Hearthstone Specialist - The New Competitive Format for 2019
A new format has been announced for Competitive Hearthstone! The Conquest Format is being replaced by Specialist this year, and brings a form of side-board Hearthstone.
Blizzard says they are excited to see how it performs and that they are eager to implement community feedback as needed. Here's how it works.
- Players bring three 30 card decks to bring to the tournament.
- All decks must be from the same class.
- The decks are designated as Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.
- The Primary is your main deck that you are bringing to the tournament.
- The Secondary and Tertiary decks must have 25 cards found in the Primary deck, with the remaining 5 being your choice.
- For the first game, both players must use their Primary deck.
- In following games you are free to choose your Secondary or Tertiary decks, or continue using the Primary.
- Your opponent will not know which you choose.
The format begins post-world championship.
Who is going to have access to this? Like can everyone play or do you have to meet a certain rank to gain access to it?
Everyone who participates in a Blizzard tournament. This affects NOTHING in game, the ladder is same as before.
This is really exciting. I think it'll be great to see the players like Fibbonacci and deathstarV3 showing their expertise in their preferred classes.
Potential for the format to be stale with broken decks/cards, but I think this would be a great format for Blizzard esports to put their foot down like MtG does and ban cards and decks that are outright unfair or boring.
would be good if it was 3 completely different decks from the same class
but idk wtf this shit is
At first glance this seems dangerous - just pick the strongest deck and make three versions of it (e.g., teching versus aggro, control, combo), but I like that (1) if the meta choices are obvious, you can bring a deck that counters the meta choices and be the dark horse; (2) you get three matches to beat them - less RNG involved. I just hope Blizzard can bring something new for casual players too.
Considering most of the game is geared towards a casual setting, I'd say they have enough. Unless you meant something to help them get into a more competitive setting, which this is designed to do. A HUGE turn off for a lot of players is the old system for tournaments requiring 5 different decks. Now you need basically 1 deck and 5-10 tech choices. This system for competitive play is infinitely better as it makes things more accessible.
Yes, the fact that you don't have to master 4-5 decks to compete is huge.
The sideboard cards are meant to offset the initial "overwhelming advantage." If there is a dominant deck, you tech your counter-decks to deal with it - one deck might have a handful of "anti-combo" cards, while the other might have a handful of "anti-aggro" cards, for example . . .
This is as close to a Sideboard we are going to get.
Looks really nice to play but boring to watch.
what a terrible format! 5 cards difference between all three decks? so out of your whole collection you end up using 40 cards for the tournament??
and people were complaining that the current format didnt represent all the classes, well at least you had to use 60-100 cards out of your collection across 4 classes!
To make matters worst it will be introduced for the world championship, they should have waited.
Side-decking without including any changes to the game itself, very practical of Blizz
It sounds interesting. They must be pretty confident thougj that there wont be a dominant class so that we only see mirrors.
So this is tournament mode? seems interesting really well thought.
Classes with a lot of core cards will probably be better at this, for example druid prenerf could change arch type entirely based on about 5 cards in the deck.
Warlock also is a very flexible class, it can make a zoo deck more aggressive or less aggressive depending on matchup for example, seems like a really fun format and something I was looking forward to.
But I hope there's more specially changes to economy since being flexible is hard when cards cost so much.
Magic bo3 with side...?
BUT BUT.... How does one win in Specialist format??
Seems like a less expensive format, which could be good for giving players who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford to field a competitive lineup access to tournament play.
less expensive of course cause you play the freaking same deck 3 times with a few different tec cards.. so boring..
Oh damn yes! Finally something new!
Now, let's read the article...
Edit: yeah... about that...
The youtube dislikes are going in hard.