Why Hearthstone Battlegrounds Is Still A Dominant Auto-Battler: "It's A Lot To Juggle"

1 hour ago 9

Published Apr 20, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Gaming Editor at ScreenRant. He has been a professional writer since 2009, and has written for top TV, comics, movie, and video game outlets like Engadget, Polygon, Destructoid, and more. He brings with him an expertise in every game genre, no matter how niche or mainstream.

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Debuting in 2019, Hearthstone Battlegrounds has withstood the test of time. Starting off as an eight-player free-for-all auto-battler, Battlegrounds eventually extended to 2v2 team combat (called "Duos") in 2023. It's continuously reinventing itself, remixing, and adding new factions and heroes, many of which completely alter how you interact with the game.

While Hearthstone as a whole is getting frequent updates, and still has some curveballs for fans every so often, the sheer tenacity of the Battlegrounds team has always wowed me, especially since they're not technically the main element of Hearthstone. Other modes have come and gone from Hearthstone (like Mercenaries), Battlegrounds shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

We sat down with Mitchell Loewen, Lead Game Designer of Hearthstone Battlegrounds, to get into what really makes the mode tick, and how hard it is to maintain after all these years. Based on our conversation, the game is in good hands.

Why Battlegrounds Is Still Going Strong

"It's About Variety"

Everything In Hearthstone's Battlegrounds Quilboar Update

If you've never played Battlegrounds before, you can log into Hearthstone with a fresh account and get started very quickly. At the beginning of a match, you'll pick a hero, which can dictate or embolden your strategy, and a randomized subset of factions (like demons, beasts, or Murlocs) will be available to choose from via a communal pool (called the Tavern). While battling is done automatically, what you choose and where you place it can mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Getting into it, Loewen explains what makes the mode so appealing: "So, speaking broadly, I think one of the biggest strengths about Battlegrounds is that it's just the kind of variety that it can provide, right? So you've got through the combination of the minion pool, the various heroes that you get, and the systems that you have on, you get a lot of inherent variety from game to game. But by changing what content is available from season to season, it lets you both experience new stuff and recontextualize old stuff. So often with systems, each system kind of has its own flavor to it, if you will, like it's got its own things about it that it provides, as it's like novel space that you get to play with."

He continues, going into examples: "You know, last season we had a time warp tavern, for example, and that let you kind of get, quote, unquote, like remixed versions of minions, because you've got each of a lot of minions had time more versions of themselves, and they're kind of like riffs or spins on where they came from. And it's fun to see that. And like, the kind of gameplay that that promotes is, you are supposed to take those minions, put them on your board, and they become kind of core parts of it, right? So that your boards will literally look different based on which time cards are in play. But this season is more about trinkets, where you've got this kind of, like added space, right? It's not literally occupying something on your board. It's more of an additive, kind of like a hero power, which lets you do new things, but your board isn't always going to look quite as different."

Hearthstone Battlegrounds has players collect minions

Loewen notes that the team is constantly listening to feedback about fresh perspectives and ways to play, but also has to weigh what worked in the past. This synthesis of old and new is arguably the best part of Battlegrounds, as the team constantly tries to find ways to keep things fresh.

That said, ideas alone don't make a successful game. Loewen agrees, and I dug into the mindset of the team when it comes to balance: " So I think balance is always an ongoing thing, right? Because sometimes it can be really fun where we have a card, and, if it's completely reasonable in terms of its power, and then you change a couple of cards around it, or you nerf some other minion type, or you rotate a card in and out, and suddenly it's the most powerful card in the game. And so it's kind of like it's an ongoing battle. You're never going to reach a state of perfect balance, but you're always there's always opportunities to move it."

Loewen continues, explaining the philosophy behind their balance: "And in general, for us, we try to get bounce feedback from a variety of sources, because the reality is, there are a lot of players that play our game, and those players are going to have very different experiences depending on how frequently they play, what MMR range they're in, just the type of player that they are. So what we often try to do is provide the best experience for as many players as possible. And sometimes that means making decisions that are more targeted to specific groups of players, and sometimes it means trying to make questions, make decisions that are very broad-based, that are trying to target a large swath of the player base."

In a game like Battlegrounds, one small change can have a ripple effect: "What's really funny...is sometimes we'll make a balance adjustment to a card where we'll change its tier or something, we'll go from like, Oh, it's a tier three card, now it's tier four card or something. And it's really funny sometimes to see some of the player reactions to it, because there'll sometimes be a chunk of players that'll go like, this isn't going to do anything. This isn't going to adjust it at all. And then just sometimes a one-tier change can make all the difference. Like, it's just the speed at which you can get the card and how many copies of it are in the game. Just, you know, the difference between getting a card two turns earlier than you would otherwise. Like, it could be a huge break point for some of these strategies. So sometimes it's really easy to underestimate the impact that something like that can have."

Battlegrounds Is The Best Part of Hearthstone

And The Easiest Way To Jump In

The team is always reviewing feedback on everything, including quality-of-life adjustments. I was shocked to learn just how much thought went into animations, which some players have found overly long in past years: "Whenever you're in combat, if the combat is going to be taking longer, we speed up the animations so that it isn't going to take as much time out of your shop phase. We've also been making adjustments to specific animations on certain cards, as well as to some trinkets. For example, there are a couple of cards in the most recent season where the first time the effect goes off, it'll do an animation, but subsequent times it won't do it again, because you kind of know what it is."

Loewen expands: "We've also done some batching of effects so that rather than buffing cards one at a time, they'll buff all of them at once. Or if it's an effect that buffs a million different times, it'll do that as just one visual impact, rather than doing it like hundreds of impacts. But those are some improvements we've made, and there are also general optimizations and tech improvements we can make. So it's very multipronged. It's usually about an aggregate of a lot of small factors."

There is a there's a new keyword coming in a future standard set that I think is super sweet, and I really want to try using that in Battlegrounds

Of course, keeping a game updated for seven years isn't easy, especially if you're expecting it to be fresh. When bringing this up, Loewen talks about lessons learned: "Yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot to juggle sometimes, and you know, some sometimes what can happen just be, given the size of the game and how long we've been here, sometimes people can make a change in one part of the game that has some sort of ripple consequence of the other one, and then you got to fix it as a result. So, and that's just, that's just the reality of working on a really large game that has, you know, we have a lot of different game modes that we encompass, right?"

As for what the future holds, Loewen and his team have plenty of ideas: "Yeah, I think, for me, some of the most wishlisted things that I think about are content or mechanics-related. And I think there's one mechanic I'm really excited about and want to try. I can't guarantee you it's going to ship or any to ship or anything, but there is a there's a new keyword coming in a future standard set that I think is super sweet, and I really want to try using that in Battlegrounds and see if we can make something unique to that mode out of it, because I think that keyword is really cool."

Until those ideas come to fruition, Hearthstone Battlegrounds will keep rocking. I'm hoping for a standalone client in the future, but for now, it still works great inside Hearthstone proper.