We were able to catch up with Dylan ‘Hotform’ Mullins at Good Game Convention in Toronto. Hotform is a professional Hearthstone player who lives in Toronto. He recently competed in the Hearthstone Americas Championship where he came second after Purple, another Canadian. He is an active streamer in the Hearthstone community, his stream can be found here and his Twitter can be found here. We had an opportunity to talk to him about how he’s feeling regarding the current state of Hearthstone. Full interview below:
Q: How are you liking the current Standard format versus what we had before?
Hotform: For me, and for all the pros that I’ve spoken to, this is probably the best expansion we’ve seen. There’s just so many more creative decks you can use. Also, we finally see the game going to turn ten regularly, these new Old Gods they introduced, these ten mana plays – it’s kinda like are we really going to get to play them? But yeah, we’re actually getting to play them like every game. So I think everyone is happy for that, we get to see so many cool things getting used.
Q: What about the Wild format? Lots of people talked about keeping it alive, but we’re not really seeing much of that. Do you think down the road we’ll see Wild coming back?
Hotform: I think it’ll be kind of like an entertainment style, like Arena is – and we have seen Arena tournaments in the past, and there were rewards for that. But it’s just going to be less popular than Standard for sure. I also think as a player it’s less appealing, there’s all the more ridiculous mechanics that are kind of less fun to play against, so that drives a couple people away as well.
Q: What’s your favourite Standard deck currently?
Hotform: My favourite deck currently is the C’Thun Control Warrior. I really like building up that big C’Thun over the course of the game, where you’re powering it up, then you unleash it all at once. It’s very satisfying!
Q: What’s your favourite card from Whispers of the Old Gods?
Hotform: Favourite card… I think I like N’Zoth probably. When they took out all those Deathrattle minions and then they also added something to charge up all the remaining ones they kind of introduced a whole bunch of deck styles for each class. We see N’Zoth Rogue, N’Zoth Hunter, N’Zoth Paladin… it’s a really solid legendary that kind of shifted the game to a slower pace.
Q: What about your least favourite?
Hotform: The four mana 7/7 for Shaman, the Flamewreathed Faceless I believe it’s called.
Q: That leads into my next question, how do you feel about Shaman right now?
Hotform: I mean I bring the Shaman deck, it’s a good deck. I do think it’s a little overplayed. Probably the biggest problem was Doomhammer, they didn’t nerf Doomhammer at all. Otherwise, engaging in these board control fights would be fun, but they tend to just hit you in the face a lot, which is… interesting.
Q: Any last statements about the meta, the event, anything?
Hotform: I guess just about the event. The event is fantastic and I love seeing these Toronto events. With EGLX a couple weeks ago and this one now, people are starting to see Toronto as an eSports hub, and we’ll probably get more in the future.
A huge thank you goes out to Hotform for his time and excellent answers. For those interested, here is the C’Thun Warrior deck he mentioned, which he used to get to Legend this season. Good Game Convention was excellent this year, and as Hotform said, hopefully it means that there will be more conventions in Canada to come.