Introducing a New Game Mode: Hearthstone Duels!
Blizzard announced the brand new Game Mode: Duels! Read all the details below!
Quote from BlizzardWelcome to Duels, a new competitive Hearthstone game mode that changes every season! In Duels, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, a starting Treasure, and build a 15-card starter deck from your collection before facing off against a series of worthy human opponents—Dungeon Run-style! Devise your path to victory by enhancing your deck after each match with minions, spells, and powerful Treasures to aid in increasingly difficult encounters with other players!
How It Works:
Duels will be accessible through the Modes button from the Hearthstone main screen, where you’d go to play Battlegrounds or Arena. Here’s how it works:
- When you start a Duels run, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, and starting Treasure.
- Then, you’ll build a starter deck of 15 cards from your Collection and play your first match. In its debut season, Duels will include a curated assortment of cards from a number of sets, including:
- Scholomance Academy
- One Night in Kharazan
- Curse of Naxxramas
- Basic
- Classic
- After the match is over, you’ll gain additional health, and get to level up your deck by picking one of three sets of cards categorized by theme. Occasionally, you’ll also be able to pick from a selection of three incredibly powerful Treasures!
- Gain or lose rating based on your result! While separate, Duels uses the same Ratings system as Battlegrounds. Your run ends after you lose three times, or net 12 wins!
Play Duels: Early Access Today
In Duels: Early Access, each playable class will start with 1 Hero Power and 1 Treasure and will use cards from the Scholomance Academy, One Night in Kharazan, Curse of Naxxramas, Classic, and Basic sets. The card pool will be updated as new sets are released!
All Hero Powers and Treasures added after Duels: Early Access can be unlocked by meeting a variety of criteria associated with your Collection. For example, unlocking a new Hero Power may require owning a corresponding Legendary card. Or to unlock a specific Treasure, you might need to own 30 Epic cards from a given set.
How to Get Duels: Early Access
Pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Mega Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today, along with 80 Madness at the Darkmoon Faire card packs, 5 Golden Madness at the Darkmoon Faire packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Golden Legendary card, the N’Zoth Warlock Hero, the N’Zoth card back, and Battlegrounds perks**!
You can also pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today along with 45 Madness as the Darkmoon Faire card packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Legendary card, and the N’Zoth card back!
When you pre-purchase either bundle, you’ll get access to a special Legendary Quest chain that rewards 6 Scholomance Academy Packs for trying out Duels!
Pre-purchase will go live with the 18.6 patch at ~10:00 a.m. PT on 10/22.
Starting November 12, Duels: Early Access will be free and open to all players and Whispers of the Old Gods will be added to the pool of eligible sets!
*Early access obtained through pre-purchase is available between October 22, 2020 and November 11, 2020. Duels game mode is accessible after reaching level 10 with all Hero classes in-game.**Battlegrounds Perks are available upon purchase and expire at the end of the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion cycle.
Duels: Early Access Twitch Drops
From October 28 at 10:00 a.m. PT to November 11 at 11:00 p.m. PT, we’ll also be giving away Duels: Early Access to 500 random viewers every hour, across the entire Hearthstone category on Twitch! Watch any Hearthstone stream to be eligible to receive a drop, so long as your Battle.net and Twitch accounts are linked.
Link Your Accounts
Before you can receive rewards, you'll need to link your Twitch.tv and Battle.net accounts. Here's how:
- Log in or create an account on Twitch.tv.
- Navigate to the Settings menu by clicking your account name in the top-right corner of the home screen.
- Navigate to the Connections tab of the Settings menu.
- Find the Battle.net section, then follow the instructions after selecting a region and clicking Connect.
- When connecting accounts, be sure that you're currently logged into the Battle.net account on which you'd like to receive your rewards.
The official rules for Twitch Drops can be found here.
Duels: Season One Starts November 17
When the Duels officially launches on November 17, and we transition from Duels: Early Access to Duels: Season One, each class will have access to 2 Hero Powers and 3 Treasures. Additionally, Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards will be added to the pool of eligible sets! We’ll be adding new Hero Powers and Treasures in a mid-season update early next year, and plan to reset Duels ratings at that time as well.
The theme for Duels: Early Access and Duels: Season One is Wizard Duels, which brings several familiar professors and luminaries from Scholomance Academy to the mode, each representing a different class and playstyle! The theme will change at the end of Duels: Season One, new Heroes will be added, and some Treasures will rotate out to make room for new ones.
When Duels: Season One begins, it’ll offer two methods of play with separate matchmaking pools: Casual and Heroic. Casual runs are free and are a perfect starting point for exploring the mode and experimenting. Heroic runs feature success-based rewards identical to Arena rewards, including gold, arcane dust, cards, golden cards, and card packs from the latest expansion. Heroic Duels runs cost 150 gold or a Tavern Ticket (US $1.99), which will be replacing Arena Tickets, and grant entry to Arena or Heroic Duels. If you’ve been sitting on Arena Tickets, they will be usable for Duels!
We announced a ton of stuff today! Be sure to check out the rest of what we’ve got going on:
Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Card List & Expansion Guide
Learn more and see all the cards in our dedicated Card List.
Fun but disappointing they didn't add the awesome music to it they previewed in the teaser! The normal music makes the game feel slow an not as flashy
IMO they should start awarding tavern tickets in the future "battle pass" or ranked mode monthly awards.
Few people play arena nowadays, I believe because they prefer holding to their gold to buy packs when a new xpac appears. I foresee see this happening to heroic mode of duels.
I'm playing HS only for tournaments, so I need to have at least 5-7 or so competetive decks prepared at any moment.
