Statistics suggest that Wild format has been getting more popular lately. In China, the number of Legend players in Wild is already higher than in Standard. While it’s still far from the case on NA & EU, it’s hard to deny that more and more players are interested in it.
At the same time, every official tournament, including the Masters Tour & Grandmasters circuits, are Standard-only. Ever since the split between Standard and Wild, the latter didn’t have any official competitive scene. It’s been over a year since the last Wild Open tournament, the only beacon of hope for Wild players who want to challenge themselves.
But why are we talking about this? Well, because things might have changed.
What is HCTS?
Sparkz, who has been a long-time user (and more recently a moderator) on our Discord channel, partnered with Solem to host two (NA & EU) $1k USD Wild tournaments a few weeks ago. It had a combined 700 participants and was rather successful, so he decided to take things one step further and kickstart a season based tournament format..
Right now, there’s still a lot of experimentation going on, such as trying to find a good format. But in general, the idea is to have a competitive format (structured similarly to official Blizzard Masters Tour, with Swiss followed by play-offs) with some extra rules and twists. The most important one will be a ban list. As you all know, it’s common for Wild format to have some cards that, let’s just say, ruin the experience. And sometimes it takes a long time for Blizzard to do anything about them (and even then, they only touch the most broken ones). With a ban list curated for the current meta, the tournament should be fresh and devoid of completely degenerate decks. Of course, it’s still a Wild format, so crazy things will happen – but in a more “controlled” manner. And the best thing is that the ban list will cycle from season to season, making much bigger swings in the slowly changing Wild meta, possibly making room for decks that would never see play in a format without any bans.
On top of that, Sparkz is currently testing some custom formats with other deck building restrictions, such as a budget format (where you can only submit decks that cost up to 3200 Dust) or a Whizbang tournament (where you can only play Whizbang the Wonderful or Zayle, Shadow Cloak) aimed mostly at more casual players (but everyone is free to join).
How to Enter
If you want to participate, here’s how you can enter:
- Join HCTS Discord server. Follow the ReCaptcha link sent to you (if you experience difficulties please message “@ModMail” on the server). Then select your region role from #rules-and-info channel.
- Follow this guide to setup your Battlefy account and get started with HCTS.
- Registration is already open! You can find the links to register for the tournaments in the check-in channels of Discord server or on Battlefly.
Yep, it’s that simple. There are no entry fees or anything like that, so if you want to try yourself, you can enter today!
Upcoming Tournaments
You can find all of the upcoming tournaments on Battlefly. And here’s a quick roundup of what’s coming next and the list of custom rules:
Conquest Experimentation
- Conquest Experimentation will be a way for HCTS to test ban lists, format changes, and flow and using the feedback to conduct our end of season Major.
- This iteration of Conquest Experimentation will feature no ban list
- Run Bo5 Shieldless Conquest (same as the previous tournament)
- This two-day event will run Swiss brackets followed by a top 32 playoffs
- It has yet to be determined whether it will be the top 2 from 16 groups, top 4 from 8 groups, or top 3 from 11 (33 total instead of 32)
Dusty Drought
- Dusty Drought will be HCTS’ official budget format. Popularity will determine if this becomes a featured format during the Major.
- This edition of Dusty Drought has a 3200 Dust cap. Individual decks may not exceed 3200 in dust value
- Dust value is based solely on rarity.
- If certain decks overwhelm the format with power levels that shut out all other decks, Dusty Drought may adopt a ban list going forward.
- Genn Greymane, Baku the Mooneater, and Jade Idol are the 3 cards that have raised concerns so far.
Yogg’s Arena
- Yogg’s Arena is an experimental casual format for HCTS
- Every deck must contain Yogg-Saron, Hope's End
- Players who bring minion based aggro decks (i.e. Pirate Warrior) may find they are not awarded their placement title.
- If this becomes an issue the tournament will be scrapped and will be conducted with a ban list.
Whizbang Warfare
- Whizbang Warfare will be a repeating casual HCTS tournament that takes place briefly over the course of an evening.
- Matches will be a simple Bo3 that involves no ban-phase or conquest style deck usage.
- Whizbang the Wonderful and Zayle, Shadow Cloak are the only valid cards in this format.
Prizes
The first two tournaments had $1,000 dollars prize pools, and there are plans to give out more prizes in the future. But right now, HCTS has requested an official tournaments license from Blizzard and to avoid possible legal difficulties, will not be hosting tournaments with prizes in the meantime.
Do you need to have more than one deck in order to compete? I feel like that will shut out some players from competing. I have one decent wild deck and can’t really afford to build anymore.
I also was curious why Hearthstone doesn’t ever use a 1deck+ side deck format like other games
Hearthstone does have a specialist format.
I will also say that if you only have enough dust for one deck you might be in over your head or you may want to try the budget format we have to offer.
One change to the Yogg’s Arena I would like to see, that would deal with Aggro, is that you have to play Yogg to win.
This has its perks and downfalls. It would shut out decks like libram yogg paladin, and instead we would see draw heavy decks featuring yogg and maybe an otk as backup.
This will more than likely be the only time this casual tournament happens. There are already far more tournaments with a better ruleset that don’t need to be babysat.
Appreciate this information.
Sparkz here!
Feel free to ask me questions here or via “@ModMail” on the Discord sercer as well
Will it be streamed on twitch?
Currently, it is not confirmed.
We streamed our previous tournament on twitch, via our partner Solem.
Will mobile work for this.
Mobile will work, but you will still need access to the battlefy webpage to submit scores