Watch 10 minutes of Hearthstone's new Battlegrounds mode

As a surprise addition to the reveal of Hearthstone's next expansion, Descent of Dragons, Blizzard announced an entirely new mode, launching in beta very soon. It's called Battlegrounds, and it's an eight-player showdown inspired by the autobattler genre that started earlier this year with Dota Auto Chess. Above is a full 10-minute match of Battlegrounds from Blizzard's press site.

The player's champion is Ragnaros the Firelord, and the footage takes us through how a typical Battlegrounds match will play out. Matches alternate between the tavern, where players recruit minions, and 1v1 battlefields against the other seven players in the match. Everyone starts with 40 health, and the last one standing wins.

Head over to our BlizzCon 2019 hub for more news from this year's convention, and check out our gallery of all the Hearthstone: Descent of Dragons cards so far.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).