Hearthstone’s 2024 in Review: A Celebration Gone Wrong?

2024 was a big milestone for Hearthstone as the game turned ten years old. Expectations for the anniversary were high, but was Blizzard able to deliver? In this retrospective, I take a look at the main events of 2024 for Hearthstone: the good, the bad, and the ugly!

10th Anniversary Celebration

There were small events to celebrate Hearthstone’s 10th anniversary throughout the year. Many of the rewards given out to players came in the form of Twitch drops, which were plentiful. We also received many anniversary celebration cards:

• Harth Stonebrew and Gift cards (like Garrosh's Gift) for all classes
• Warcraft Rumble themed Gnomelia, S.A.F.E. Pilot, Warsong Grunt, Night Elf Huntress, and Footman
• Champions of Azeroth
• Avatar of Hearthstone
• Bob the Bartender (does this one even count though?)

Many of these cards have seen some competitive play too. Harth Stonebrew saw play early in the year, the best Gift cards have been useful throughout the year, and Bob the Bartender has become popular after its recent introduction to the game.

Hearthstone’s in-game music was released in two parts and is now available on many services, such as YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.

Alas, the 10th anniversary is unlikely to be the thing 2024 will be remembered for. Instead of major new launches, we got something else entirely.

The End of Duels

Hearthstone’s 10th anniversary did not start on a high note: the very first announcement of the year on January 4th was that Blizzard was closing down the Duels game mode in April 2024.

Duels was not a popular game mode, although it was far more popular than Mercenaries, which still resides in the client. Duels videos from content creators like Roffle were doing well with tens of thousands of views all the way to the end, so the mode had a dedicated player base.

The difference between Duels and Mercenaries was that Mercenaries is a separate island that does not affect the rest of the game – even less so after any ways to gain meaningful XP or gold from the mode were gutted – while Duels required constant tweaking and maintenance. Duels was basically Arena meets Dungeon Run: a limited-run PvP experience where you grow more powerful after each game. You chose a powerful Hero, built a 15-card skeleton deck from your collection, and were then offered more cards, including powerful treasures, as you played games with the deck. The complexity and power level of the mode surpassed that of Standard, although you had less control over your deck as you relied on limited and randomized options to build it beyond the initial list.

While building good Duels decks required a comprehensive collection that included Wild cards, it did not quite have the same monetization potential that Standard has with its rotating expansions and major effects of new expansions on the meta. Ultimately, Blizzard thought that the upkeep cost of Duels was not worth the income gained from the mode, and it was not feasible to freeze the mode and leave it in the client, so they removed it altogether.

Twist Offline More than Online, But With a Bright Spot

The Twist format is Blizzard’s latest attempt to create a new constructed format to go alongside Standard and Wild. It replaced Classic in mid-2023, and Blizzard released their first direct-to-Wild card set, Caverns of Time, in August 2023. Caverns of Time has played a prominent role in many Twist seasons, which feature varying card pools from both Standard and Wild expansions.

However, Twist has revealed a major problem with Blizzard’s plans. Many Hearthstone players started playing later in the game’s lifecycle or do not keep a Wild collection. They disenchant their old cards to keep up with the Standard format. Wild has an important place in the game because your cards cannot suddenly become useless, there has to be a place where you can play with them. Every card game has some kind of an eternal format where old cards can be played. But building a brand new experience that requires cards from the past ten years? It has not worked out well for Blizzard.

In 2024, Twist has tried to reinvent itself, but to no avail. The game mode was available for five months and offline for seven. That’s just way too much downtime. After trying out some new things, Blizzard is now recycling old Twist formats, as the Wonders format for December 2024 was originally available in September 2023, and the upcoming Wonders XL for January 2025 was originally available in October 2023. No further formats have been announced yet.

However, as it happens, 2024 had what I consider the most interesting and best Twist format we have seen. The first season of Whizbang’s Heroes in June 2024 was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. You unlocked special heroes and pre-made decks by owning specific Legendary cards from the past. The ownership of one card gave you access to an entire deck. In June season, Whizbang’s Heroes’ power level was on par with Hearthstone from a few years ago, and it was both nostalgic and a new experience. Whizbang’s Heroes continued into July, but it added a number of new Heroes that made the June Heroes obsolete and changed the format into far more combo-oriented play.

Anyway, neither season of Whizbang’s Heroes attracted a large audience. Some decks were unlocked for everyone, but most of them required owning a specific Wild Legendary card. Even that one card – an expensive one, sure, but still just one card – was too much of a barrier to entry for a big portion of Hearthstone playerbase.

The future does not look bright for Twist. People don’t want to craft cards for a format that is only around for a month, and many Wild players have their favorite decks from the past that they stick to. The whole idea of Twist is that it is like an extended event that also enables the developers to try out some ideas. Perhaps it is useful enough as a testing ground for the developers that it can stay, but with extended downtime between seasons, it is not something anyone can play as their main mode.

