Duels for me was always more interesting that normal hearthstone

It's a damn shame because duels is cool and I really like watching it. I'd play it myself if my collection wasn't full of holes from not playing the game for such a long time.

The big issue I see with the removal of all these game modes, is that they're not putting anything in their place. Ultimately it just means we have less ways to play the game. Tavern Brawl is already somewhat abandoned since we see like two new ones a year. Mercenaries is dead and duels is closing down. Twist spends more time closed than open, and classic is gone. HS now is just Standard, Wild, BG and Arena, and 3 of those games mode are incredibly similar gameplay wise. I'm just getting bored with it

No one wants to "Buy-In" to a dying product and when you close game modes, regardless of the actual status of your game, it feels like it's a dying product. This is one of those things that needs the ole compliment sandwich. *Here's something to look forward to!* we're dropping duels *And can you believe this is happening next!*

I was really excited to try duels when roffle started playing it however when I clicked on it and realized I have to own the cards to use the fun decks I felt the same way I felt about wild, which is that it’s just too hard to get into

I'm probably in the fringe but I find Duels way more fun than arena. I enjoy the pve content more or less and this mode I feel did a nice rng blend of PVP vs pve but rarran is correct on the card barrier you need a strong 16 count to build on to make it worth the entry fee.

I didn't play duels much, but I am fully aware that there are people who did, and this just fucking sucks for them. Even just saying "We have no plans to update Duels anymore" would be better than removing it outright!

I don't play hearthstone anymore, but when I did I was worried that duels would mean the end to all single player dungeon runs. The only time I ever feel like downloading the game again is to play through those old dungeon runs, because I had a goal to beat the final wing of dalaran heist with every class using a random deck on hard mode and I never finished. If dungeon run ending means that we will get more bespoke single player draft game modes, then I would definitely play again. Just my two cents, I was never interested in PVP dungeon runs because I don't want to lose to other people's OP decks!

As many times as I have typed a litany of slurs into google after losing to a Rattlegore in duels, duels was really fun for me, and I will miss it.

Since they’re removing duels I wish they unban every card for it in the final days leading to the removal So that way we can all play the most unhinged version of it since now they don’t seem to care for their casual audience anymore

The idea that they are bringing treasures to arena seems horrifying. They need to change the amount of cards you can draft like MTG

They ruined duels when they changed the buckets from synergystic ones to expansions ones where you often just got offered garbage.

Rip Roffle, especially with his most video

duels with an arena draft deck is something I would be in for. I hate constructing decks.

The core issues of Twist and Duels very much reflect their main purposes, which will probably continue as HS drops more experimental formats in the future. The people who keep up with the Standard rotation always buy into the new packs and the new product and provide immediate stimulus to the economical side of the game. However, Wild doesn't have enough of a playerbase where the older sets see enough purchase. So they bring these new "fun and original" formats with limited card pools to pressure people into either wasting their dust to craft older cards, which will cause them to be more likely to buy newer products in the future, or to buy older packs/sets in order to pull the cards or get the dust needed to get the cards they require to access the formats.

Duels was the best part of headstone…

I don't remember battlegrounds releasing as a tavern brawl. I think I heard it started off as a tavern brawl but I remember disguised toast playing it in like late 2019 and it releasing shortly after?

Duels are so fun. And payed off better than playing classic hearthstone. 150 gold and you get a guaranteed card pack, 30 gold back or 30 dust. And if you won a couple of games it would award you more than you payed for.

i really loved duels! i vaguely remember when it released it was a little difficult to get into. i think i had the the bonus xp on the reward track they do with every expact, so i had a lot of cards and i could get into faster then others. i perfer the duels format over arena and i highly dislike battlegrounds so it was my only other game mode outside of standard. i also like twist(or i think i would if they actually did anything with it). i agree this is a big hit to my confidence in hs. im hoping that this pruning will result in stronger support for other developments in the game

The solution to wild formats being a big problem collection wise is to half the cost and disenchant value of wild cards, make wild packs not give standard cards and half the price of packs too. Add catch up wild packs that give double the amount of wild cards. The game has potential, they just have to be willing to accept that wild cards have inherently less value than standard cards and show for it price wise.

