After only one season and much speculation, Blizzard has decided to retire its problematic “Specialist mode” from Hearthstone's competitive scene and its new Grandmaster Season. From before the mode was even implemented, the consensus was that there would need to be a change to avoid competitive events representing only a small proportion of all the classes in the game.
It was only February of this year that Blizzard announced Specialist as its newest competitive format. As its name suggests, players could bring three decks, but all were required to be from a single class and differ only by a total of five cards per deck. This was supposedly going to encourage players to focus on their strongest class and thus, we would see experts for all the nine classes. Instead, fueled in part because Hearthstone is a game where the developers are slow to react to meta imbalances and overpowered decks, the competitive scene lacked diversity with two or three classes represented at most per tournament.
The rest of the classes were virtually non-existent from a competitive standpoint. Events were uninteresting to watch, and downright exhausting when two control decks faced off for matches that could take upwards of forty minutes a piece.
In its place, Blizzard is implementing a best-of-three Conquest mode with a Shield Phase. In summation, the new competitive format will require that:
- The two battling players bring four decks, each from a unique class.
- The match starts with a Shield Phase where both players will choose one of their own
- Decks to “protect” that cannot be banned.
- Each player will then ban one of their opponents’ decks, removing it from the pool.
- Each player then selects which of their eligible decks they would like to play first, then begin their first game of the match.
- After the first game has concluded, the winning deck is removed from the pool before both players pick which of their remaining decks they would like to play next.
- If after the second game one player is 2-0, then the match is over!
- If the score is 1-1, then the winning deck from the second game is removed from the pool and both players will choose their third and final deck to decide the series.
This mirrors the previous competitive mode seen in the game, only now with the inclusion of the Shield Phase to ensure a specific deck cannot be banned. Since we are back to a similar version of the old Conquest, it will no longer be possible to see a single control deck stall out against another control deck, as the winner will now have their deck locked for the rest of the set.
Although this should be an improvement to the eSports scene, watching Blizzard establish the competitive scene of Hearthstone feels like a parody of itself. Before Specialist launched, these sentiments were declared loud and clear by pro players. Some certainly relished in the idea of specializing in one class, but the default instead was that everyone picked Rogue, until that was nerfed, and then everyone moved onto one or two other classes.
Now we will have to see how players react to this new version of Conquest, which hopefully will be around for more than a single season for players to become accustomed to.