How do you feel about Hearthstone Mercenaries being put into Maintenance Mode?

I am willing to admit that I didn’t see it coming when Blizzard announced that Hearthstone Mercenaries was getting shipped off to the internet equivalent of a nice farm upstate named Maintenance Mode. I’m not saying there weren’t perfectly good reasons for this to have happened — Mercenaries was an odd duck from its inception that helped make Hearthstone feel even less like an actual game and even more like a series of games nestled inside of itself like a Matryoshka doll you could play online and get your butt handed to you by someone spamming emotes.

I actually liked Mercenaries quite a bit, but as is the case for a lot of modern “free to play” games, the sheer grind and the way the game seemed to be playing the role of a shakedown artist trying to get me to skip actually playing the game and instead paying them directly for progress turned me off pretty fast. I still maintain that the actual game at the heart of Mercenaries was a lot of fun, but not only was it astonishingly grindy, it also really didn’t feel at all like Hearthstone to me. And that was kind of off-putting since at this point, between Battlegrounds and Mercenaries I was starting to wonder if the problem was that Hearthstone itself doesn’t feel like itself anymore.

But now Mercenaries is off to frolic in green fields alongside StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm, and I’m left wondering if it had to be this way. Did Mercenaries just need a little less of that feeling of being grindy just to get you to pay to skip it, which instead led players to just skip to skipping it? Would it have maybe fared better as a stand alone game than a part of the Hearthstone umbrella? What do y’all think about the way Hearthstone Mercenaries ended up?