Rush is a 3v3 queued mode, and the patch notes undersell how much actual structure is packed into it. There is a real pool behind the randomness: 15 total battle arenas, with each match drawing seven of them, one of which is always a neutral map where the round begins.
That neutral opening matters more than it sounds. Every other arena in the gauntlet is somebody's objective, you are either pushing toward the enemy castle or holding your ground against a team doing the same. The neutral start is the one moment in a Rush match where neither team has a built-in positional advantage, everyone begins on equal footing before the actual push-and-pull of the gauntlet decides who is attacking and who is defending for the rest of the match.
Seven arenas drawn from a pool of fifteen means you are seeing roughly half the pool in any given match, high enough that a player can plausibly learn all 15 well enough to have a read on whatever shows up, low enough that you cannot build a whole strategy around exactly which arenas you will get. That is a genuinely different kind of preparation than a fixed competitive map pool, less about deep specialization in fewer maps, more about broad competence across a wider set.
The budget-and-timer objective format is worth taking seriously too. A round that is short and limited on money does not stop being about economy decisions, it just compresses them. Whether to save a mediocre gun for the next round or spend everything trying to force the tower right now is still a real decision, it is just made faster and with less room for a bad read to be corrected later in the round.
Worth arguing about: does the neutral-start-then-gauntlet structure actually create interesting asymmetric decision-making as a match progresses, or is it just dressing up a coin-flip start with extra steps?
Argue it out in the discussion thread — that is where this actually gets resolved.
More Rush Hour coverage: The Premier pick change · Does Rush matter competitively? · What we're testing next · The silent reload trade · March's mag overhaul, revisited · The new crosshair default