Hearthstone Esports 2019 Announced!

by hsdecktech - 5 years ago     show comments

This morning, Hearthstone unveiled the long-awaited plan for Hearthstone Esports in 2019! There’s a lot going on in the official announcement, so we’re happy to be able to break it all down for you!

Introducing Hearthstone Masters!

Last year, the best players in the world competed to become Hearthstone Masters! This year, the rest of us will have a chance to compete with them. Hearthstone Masters is made up of three parts, two of which were explained this morning.

Open online qualifiers: First, the Hearthstone Masters Qualifiers are open qualifiers, hosted through Battlefy.com. They will have limited registration spots, but will be free for anyone who wants to participate. Approximately 30 such tournaments will run each week during the qualifying season, and registration for the first Qualifiers is already open. Anybody who wins one of the Qualifiers will earn a spot in that season’s Master’s Tour event.

The whole schedule is live, but you can also see a simple snapshot here:

Ladder matters again: In addition to the open Masters Qualifier tournaments, the Top 200 Ladder finishers on each month during the qualifiers period will earn invitations to a special Ranked Ladder Qualifier. The top four finishers in that Qualifier will earn spots in that season’s Masters Tour event.

A few more ways to qualify: In addition to the Masters Qualifiers and the Ranked Ladder Qualifiers, there are a few miscellaneous other ways to qualify for the Masters Tour as well: winning invitations through licensed third-party tournaments (not yet announced); finishing as a “top performer” at a previous Masters Tour event (no specific cutoff provided); qualifying through the China Gold Series (because China is always on its own thing); and finishing the Year of the Raven (this year) with at least 120 Hearthstone Competitive Points. All these systems seem geared towards making sure the top players are rewarded for their prior successes, which will, in turn, ensure that these events have all the big names in attendance!

The Hearthstone Masters Tour: The Hearthstone Masters Tour will be the premier events of the year, taking place three times throughout the year, at different locations around the globe. The tournament will be huge–with hundreds of participants, playing over three days of Swiss and elimination rounds, for their share of over $250,000.00 in prizes!

Audience participation buffs prize support: In addition to the guaranteed prize support of $250,000.00, there will be special in-game items and limited-time bundles that players can buy to help build up the prize pool. As with this year’s Hearthstone Global Games, a portion of all those purchases will add to the base prize pool for each of the Masters Tour events!

Ease of planning: As a quality of life change, Hearthstone promises that the Masters Tour locations and dates will be announced at least two weeks prior to the beginning of each Qualifiers season. That means that players will be able to book tickets (if they’re confident, or already qualified) early, or even decide if it makes sense for them to try for a particular season before going into it. This should make things a lot easier, logistically at least, for pros and competitive hopefuls. Reducing travel to just a few times a year also goes a long way to making professional Hearthstone play less expensive as a whole.

A New Way to Play: the Specialist Format

Perhaps the most anticipated part of the announcement was the portion regarding the entirely-new gameplay format for competitive Hearthstone, the Specialist Format. As they said when they announced the change, the Specialist Format is designed to better approximate the ladder experience. It does that by switching from a multiple-class format from the last few years to a modified sideboard format, that works as follows:

• Players submit three decks from the same class.
• One of the three decks is designated the “primary” deck. The other two are called “secondary” and “tertiary,” but the labels of the other two are interchangeable.
• In terms of deck construction, the “primary” deck is like your “core” deck. Your other two decks may have up to 5 cards difference from the primary deck. The secondary and tertiary decks don’t have any deckbuilding restrictions as to one another, so you can take out the same 5 cards from the primary, or a different five, add the same tech cards in, or do something in between. That means that your secondary and tertiary decks could be 10 whole cards different from one another, which is often enough for complete archetype shifts. Technically, it also looks like you can just bring three copies of the same deck, though that would just be hurting yourself to do so.
• Game one of each match, both players must bring their primary decks. After that, they can choose to play their primary deck again or switch to one of their other two decks. There are no mandatory swaps like in Conquest and Last Hero Standing.
• All Masters Qualifiers and Ranked Ladder Qualifiers will be best-of-three matches. The Masters Tours will also be best-of-three, except that the finals of the Tours will be best-of-five.

Hearthstone provided a video explanation as well, if you’re still confused on the details of it all. There are also more details in the official 2019 players handbook, also now live.

That’s all we have for now! More details will be announced at the HCT World Championships, taking place in Taipei, from April 25-28. You can listen to the Well Met! crew discuss all these changes in their brand-spanking-new episode, going live with this article. I’m also planning a look at some possible Specialist decklists, and thoughts on the format generally, once I get a chance to sit down and think about the format a little more, and how

What are you excited to play?