same group will compete with each other using a new Specialist format (here’s a reminder on how it works), and they will be ranked within their division depending on the number of wins […]
That’s good news. I liked the Specialist’s Showdown tournament and I like the idea of simplified sideboarding in HS.
I hope they add this mode as an alternative to ladder into the game.
Deckbuiling, Skill and Experience will matter more and the fact that you can shore up for bad matchups reduces matchup-Rng to some extent.
Overall, a step in the right direction.
Wow, nothing for a causal player…As usual…Great Blizzard, more nails to that coffin.
Who ever said that it’s the only announcement they’re going to make?
We’ll get a Standard year announcement and a new expansion announcement in the matter of days or weeks (because it’s only 1.5 months until the Standard rotation).
Ok, we´ll see…
By the way – see?
Imagine playing Yu-Gi-Oh! with your 15 cards side deck, except you can only really change 5 per game.
This sounds horrendous to me
Nice, sound like player will have “sideboard deck”.
This may bring up some flexibility.
But now player can only play 1 class through the whole tournament?
It’s an even bigger change than just that. Think of it conceptually as if each player is really only bringing ONE deck, but it’s best two-out-of-three and they have the option to make slight changes to their deck between matches.
Yeah, I understand that a bo3 with “sidedeck” is cool. But now everyone must play and watch 3 game, same matchup with a little “tweak” every match. It’s more competitive now for the tournament, but somehow less interesting for me to watch. But I still think this change is neccessary.
So basically you can sideboard cards, but you need to define “Sideboard A” with at most 5 cards and “Sideboard B”.
Promising. It will be interested to see if players start to focus on decks that can morph into different archetypes with a few changes (e.g., how pre-nerf ramp Druid could morph into Maly or Togwaggle or Taunt with a few card changes) or if they stick with a single archetype with just tech cards to counter particular matchups in the sideboard.
I guess they liked the vibe of the play in the Esports Arena’s Specialist Showdown (won by Deathstar’s Hunter).
The most straightforward approach is make your primary deck the “normal one”, and tech your secondary and tertiary decks to be anti-aggro and anti-control.
This will give tournaments a different feel.