Back and Forth with Weekly Quests

Blizzard tweaked the requirements and rewards of the weekly quests for more than half of the year in what was the most disastrous series of decisions for the game in 2024.

First, in April 2024, Blizzard decided that it would be a great idea to increase the rewards from the Weekly Quests by around 20% in exchange of making many of them three times as hard to complete. In a completely unexpected turn of events, players hated it and many players left the game. Blizzard made some minor adjustments in a week, but the quests remained far too cumbersome to complete compared to their rewards.

It took Blizzard one and a half months to fully change course. Finally, in mid-May, the Weekly Quest system was changed for the better. The additional rewards were kept, and the requirements were toned down. Some of the Quests remained clearly harder than they originally were, but in a wonderful quality-of-life improvement, the “win” quests were changed into “play” quests.

For example, the main Weekly Quest originally asked you to win 5 games of Ranked Hearthstone. In the first set of changes, that became win 15 games of Ranked Hearthstone. It was quickly toned down to win 10 games of Ranked Hearthstone, still twice the effort. Finally, the May patch changed that into Play 10 games of Ranked Hearthstone, effectively making it easier than ever. As Hearthstone is a zero-sum game, the average win rate on the ladder is 50%. You cannot have a winner without having a loser. Across all of the ladder, it takes 10 games played to win 5 games. But a quest to play 10 games can be completed with any deck. You don’t have to play a meta deck. You don’t even have to play a successful off-meta deck. Anything you can imagine, you can play, and you can get quest progress.

Alas, it was too little, too late. Many players left the game and did not return because Blizzard took too long to fix things. Sad, but the game itself was in a better state. If only the saga had ended there, but it didn’t.

In November, Blizzard reverted all Weekly Quests to their pre-April state. They took away the additional rewards. They made the quests that were now harder easier again. And they also took away the major quality-of-life improvement from play quests, and changed them back to win 5 games of Ranked Hearthstone.

Somehow, Blizzard managed to return the Weekly Quests back to their initial state while upsetting pretty much everyone along the way. The people who could not keep up with the increased requirements left in April. The people who stayed until May were rewarded with an improved system. And in November, the improvements were taken away, upsetting all of those people.

This was an inexplicable failure on Blizzard’s part, a total disconnect between the developers and the player base. It can be easy to attribute both too little and too much competence to a company. There is no doubt that Blizzard collects a lot of data on how they make money from their games, and they use that data to make decisions that improve their profits. But this time, they drew the wrong conclusions. They underestimated the elasticity of demand for their product, or the barriers people have to leave it because of sunk costs. That resulted in a back-and-forth where nobody won. All because of an attempt to earn more money from the game.

Tightening the Monetization Screw

The Weekly Quests were not the only part of Hearthstone where monetization was increased and costs were cut.

For Whizbang’s Workshop in March, the Diamond Legendary card was removed as the reward from the Legendary Collector set achievement. Many low spenders used the Diamond Legendary to fill their collections because when the mini-set launches, you can reach the achievement without owning every Legendary card, so the Diamond Legendary is also a brand-new Legendary card for your collection. It was replaced with low-value Signature cards for Whizbang’s Workshop, although Perils in Paradise and The Great Dark Beyond improved the value a bit by giving Signature Epic cards. They are still a downgrade from the Legendary, but not as bad as Whizbang’s Workshop.

With the release of Perils in Paradise, Blizzard stopped creating new game boards for each expansion. We got one for the first expansion of the year, Whizbang’s Workshop, and should get one game board per year in the future. Nothing was announced in advance, the feature was just silently cut and responses only arrived after player complaints and confusion over the missing board.

Perils in Paradise also did not get a launch cinematic for the first time, and this was repeated for The Great Dark Beyond. Both expansions had influencer videos instead, so there is still a marketing budget for launch videos, but either it is too low for a full cinematic and a theme song, or the marketing team has other ideas instead. Either way, the Hearthstone cinematic trailers were iconic, and the best of them have been watched over and over again: Saviors of Uldum (2019) being the most popular one with 5.9 million views on YouTube. The most recent ones have failed to reach 100,000 views so far, although they still outperformed the influencer videos.

Blizzard changed the Tavern Brawl reward pack from a Standard Pack to a pack from the latest expansion in November. If you always open your packs immediately after earning them, it’s probably a positive change. But many players saved the Standard Packs to be opened at the start of the next expansion to get new cards immediately, and that is no longer possible with expansion packs being granted instead. You can still get as many cards as you used to, but now you collect cards for the current expansion slowly over months instead of saving your packs to play with new cards from day one.

Finally, Activision Blizzard laid off a lot of people in 2024. There were two rounds of layoffs, in January and in September, both of which affected hundreds of people at Blizzard. Hearthstone was not a main target in either round, and it had already had its own smaller restructuring with 10 people laid off in late 2023, but Hearthstone was affected in a more minor way by these rounds as well.

