We’re excited to announce the release of a patch for competitive Hearthstone that will ensure you’re always in charge of your tournament experience.

We’ve seen the community embrace the Open Decklist format for competitive Hearthstone. In addition, Blizzard announced HCT Tour Stops will adopt the Open Decklist format from now on.

What is the Open Decklist format?

In an Open Decklist tournament, all submitted decklists from every player are made public once the tournament starts.

We’ve buffed our platform by integrating decklist submission and management into the Hearthstone tournament experience. We support both Open and Closed Decklist formats.

Here’s what we’ve added to support the Open Decklist format…

Tournament Creation

There is now a setting during tournament creation for organizers to designate whether a tournament is running Open or Closed Decklist format.

All new Hearthstone tournaments created on Battlefy will default to the Open Decklist format, as this is the preferred format of the community and HCT.

Decklist Submission

When players join a tournament, instead of choosing the classes they want to play, they’ll now submit and verify their decks!

Guess who?

We’ve made decklist submission simple by using the deckstrings feature built into the game.

Instructions on how to copy deckstrings can be found in this blog, which you can share with your players.

Decklist Management

Until the tournament starts, players can manage their decklist by going back to the tournament page and clicking the “Edit Decks” button on the Player Guide.

As organizers, you and your admins can edit any player’s decklist at any time. In your tournament’s admin portal, you can access and modify any player’s decklist by going to the Manage Participants page.

No more Google Sheets!

Playing Matches

Finally, for Open Decklist tournaments, opponents’ decks are shown on the match page. Players can make important strategic choices, from banning which deck they don’t want to play against to keeping track of what cards their opponent has played.

We’re pumped for these changes and hope you are too! This update will go live Monday, February 19th.

How will this impact tournaments you’ve already created?

All tournaments created before this update will default to Closed Decklist format, as players may have joined without submitting their decklist. It would be unfair for one player to know their opponent’s decks and not vice versa.

If you would like to employ the Open Decklist features for an existing tournament, here’s what to do:

• If you used Battlefy’s Custom Fields feature to collect deckstrings from players, we will automatically convert those into decklists in our system so players won’t have to come back to submit their decklists again.
• It is your responsibility to remove the deckstring custom fields from your tournament after they have been converted to actual decklists. If you do not, new players that join will be prompted to enter decklists twice.
• If you collected deckstrings outside of Battlefy, you can enter them manually for your players in the tournament admin portal. You can see which players have not yet fully submitted their decklists.
• Once all players in your tournament have all their decklists submitted, change your tournament settings to enable the Open Decklist format. We will warn you if there are any players still missing decklists.

Got questions?

There are more exciting Hearthstone features coming soon!

In the meantime, if you have any questions or want to give feedback on this patch about the Open Decklist format, please email us.