If it was possible to play this mode without having all needed cards, if you were able to choose cards that you want just like in PVE version, it would be much more better for all. But anyway this is not the mode we all were waiting for. "Pay to play" Duels - won't save the game. From my point of view, instead working on this ridiculous Duels, they could make some efforts to create co-op mode. Of course it's a difficult to create such mode anyhow I'm sure that it is possible. And everybody know that this mode is what community is asking for years.
Much like I figured, crappier arena, lol.
Gave it a few tries, passing.
Played a couple of runs this afternoon after work. It's good fun!
Too bad nobody playtested it... I guess they just cobbled it together and threw it out there for the players to figure out what stuff is broken and get salty in the process. This frikkin mindset of pay us to test our game for us is so annoying.
If I wanted to play coinflip games, I would go to battlegrounds. We didnt need another heavy RNG format. Like what are you supposed to do when your opponent has Robes of Gaudiness, and starts chucking 5-drops for 2 mana at you. 7-drop on turn 3. It just ridiculous.
Looks like a fun mode. Honestly, how many other card games offer something like this? People wanted Tournament Mode. What an uncreative thing that would have been.
WoW also added a rogue like experience with Torghast. It's meant to be casual fun.
I do see the issue with card collection, cost and new players / players that dusted wild cards. But apart from that, I'm eager to play it.
Yeaahh don't know about this one... In dungeon runs there's always a 20% chance of your treasures being so good that there's no way to lose and a 20% chance of them being so bad that there's no way to win. I really hope they found a way to balance that so it's not equally game deciding in PvP.
Where can I get deck suggestions?
Have you noticed that the current roadmap inludes a new game mode separate from Duels? It was confirmed by Kaeyoh on Reddit!
Why are there always people who cry like babies when new, innovative changes come? My God! Go back to kindergarten and let your mothers change you and just stop playing before you drown in your tears.
Great job blizzard !!!
i will try it tomorrow but I am not super excited. never liked arena that much and the whole dungeon run concept has been recycled a little to often for my taste so lets see how fresh it actually feels.
i am not sure how they are going to handle the re-introduction of wild cards. from a crafting point of view it is probably not a big deal since there will be only a finite amount of good cards from a given wild expansion (most people will have the good ones anyway) but for completely new players it might be a bit much to collect cards from multiple years of content. I am not sure for example whether you can craft the cards from wild adventures or whether you still need to buy the entire wing for gold/money. that would hurt pretty bad if you are only looking for specific cards. maybe they will start to give out some of the wild stuff for free (should have been done some time ago imo, especially for the first couple of expansions/adventures).
So is this the so-hyped new game mode? Omegalul what a let down. Basically a worse arena...
How new players will play duals without old cards?
They will need dust to make them. And to have dust they will have... to pay!
Buy Wild packs and buy Adventures. Good way to save the game.
I wanted to leave a comment saying something witty about how Rattlegore is the "teacher" for warrior... heheh...
But holy crap, can people just enjoy things? Why are all the comments everywhere so hateful? New things are good, some are free, some are not. Just play what you can and don't expect every change to suit you specifically. There are a lot of people Blizzard is trying to please with their product.
Yeah, this game has gotten waaaay too expensive and that says a lot because it was never a cheap game to begin with. This is where I draw the line I think, soon you won't even be able to log in without paying upfront, fck this
This new game mode looks fun but my excitement for the competitive, "heroic" mode is tempered by the RNG of treasure selection and my lack of a collection dating back to 2014.
It looks like the treasures are similar to the types of treasures available in last year's solo adventures (Dalaran Heist and Tombs of Terror). Those treasures varied wildly in power level (for instance, one of them randomizes the costs of your cards each turn, so you regularly can cheat out expensive cards for little or no cost; compare that to the one that only draws you an extra card or two at the beginning of the game). And the fact that you have to construct your deck prior to knowing which treasures you will have to choose from makes the RNG aspect of this even more pronounced. You may get lucky and get a treasure perfectly suited to your constructed deck, or you may get no option that synergizes with your deck (or even get options with anti-synergies--such as your taunt-heavy deck getting the treasure of your minions having permanent stealth). We'll have to wait and see the whole range of available treasures to know just how much difference there is between them.
Then there is the issue of players with incomplete collections being at a competitive disadvantage. I started playing in late 2018 when Rastakhan's Rumble was released. Whales who started when I did could have spent $800 on preorders for each expansion and the Galakrond's Awakening adventure. Yet, despite having spent almost two years and a lot of money playing on the game, that whale will be facing people with significantly bigger card pools, at least during the first phase of Duels. I realize it's nice to reward long-time players (One Night in Kharazan was released in 2016 and Curse of Naxxramas was 2014), but I am guessing a sizable percentage of the current player base wasn't playing in 2014 and are not inclined to start buying packs for old expansions. Of course, you can bring a standard deck into wild and still win. But if your goal is to regularly reach legend then it's usually going to be tough sledding. I am guessing that is the way it will feel in heroic Duels with my 2018-2020 collection, at least at the outset.
Of course, I can still play the casual mode in Duels and have fun with no cost. I expect that's what I will do. But I don't play casual mode in standard because it has too little stakes, so I wonder if casual Duels will also get old quickly. Or I could start crafting some cards from the old expansions to make competitive Duels decks, but this just makes an already expensive game even more expensive, particularly if Duels rotates old expansions regularly. Or I could just focus on playing standard and arena (where the lack of an old collection doesn't matter, thankfully), which I expect is what I will do long-term.
So, while I am excited about the new game mode and applaud Blizzard for adding to an already great game, I would guess that the long-term audience for heroic Duels may be fairly limited.