I would prefer duels where you don't get to start with a deck made from your collection, but the whole run is picking options and building your deck as you go. That way you can't net-deck

Duels had the most potential if they just made it so, that u draft the deck instead of crafting it.

In a way I sort of knew this was coming. I used to only play hearthstone for the PvE modes. I dropped the game for a while when I heard that they were not adding new dungeon runs anymore in favor of Duels. After some number of months, I considered coming back again, but at that moment, I heard that all the PvE modes were inexplicably broken, soft-locks and stuff, enemy AI just breaks for no reason, etc... and that basically sealed it-- I wasn't coming back.

still pretty scummy that they are just deleting a format that some players, albeit not that wisely, crafted a bunch of otherwise useless cards for

I'd rather play arena than duels, but the other day, I had the thought that they could take a page sort of from duels. What I mean is that after 1 loss in the arena, you can choose a card and get a choice of 3 cards to replace it or deny it and just keep that card. The second loss you can choose 2 cards. You still have a 30 card deck, but it allows some of those really ish decks a fighting chance. they would be kind of like buckets, but only replacing 1 instead of adding to the deck.

Duels was incredible, i was hardcore arena player and didnt get to use my collection. In duels my collection got some use out of it atleast

Duels is hella fun I'm going to play it right now!

The problem with mercenaries wasn't the developers' fault. It was (and is) fun. It was something else inside the HS family. But you got a peek greedy Blizzard, which wanted to get as much money as possible out of the game mode. And that was a burden it never got rid of. Because they were too greedy to maximize the profits instead of appetizing a new game mode. Everything was dished as the most unfriendly game experience to see the greed of a company at every corner.

Removing duels and not removing mercenaries is baffling to me, especially since I got really into duels only a few months ago. It's so annoying dealing with blizzard. First Overwatch and all that bullshit, and now Hearthstone is shrinking. And will continue to shirnk until it dies and they release "Hearthstone 2"! And probably make it terrible like they've started to do the last few years

I had played from release up until the northrend expansion (the one with the death knight hero cards). Then I had quit for an absurd amount of time. Like I just tried to play after many years away a few months ago. Because I knew Tavern Brawl to be a mode that only helped expand your collection with it's one free pack a week, and arena to be a pvp collection expanding mode I made the horrible assumption that Mercenaries was a huge pve mode that would eventually help you expand your collection also. Back in my day, every mode outside of the main way to play was a way to expand your collection. And I spent all my "welcome back" gold progressing Mercenaries. I thought it would turn into a huge catch up mechanic. Once I realized what it was and the huge mistake I made I submitted a ticket. I told them I want a gold refund for all the Mercenaries stuff or I will never touch the game again. And that is why I no longer and will never play Hearthstone again.

This is honestly saddening, especially because duels was supposed to replace the solo adventure dungeon runs, this is honestly bullshit, kuz now we don’t get that or duels

Battlegrounds was made to get in on the Dota Chess fad. "How do we turn hearthstone into a auto battler". That was the thinking behind it. Rarran is giving the people in charge of hearthstone wayyy too much credit. They couldn't aggressively monetize it because all of the Dota Chess clones only had cosmetic monetization. That was the only thing that stopped them.

HS has a huge barrier to entry problem. You not only need a large collection, you need enough knowledge of the game and the metadecks, because with a much smaller playerbase the average person is tryharding, if you're casual and queuing into ranked Standard you're going to have a miserable experience even at the lowest rank. And don't even think about queuing Wild or Casual.. in some ways the game needs a full reboot or Classic mode for people who just want it back the way it used to be.

I think duels is a blast, I know you haven’t enjoyed it when you played it, but I know a lot of people really love it.

I feel like for a new game mode, they could take a page from MTG Arenas book. Release a game mode like sealed or limited. Furthermore, actually incentivize people to play instead of having a barrier to entry. I actually really liked the concept of Duels, but I started playing again in FoL after a long break, I dont have a Wild Collection. So, everytime i get like 2 or 3 wins in, i would get crushed by people playing with a much larger card pool than what I had.