Battlegrounds: Duos and Pay-to-Win

The main new feature Hearthstone got in 2024 was for Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds Duos launched in April and brought a new 2-player co-op PvP experience to the game. It’s a fun mode to play with a friend, but the solo experience with a random partner is lacking, and the mode has not become popular. HSReplay stats indicate that 99% of Battlegrounds is still played in the regular mode. The mode doesn’t cost anything extra and shares the season pass purchase with regular Battlegrounds, so we can’t exactly complain, but in hindsight, it might not be exactly what players wanted.

Battlegrounds also worked on monetization with the addition of Hero rerolls, which you can buy with real money. A season pass holder with paid hero rerolls can choose from up to eight Heroes per game (as long as they are willing to spend their tokens), whereas a free-to-play player only has two options. Over the long term, this has a significant effect on your success in the mode, even though the difference in an individual game can be minor. The community wasn’t exactly happy about it, but the changes are still fresh, so we’re yet to see how they’re going to affect Battlegrounds in the long run.

Return to China

Late in the year, it was finally time for some good news for Hearthstone. Blizzard and NetEase had renewed their publishing contract for Blizzard games in China early in the year thanks to Blizzard’s new owner Microsoft. The breakdown in the relationship between the two companies had been highly public and NetEase commemorated the end of the 14-year partnership in January 2023 by dismantling their Gorehowl statue on a live stream and serving Blizzard Green Tea to the participants in a symbolic gesture that painted Blizzard as untrustworthy.

New ownership and money heal all wounds, and Hearthstone’s relaunch in China in September has been a stunning success. Sensor Tower reports Hearthstone’s iOS revenues from China from September to November at 30 million USD, and some sources claim that Hearthstone has already made more than 100 million USD from China since its return. Of course, this is all third-party data, but if the real numbers are anywhere close, that’s a lot of extra revenue.

As it happens, all the cost-cutting and monetization measures Hearthstone implemented were decided before their return to China. Their success in China may give the Hearthstone team more leeway to do better things for their players, but its effects remain to be seen.

But Is It Fun?

While 2024 had more than its fair share of controversy when it comes to Hearthstone, the year also featured three new expansions:

• Whizbang’s Workshop
• Perils in Paradise
• The Great Dark Beyond

Thematically, I enjoy The Great Dark Beyond the best as it comes closer to Hearthstone’s World of Warcraft roots. Whizbang’s Workshop was hilarious too, and who could possibly not love King Plush? Perils in Paradise was the weird one this year, a strange holiday resort.

We got several memorable cards, although one player’s fun match is often a devastating loss for the other.

• Undead Handbuffs with Amateur Puppeteer were something I tried hard to make work, especially in combination with Darkthorn Quilter. Ultimately, the concept was not strong enough though.
• Window Shopper had its day early in the year, and an endless stream of Magtheridon, Unreleased was a sight to behold, if you were able to roll enough of them.
• Sky Mother Aviana giving me random Highlander synergy cards when playing it in a Highlander Druid deck produced some of my most memorable Hearthstone moments of 2024.
• Puzzlemaster Khadgar was every bit as helpful and potentially frustrating as Khadgar accompanying you in quests in World of Warcraft. I could feel his floating head staring at me when I held the Wisdomball in my hand. Sometimes it also won me games out of nowhere.
• Timewinder Zarimi turned Priest into a midrange wonder, but Priest players would prefer to play control. They have stuck with the class this long and they will not go aggro.
• Sonya Waterdancer and Zilliax Deluxe 3000 did exactly what you would expect and broke the game periodically. Especially Zilliax.
• Wheel of DEATH!!! was actually a playable win condition, and I played it in Control Warlock so much.
• Shudderblock can’t damage the enemy Hero, so players had to find roundabout ways to use it to end the game. They were successful.
• Tourists brought a bunch of new interactions to the game. Ramping Warriors. Pirate Shamans. Druids ending games with Spell Damage and Mage spells. Trusty Fishing Rod and other Hunter cards in Priest. Sunsapper Lynessa and Paladins killing you with damage spell OTK. Hydration Station in Warrior still makes me shiver when combined with Unkilliax. Many nerfs resulted from those combinations, but some of them are still alive and well.
• The back-and-forth with Tsunami. How the fortunes of one card can shift from useless to overpowered and to something in between in the span of a couple of months.
• The sheer power of the Neutral Legendary cards from Perils in Paradise: Marin the Manager, Gorgonzormu, Griftah, Trusted Vendor, Incindius, and Travelmaster Dungar. The power of the latter three was not immediately obvious, but all found excellent decks to be played in.
• Exarch Naielle transforming Hunter into something new with the Discover Hero Power.
• Quasar pulling off incredible feats, but lacking the consistency to become a top deck even in the hands of the most skilled pilots. Still getting hit due to frustrating experience.
• The Ceaseless Expanse being the highest-cost Hearthstone card of all time, and still being very strong (it’s the most popular card in Standard at the time of writing).

When you look at all of the new cards we got to play with in 2024, there were some great and unique moments there. Even with no new formats or modes for constructed Hearthstone, there was still a lot to play with.

What about you? What was your favorite Hearthstone moment in 2024?