In the wake of the Blizzard-organized Battlegrounds Brawl streamer event comes another tournament where the new gamemode is in the spotlight. Hearthstone BattleGrind, organized by Esports Arena and Bytes Events, gathers 100+ eager participants to fight for glory and the grand prize of $500 while gathering some bounties on the way. Read on to find out more!
Format
Unlike the Blizzard tournament which happened in a closed participants-only tournament environment, BattleGrind will be a true online tournament.
- All players will create new Americas server accounts for the tournament.
- Players are allowed to start at 11:00 PST/14:00 EST/ 20:00 CET.
- The tournament will last 12 hours; all games that started before or at 22:59 PST will count towards the results.
- The person with the highest rating is crowned the winner.
- All games must be streamed, and players are not allowed to queue with friends.
- Players are allowed to stream their own games with the same delay as in the official stream.
Bounties and Leaderboard Awards
In addition to trying to gain as many points as possible, players can choose to try to get some bounties on the way. Only the first player to reach the bounty goal gets the award. The bounties are
- Perfect game (40 Health victory).
- Perfect Patchwerk game (60 Health victory).
- Deal 35 damage to a living opponent (i.e. already eliminated players do not count).
- Create a golden Shifter Zerus.
- Create a minion with over 250/300 Health (the number varied between sources).
- Win a game with 1 Health remaining.
- Win a game with both of the statistically worst heroes, Patches and Putricide.
- Create a (non-Pogo) minion with over 100 Attack.
These bounties will give a variety of different awards that can be found here. Additionally, a custom portrait (art commission) award will be given for the current leader at every other hour.
Participants
Some familiar faces can be seen on the participant list. The full participant list can be found here.
Stream
We've embedded the official stream below but don't forget to pop by your favourite player's own stream as well.
Comments
The success of Battlegrounds is determinated for a large part from the current state of HS: the game is not entertaining like it used to be, the meta is stale (both for Standard and Wild) and people seems to be bored about the current situation. A completly new mode has refreshed the game and many people, also streamers (like Savjz), have returned.
I'm a bit sad that instead of trying to substantially improve the game by making some big important change (not just another new expansion set), they've prefered to take another path very far from being a card game itself. Maybe when the new Year will come something will shake up HS main mode and Arena.
yes. ppl said this mode would never be competitive. this will prove them right or wrong.
im hoping it proves them wrong but lets see. i think the biggest challenge of BG will be how ladder will turn out after Descent of Dragons. that will heavily impact BG. on both my accounts my friends list is alwasy filled with ppl playing BGs. that will change with the upcoming exp but question is how long?
how long will it be until ppl get fed up of broken ladder and opt to play BG more and more until it eventually turns to be the main mode in HS? far fetched? quite possibly, but you never know...
We might see seasonal shifts, where ladder is more popular after an expansion launches and Battlegrounds more popular when an expansion has been out for a while. I guess it's still better for Hearthstone though if people play/stream BG when they're bored of ladder instead of playing a different game entirely.
yeah that might turn out to be huge for HS as a whole. u play the first weeks the new exp then it gets stale. then theres nerfs sometimes buff apparently and when that gets old and the new exp is like 60 to 80 days away ppl jump in more on BGs and there there will be new nerfs and buffs to the mode and the game will stay fresh until the new exp Rinse and Repeat.
with events and brawls and arena shifts in between i believe HS might enter a new golden era.
Im interested to see this, i understand why the team tournament was played the way it was, dont damage your teammate too much and get draw if possible, but thanks to that you had pretty easy early game sometimes. Not at all how you would play a regular game. So im interested to see how players in a "regular" environment match up.
I didn't watch the last tournament, how did they make sure people on the same teams ended in a draw?
What Zelgadis said, basically they tried to minimise the damage the winner would deal to the "enemy". They often took the turn to level up their Tavern instead of buying minions and putting more stuff on the board. Or they did buy minions they wanted, but didnt play them; or even sell some they would sell of next turn anyway. Position stuff that it would die to a Divine Shield Taunt etc. or so that Deathrattles would spawn as little crap as possible.
Health is a very important resource in Battlegrounds, we can clearly see that just by how +20 Health on Patchwerk makes him one of the best Heroes. So when they managed to minimise damage dealt to each other, or even cause a draw. And not only that, but often being able to upgarde Tavern on early turn where normally you would have been trying for board control so you dont take excessive damage, that created big advantages for them.
It was actually a very interesting to see the strategy behind this team play, which had some random elements to it attached still, for obvious reasons, but it was another layer of play and a big part of why the winning team won.
from the article: "Win a game with both of the statistically worst heroes, Patches and Putricide."
turns out it's not one of the best heroes.. at lest statistically maybe in high elo..
Patchwerk not patches
CardID or NameBADCARDNAMEOh right, my bad, they have similar names so I got them mixed.
All good :) That being said, iv had quite a success with Patches as well :) His HP can help you "cheat out" some wins early game allowing you to upgrade Tavern more aggressively.
There is too much randomness to be sure of a draw, but they let the player with the stronger board would keep buffs in their hand to play after the round, to increase the chance of a draw or at least avoid dealing too much damage. I guess positioning as well, but I don't know the details there, since I watched the overall stream mostly and not specific streamers. Also they would often level up on turns before same-team fights.