With a little over two weeks into the newest Hearthstone expansion, the second season of Grandmasters is set to begin from August 23-25 with the new format - a best of three conquest that includes both a shield and a ban phase. Matches will begin at 5am EDT on each day and can be seen here, on the Hearthstone Twitch channel.
While the format is new and replacing Specialist, the decks we are most likely to see on top should be consistent with the final results in the Masters Tour Seoul that wrapped up only days ago. There, we saw the finals consist of a Highlander Mage mirror match, along with two Control Warriors, two Highlander Hunters, a Combo Priest and a Tempo Rogue making up the other six decks in the top eight finishers.
There is little reason to expect much deviation from these decks in the upcoming Grandmasters event, not only because certain cards are problematic and in need of tuning through a balance patch, but because the new conquest format will allow players to shield their most powerful decks from the initial ban phase.
Currently, most may recognize the frustrating pattern of rock, paper, scissors style matchups that can occur. Highlander Mage is countered consistently by Tempo Rogue, winning only 37.86% of the time according the HSReplay, spread across 40,000 games. However, Control Warrior counters Tempo Rogue by winning 72.47% of its matchups over based on 41,627 recent games.
Although we can expect to watch many Mage and Warrior matches this weekend, the third deck choice opens up the possibility for variety, meaning that we may be seeing more Highlander Hunter, Combo Priest, Murloc Paladin, Tempo Rogue, and more.
Although we may be in for a similar selection of decks used at the Grandmasters event, this will more than likely shift soon after. Mike Donais, the Principal Game Designer on Team 5 for Hearthstone recently answered several questions about the state the game. He hinted at balance changes to Warrior and Mage as coming “soon”, which could be as early as August 25 following the conclusion of the Grandmasters event.
At the Grandmasters event, we are sure to see interesting performances from the broad range of expert players. In particular, viewers should keep an eye on Kolento, Swidz, Hunterace, Thijs, Orange, Viper, Rdu, Bunnyhoppor, Firebat, Purple, Amnesiac, Zalae, Pavel, StrifeCro, justsaiyan, Fr0zen, and more. These are among some of the more well-known players, including former World Champions and some who have been away for a bit. Given how early we are still in the expansion, we may see some radical shift, particularly as Highlander Hunter has been doing better recently against Highlander Mage.
On the other hand, if we see a repeat of Highlander Mage destroying all of the opposition, there will be little left to say regarding the need for a balance update. It would be nice to see Blizzard take a more proactive role in assigning card nerfs, because if we once again have a winner stating that their entire strategy was based on drawing Luna’s Pocket Galaxy by turn five, it becomes difficult to keep viewers interested in Hearthstone as a competitive esport.