Its such a shame what happened with duels, I feel like it was the evolution of the pve campaigns that were releasing since WITCHWOOD, every expansion they tried doing something different and upgrading the singeplayer campaign experience, and I remember that at the time there was a good amount of people that wanted to play with the treasures and new hero powers but in a pvp setting, and duels felt like the height of what they were doing with witchwood, rise of shadows and then saviors of uldum Really sad hearthstone doesn't do stuff like this anymore

Next up on the chopping block: Hearthstone Twist!

I was playing duels every expansion and miniset before this happened.

Duels is my favorite gamemode. Im sad its leaving :(

Duels has been probably my top played game mode since its release. To be fair I never saw the barrier to entry because I keep a full collection. But it sucks to see them canning it so quickly as those of us that play it regularly really enjoy it.

The difference between tavern brawl and duals is the fact that they started it so early and made it such a pinpoint of their weekly rotation that they can't go back and alter that one now without really upsetting everybody. In my opinion I feel like they should just combine the essentials between twist and duels and create a rotating meta every single month to every single week somewhere in between.

the thing i like about duels, other than the game mode itself is the fact that the starting deck only requires one card of each, which made the decks considerably cheaper. im gonna miss it so much cuz its my most played mode, although im aware that i don’t represent the majority of the player base

My issue with duels was that i had to build my own deck. But i dont have any good cards. Woul have much preffered if it was actualy pvp dungeon run

I think there's another thing to think about when talking about Mercenaries. The actual gameplay might have been fun, but the mode was so bloated with menus and had such a terrible UI that I didn't have any fun playing it. I think if the experience of actually playing the mode was better, it could have been so much more...

I was really excited for duels when it was released. I loved the single player dungeon run type modes and playing a pvp mode with the same progressive deck building sounded great and I thought it would give a lot of variations in the game. The actual experience was that it felt way more pay to win than normal hearthstone. Because, the small starting deck let people optimize the decks to crazy degree and with a small collection you just got destroyed in the first few games before you even got to do the fun progressive deck building. Perhaps if they let you draft the starting deck similar to arena or something, the game mode would have been more fun.

battlegrounds was made as a response to the overwhelming popularity of dota auto chess. during that time period everyone was making their own auto battler capitalize on the hype. hearthstone was a free to just play game at the time that was still hugely popular so when they made their own auto battler it was quite a success for that genre especially considering the audience was people who played card/strategy games. blizzard most definitely did have money in mind making it but they made it so fast that they couldnt implement a proper monetization model so at the beginning the game mode was much more open to players that didnt buy a pass which now gives 2 more play style options vs the original 1. make no mistake the game mode was definitely made to make money but they had to race other games that were putting out auto battlers as fast as 3 months after dota auto chess.

Duels has nothing to do with the player base it has everything to do with the monetization of it!

I came bck to this game for Twist so They got me I had fun reliving the old days with alittle new stuff. Now im going for legend for the 1st time since GVG so they got me

Them removing duels and not giving us any new pve dungeon runs... I am done with giving this game my money. Just done.

I hope they re-add classic mode soon. Really enjoyed it and makes me nostalgic for the 2014 days

What the devs are really saying is "As we think about the future of lining our pockets. We realize you suckers will buy our solo adventures if we remove the more fun free version of it. So with a heavy heart (Not really) We remove duels to focus more on putting more mercenaries bundles in the shop"

i want to believe that they created this game mode after my post on forum about pvp dungeon run, but in my concept decks where as in other dungeon runs - already created + the random one. dunno mb it would be better mb worse

Duels > Mercenaries

Played so much duels that recently I started crating some of the starter deck cards in gold

Been playing since closed beta, have played competitively being close to qualify for official major events multiple times. Guess I had a good run on this game.

