What Happened in Hearthstone? Taking a Look Back at April 15 - 22
This was a sad week as we saw two great people leave the Hearthstone team!
Before we jump into the recap though, you can look forward to "Monster Hunt" releasing this week!
- April 26 at 10:00 a.m. PDT!
Hearthstone News
- After working at Blizzard for 15 years and Hearthstone for almost 10, Ben Brode has decided to leave the company.
- Soon after, via a follow up tweet, Hamilton Chu, Hearthstone's Executive Producer, also leaves Blizzard Entertainment.
- You can now gift Blizzard Balance on Battle.net.
- We got a video for the upcoming Monster Hunt which releases on April 26th!
- Some Arena Hotfixes got deployed on Thursday.
Hearthstone Decks
- Our usual top decks of the week are here! Did anything you play make it to the top?
Community Clips
Check out popular community Clips below! Be sure to also share some of your favourite clips from the past week in the comments.
It's bad when you work for one of the largest video game companies in the world. Probably sick of the slow and poor design of newer sets, and the audacity for Blizzard/Activision to focus largely on Pro players instead of the community which makes the game thrive.
I typically leave and get back into hearthstone around each expansion, mainly because Brode could hype up something like bread to the point that you would give it your vote in the presidential election. (He is basically the gamer version of Billy Mays) And I really hope they find someone just as charasmatic because with how little this expansion impacted the meta, the hype train was still fun enough for me to enjoy it.
Best of luck Brode, may your laughter never be forgotten nor your impact on this game, diminished.
Hearthstone is not by any means the best card game ever. Though it is the most popular. The reason behind is the marketing and you guessed right, Ben was the star of the show. Not a single game in this world is irreplacable, blizzard should know that. They should act careful from now on and find another strong public presence immediatly. It could be kripp, day9 or another guy from the dev team. But it should happen before the campaign period of the next expansion which is not that far away.
I do not agree. I started playng 2 years ago whitout knowing who Ben Brode was, and got really hooked up 6 monts later, still prior to knowing him, when I started to watch the various videos of the streamers on youtube, to better understand the game.
I love Ben, but I think the force of heartstone is the community, not the marketing. Marketing is important for sure but not so much, at this point, to be able to disrupt the game whit the departure of just 1 person...
i agree that hearthstone is not the best card game ever.
Magic: the gathering is.
Blizzard knows quality, and will find a way to replace is job functionality. What will be tough to replace is Ben's showmanship. They guy had a great goofy and endearing, but professionally interesting presence. That's tough, if not impossible to teach, and hard to find in the gaming world. Just go look at all the cringy videos of announcers at E3 and every other video game event.
Kripp knows whats up.
Still such a shame to see them go, but hopefully, they will provide us with another great game.
Weekly Recap: two thirds of the Hearthstone team leave. All that's left is Bob the Janitor, who will now also be taking over the bug tester duties and all of the balancing for Wild. All 2 minutes of it.
Thanks for posting this. I was hoping for some news to distract me from the article about Ben Brode leaving.
Oh great, now I'm sad again. :-\