The Hearthstone Esports team just recently revealed their plans for the 2019 competitive year. They have been making constant shifts from year-to-year searching for the right way to present and play competitive Hearthstone. The format for 2019, named Hearthstone Masters, has made competitive Hearthstone more accessible to more players than ever before.
The 2019 competitive year will do away with the Tour Stop tournaments. Players will no longer have to travel far distances in order to gain a rather small cash prize and points towards seasonal playoffs. The need to maintain a high point total through high legend ladder finishes has also become unneeded.
The Hearthstone Masters Qualifiers are tournaments that are held entirely online. Using Battlefy to organize the tournaments, players can participate from any location they have access to a device that can play Hearthstone and an internet connection. This eliminates having to take time off from work or school to travel and there are no more travel expenses. 
Another positive is the sheer volume of these tournaments. They appear to run three times a day, five days a week across three regions. For those who are unavailable to play in the qualifiers taking place during weekdays, there are six tournaments per weekend to play in.
There are a couple issues that arise from the tournament being open to literally anyone. The signup window for these tournaments has become very small. The registration for the tournaments opens two weeks prior to the qualifiers and fill up within the day.
Not only do you have to figure out what tournaments you can play in, but what tournaments you will have the time to sign up for. Fortunately, the signup process is pretty short, and you can submit any decks and change them later. Though unfortunately for mobile users, you still have to get those hard-to-copy deck codes.
Not only is the tournament format more accessible to the general player base, but the game format has also become easier. The 2019 competitive year will do away with the Conquest and Last Hero Standing formats of old. They will be replaced by what is called the Specialist format.
The name Specialist is quite fitting because players will now only play one class for an entire tournament. They will have three decks, and the two decks that are not the primary decks can only have five cards different from that deck.
A lot of players who struggle to fill out a four deck lineup with four of what they would consider the strongest decks was always an issue. Having even one deck in a lineup that you aren’t fully confident with can lead to many losses in a tournament. The Specialist format makes it so that even free-to-play casual players can compete with many of the best players.
This format actually has players torn on whether it is good or bad. The tournament format is also reduced to a best-of-three set instead of best-of-fives, which should speed up set times. A major issue in the Conquest format is that two control lineups could make a match last well over an hour.
Players liked the old format because it rewarded players who have mastery over many classes and archetypes and situations. On the other hand, the new format requires mastery of a single class. Players also think that the guessing game of what the field will bring to counter with will lead to rewarding that guesswork over anything else. Not being sure of what cards an opponent will have after their primary deck match because they have switched also creates a secondary guessing game.
Spectators will have a change of pace in the flow of tournaments but not necessarily for the better. As previously stated, some matches are very long. This can become boring over the course of Control mirrors. At least each game played in a set changed the deck match up however.
With the new format, matches are quicker which is a positive for spectators. The downside, however, is that essentially the same deck is being played throughout the course of a whole match. So if a particular archetype becomes very popular for tournament, spectators will grow bored very quickly of watching the same deck over and over again.
Hopefully the Hearthstone meta will be in a good enough position that the competitive meta doesn’t become a rock-paper-scissors duel to see who wins a tournament. Spectators have always enjoyed most when good plays and careful win condition planning wins matches.
Overall, these changes have made it extremely easy for any player to enter the competitive Hearthstone scene. There are more adjustments to be made to competitive Hearthstone before it will reach an optimal format. We shall see where the Specialist format and Hearthstone Masters tournaments take the game.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via their official website.
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