Duels gone before Mercenaries.....wow

The problem is a need for more cards in collections for a smaller deck that you might not get to play because the random classes is dumb

I liked duels, purely because it reminds me of Koblods dungeon solo adventure.. sad to see Duels gone

It’s crazy how the only playable modes of hearthstone nowadays are Arena and Battlegrounds. And the only non excruciating way to get money for Arena is battlegrounds and Arena itself lmao. If anything, I’m convinced they changed the way to earn money solely so battlegrounds would serve as a money-farm for arena as well.

I think there is an interesting comparison to be made with Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering when it comes to non-standard game modes. Arguably MTGs most popular format, Commander/EDH, is a community based format. The game mode was developed by the community before Wizards started producing products for it, and the rules committee are all community volunteers. Even on a smaller scale, different playgroups and card shops might have house rules and customized ban lists. By contrast, Heathstone has a much harder time making/supporting new formats. As Rarran points out, a lot of them seem to have 'monetize first then make good' approach. Even game modes like Duels and Twist, that are largely just 'Hearthstone with extra steps', don't seem to do well. I think the main difference is that MTG is a physical card game while Hearthstone is digital. In MTG, fans and armature game designers can just say 'lets add/change these rules and see what happens' pretty easily. Hearthstone devs have to write code and implement UI changes, all of which takes a bit of time and money to do. No surprise when some corporate boss/shareholder demands the minimum amount of resources be spent to experiment with a new game mode, even if it has real potential.

It had potential but you can tell monetization was the first thing discussed when designing the gamemode.

I loved Duels it was a gold farm, took more skill for certain heros than others.

It wasn't lucrative enough I'm so pissed

The better a game is in free to play, the more comfortable I become spending money to support it.

The best taverns are the ones that have different rules for you to BUILD your deck and play.

I've already uninstalled hearthstone and battle net as a whole. Duels was the last piece of hearthstone I found fun, and Bnet was only on my PC to launch hearthstone. The camel's back is now broken.

The biggest issue is the greed from blizzard! They are producing poor designed content through the roof and are demanding an extraordinary amount of money for it. Not only Hearthstone but also Diablo, WoW or Overwatch have suffered from poor decision making in the past few years. You cant blame the creators for working under fixed guidelines. The only goal of this company is to generate the highest amount of profit possible, ignoring the later results. The best examples are mercenarys and twist from hearthstone or D4/Immortal and Warcraft3 remake.

I acually like to see that I remember when it came out i wanted to try it and when he showed me a special card for my deck i had 1or2 /6 and i was like nope fk this shit im out

i actually enjoyed roffles duel videos, it almost made me want too play it aswell but i dont want to support blizzard with my money so i didnt

Such a shame that duels is doing poorly enough that the feel like they have to close it, it's always been such an under-rated but great game mode imo. And it actually doesn't take that many cards to make a decent duel run, you only need 16 singleton cards and then the buckets and treasures quickly become more important than your starting deck ! Meanwhile the piloting is very subtle with difficult decisions all the time and a large variety of viable strategies you can end up against. I guess their issue is that they have no one ready to crunch the duels data to figure out how to design and balance buckets with new expansions... honestly seems like a weird failing because there's no way designing an auto-balancer that modifies the weighting of over-performing cards would be impossibly difficult. The current standard meta is alright but not having duels to fallback on for when I'm sick of it is going to sting. Arena was ok in 2015 but with that format still being just 'Hearthstone but everybody's deck kinda sucks' after ten years there's really no appeal at all...

Not wanting to put resources on a game mode is not a valid excuse for a company as big as blizzard

I stopped playing standard and started playing battlegrounds hopefully the remove standard from the client next.

Personally I think duels because of its complexity of deckbuilding strategy and difficult curve made it even harder to enter for new players. It almost felt because every run was different that the gamemode was made for content creators as much as it was for players.

Nooooooo this is the only thing that kept me playing hs….. 😢😢 RIP

"Shift our resources where we feel its needed most..." the storefront basically

Duels is actually the only reason I came back to hearthstone. Super sad we are losing it. I’ll probably quiet again soon from it.

