Hearthstone in 2021: A Year in Review

The Year of the Gryphon has brought along a wide variety of new modes and elements to the game, but has it lived up to the expectations in a year of unprecedented disruptions?

Core Set: A Long-Overdue Decision

Team 5 finally took a page out of the MTG developers’ playbook and introduced a rotating core set instead of Classic to ensure a healthier balance across the classes’ power levels in Standard and to ensure they have another lever on the health and variety of the metagame.

It is an unquestionably positive move and one that should serve the game well going forward. Making it available to every player for free also makes it easier to get into Hearthstone at its current mature stage, though the added mini-set releases have definitely counterbalanced the effects of this.

Classic Mode: A Nice Trip Down Memory Lane

Following in the footsteps of WoW Classic, Hearthstone has also received its own old-school game mode, one which does exactly what’s been expected of it. A nice escape from Standard and a great way to relive the past, Classic Mode has also served as confirmation that the metagame has basically been figured out over the long time we were stuck with it, waiting for the game’s first expansion.

With little innovation around (and fairly long queue times at the higher ranks), the big question is when, not if, we’ll be moving on to Naxx.

Spell Schools: A Straightforward Addition to the Design Space

For little added complexity, Team 5 snatched many new options for themselves by adding tribes to spells as well this year, with the most notable example of this being Questline Mage and perhaps Lady Anacondra shenanigans in Druid.

Indeed, it’s Mage and Priest that made the most of this adjustment so far, simply because they’re the classes that reliably make use of spells from multiple tribes. For most other classes, the distinction between tribes hardly came into play (Knight of Anointment is basically just a super-powerful Novice Engineer) but this is another unquestionable positive design step.

Battlegrounds Updates: A New Balance Approach

Diablo came and went, heroes were moved up and down the power ladder, but perhaps the most important aspect of BGs updates in 2021 was the introduction of the Armor system, a huge shakeup that allowed for lower-rated heroes to get into the action as well by providing them that crucial extra turn to try and pull off their marginal strategies.

This should allow Team 5 more room to explore design possibilities for BGs heroes, though the limited competitive announcements and the performance issues look rather poor in comparison with other autobattlers around.

The Impact of the Mini-Sets: Less Than Expected

The three supplemental card sets released this year had distinctly different levels of quality. Darkmoon Races had perhaps the most interesting designs (and also the largest impact), with Crabrider and Armor Vendor serving as unusually relevant Neutral cards in modern Hearthstone. There was also Arbor Up, Conjure Mana Biscuit, Backfire, Imprisoned Phoenix, Nitroboost Poison and Hysteria on the class side of things.

The latter two releases weren’t anywhere near as good. Wailing Caverns was mostly irrelevant (Mutanus the Devourer turned out to be too narrow a disruption tool and almost all class cards supported niche archetypes, with Lady Anacondra and Wailing Vapor serving as the only highlights in Constructed alongside Whetstone Hatchet) while Deadmines seemed so irrelevant at launch that we actually did a dive as to whether it’s even worth purchasing.

Mercenaries: Narrower Than Expected

Mercs feels like a bastard child. With so many changes at Team 5 during its development cycle, many conflicting communiques about its design, plus delays and post-release controversies, the mode really didn’t turn out to be much more than a gacha element of the wider Hearthstone-as-game-platform ecosystem.

It is a shame because the PvP mode is actually rather interesting if you have a wide enough roster to strategize: however, the way there is barred by an incredible time investment requirement, one you can’t even really skip by spending money.

It’s no wonder Mercs has basically no presence on Twitch or Reddit, and though the devs fully intend to support it going forward, we’ve seen with Duels how continuous content updates can’t restore player confidence in a mode by themselves.

Esports: Sunk-Cost Fallacy?

What’s left there to say about Hearthstone esports? The way the game’s competitive scene was bundled into Activision-Blizzard’s YouTube deal as a freebie afterthought says a lot by itself, and it has kneecapped interest and viewer numbers for years.

It’s impossible to tell how the later seasons of Grandmasters would have performed on Twitch, but the numbers are clear. Interest in competitive Hearthstone is at an all-time low, with the World Championship peaking at 23k viewers and the Thijs Legends Invitational petering out at 12 600. Bringing original deck designs and skill expression is more challenging than ever, and the setup of the competitive scene (brutally top-heavy in a game with high built-in variance) doesn’t build viewer goodwill in the long run.

The expiry of the Grandmasters system might bring along the possibility of new faces to emerge, but when it was the existing streamer audience that kept any semblance of interest alive, it might all just be too late. Competitive BGs seems to follow the exact same spectacle-ridden pathway with Blizzard’s complete control over the esports proceedings, something that hasn’t worked out too well with Constructed over the years.

Any change is good when the existing product is as bad as it is now, but the team’s track record on packaging a compelling competitive product has been singularly awful over the years.

Communication and Controversies: A Rough Year for Blizzard

The revelations about Blizzard’s inner workings have been nothing short of nauseating this year, and though Team 5 seems to have been a calm spot inside the maelstrom, it’s clear and well-known that they’ve also been adversely impacted by the goings-on. Who wouldn’t be about such news inside their own workplace? The scope of all that’s been going on at the company is so breathtaking that Hearthstone’s developers definitely deserve congratulations for mostly keeping the deadlines and content releases on schedule, and Iksar’s continued Q&A threads serve as useful, if somewhat one-sided insights into the inner workings and plans of the team, something we sorely lacked in the past.

Overall: Was It a Good Year?

A steady stream of content and new features saw the game progress towards the team’s new vision of HS-as-a-platform, granting us a ton of goodies along the way. Whether quantity trumped quality is more of a matter of taste on this one.

Personally, this was the year I spent the least time with Hearthstone. The growing power levels in Standard and Battlegrounds alike have left a sour taste in my mouth, and the card design philosophies have made deck designs even more railroaded than before.

The way the Worlds lineup had nearly nothing but combo decks also serves as a great highlight of the issues of interactivity the game has struggled with this year. The way Team 5’s balance philosophy continuously shifts towards “release first, balance it later” means that less and less time between content releases is spent with a balanced metagame.

The new design features (a Core set, Spell schools, more cards to sculpt the meta) could all help produce something great, but the specific decisions have not been particularly appealing to me. I found myself spending the most of my gameplay time in Arena, the mode with the least direct developer involvement. However, with all the controversies swirling around the company and the difficulties of the pandemic continuing around the world, no one would fault you for giving the team a good grade on a curve for what we’ve received in 2021.