The second season of the Grandmasters Tour has been a thoroughly exciting affair with big shifts in the established meta of Hearthstone since the release of the Saviors of Uldum expansion. With the first seven weeks of intense competition now wrapped up, the top four players from each group is set to move on to the upcoming playoff portion of the event.
All this hard work is but a glimpse of the effort made towards becoming the next world champion. The finalists will soon join the three winning players from the first season of the Tour and two from the China Gold Series in the Global Finals, which is not far away at all. As expected, the sudden and unprecedented shifting of 23 cards from the Wild set back into the Standard rotation had a big impact.
Surprising no one, Evolve was one of the most significant cards brought back into the Standard card pool. This card was released in the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion in 2016, and many players may have forgotten how impactful it could be to a Shaman’s board. For a single mana, this spell reads, “Transform your minions into random minions that cost (1) more”, which can provide devastating board state swings and an extremely cheap tempo swing.
Quest Shaman decks have already been extremely potent by playing mutate on either Mogu Fleshshaper or Former Champ with Mutate, but now have even more wide-reaching options with Evolve. It has certainly been odd trying to determine what criteria Blizzard used in deciding to bring Evolve back given how strong the effect is and how balanced the single-target Mutate is by comparison.
As for the competition, every class appeared at least once, with Rogue and Mage appearing the least and not being effective choices. Mage has certainly fallen far from the days of a pre-nerfed Luna’s Pocket Galaxy. Bloodyface took the first place for the Americas region, Casie for the European region, and Tom60229 for the Asia-Pacific region.
Now there are only a few weeks left to find out who takes home the title of Hearthstone World Champion. On November 8, BlizzCon will host the Global Finals at the Anaheim Convention Center in California with an impressive $500,000 prize pool.
Speculation is high right now about what decks will make their way to the final spot. The introduction of Wild cards in the Standard set is still revealing several powerful combinations, as well as some frustrating results as well. Emperor Thaurissan was another strong card this past weekend, and we may see him in greedier Quest Shaman decks that hope to pull off a dreaded and massive double Shudderwock on turn ten with only a single tick needed from Thaurissan.
Meanwhile, Casie showed everyone this past weekend exactly why Ragnaros the Firelord was removed from Standard play, as no one liked the RNG element of being hit with 8 damage to the face, which is exactly what happened to Hunterace.
If Quest Shaman does not dominate play during the finals, there is a strong change that we will see some other combo deck emerge with the mana reduction from Thaurissan. For now, we can only speculate, but there is bound to be some interesting shift in the meta as the “new” cards in Standard open up new competitive possibilities.
Source: playhearthstone.com