They abandoned solo content. They stopped making new brawls. They lied us about mercenaries and stopped working on it. They cancelled classic. They cancelled twist. They cancelled duels.

really loved the crazy things u can do in duels too bad they cannot support the mode. i hate battlegrounds tho so sucks that the mode is so popular its just a totally different game itself.

I think you are referring to a self fulfilling prophecy at 9:58

I don't know why they decided to remove them. In a world where Arena and Mercenaries exists especially. Duels are very fun and non-repetative with a large variety of decks being valid.

The good news is BG duos looks sick

I’m just waiting for the announcement of them closing the game

the reason theyre getting rid of duels is because its not making money plain and simple. they have a casual mode where you dont need to spend anything to play in the format and have cards given to you through draft. theres also the fact that duels has been super meta for a while so if youre a f2p or light spender then you typically still cant play well because youre missing core pieces for your 16 card deck from wild. nobody wants to buy wild stuff because you can only use it twist, duel, or wild and wild is outrageously meta. you also have the fact that they still charge the same price for wild cards as standard cards which means players arent incentivized to buy them when they can buy standard cards and be more relevant at any time. so when you combine these underlying problems of cost and stagnation in modes new players arent at all able to compete and vets are just burned out or bored.

Rarran really hit some important key kites here, I come back to hearthstone because they remove the barrier of entry to fuel and it is a very enjoyable mode that is just different from the same kind of game play loop they been pushing since the launch of HS. I stopped playing hearthstone because they stopped caring about duels as a model and my passion slowly dies for HS. I just found play the same standard model for the past 7 or 8 years felt so boring. I remember what toast said about the game. If they just keep releasing new cards, it’s not going to be sustainable for the future of HS. But they just don’t have a leader in the team to turn the wheel I guess.

Im gonna use all the tickets now, dam it it was better than Arena :P

I enjoyed twist for a bit but stopped. They could have cooler rule sets and have more balance changes.

I'll never go back to hearthstone now.

I like that they didn’t even mention mercenaries. They just said traditional hearthstone, battlegrounds and more

I only play duels. I guess I dont play heartstone anymore. Thanks Blizzard.

Duels is more fun for me than standard and wild. As standard Hearstone is worse in my opinion with needing to spend money to even have a chance of winning games. Case and point Dragon Duid, if you do not own the Cards for this deck, then there is a high chance to lose, same with some other current popular decks. A new player will not have a chance to catch up to the standard meta before it changes again. In duells new players still have a chance, they might not have the newest card, but the Buckets can save you and even make you win more games, than you would have won in standard. I do not own newer cards or even have complete decks and I mostly played Duels for fun and actually won games thanks to the buckets, when I was missing many of the cards, I would have needed in standard to even have a chance. Really standard and Wild sucks, and will suck more the newer you are and the more cards you need to gather to even have a chance of winning. The only times I win with my decks in standard is when I play against a new player or simply decks that also wanna have fun. I hate that I just wanna play Death-rattle Otk (My own version, less op since I lack cards) Priest and just keep being matched against Dragon Druids, while standing no real chance, as I do not possess the newer and other current meta cards.

Personally I've played quite a bit of Duels, but the way to open the stuff was annoying x

I came back for Mercenaries and then stuck around for Classic, so I definitely feel for the Duels community. Bummer.

Make mode -> grab the money -> stop supporting mode (maybe delete it) -> repeat

I'm surprised it lasted that long, I don't even think most people remember it nor I know any streamer who promoted it. Sure, it was kinda fun for a bit, but I feel its moment was over after the Scholomance hype. It shouldn't have been a permanent game mode, but another Tavern brawl, honestly. Mercenaries is even worse tho. That one I still have no idea how the hell is still in the game.

I think we can consider Twist as a monetization of balancing old cards in the Wild

I still have my 2 free mercenaries packs that I haven't unlocked.

I never cared about duels and blizz kinda abadoned it so it was bound to happen. Problem is that they won't put more resources into normal hearthstone modes

Duels always felt awkward. It never felt right to play. Fun to watch at times, but never to play.

Rarran podcast when

Nowadays Hearthstone is mostly Standard + Battlegrounds