The Challenge's new format for Battle for a New Champion is weird but intriguing

MTV’s long-running series, The Challenge, is back and with a brand new format. The Challenge: Battle for a New Champion debuted on Wednesday night, bringing 24 competitors together that all share one thing: They’ve never been named a challenge champ.

MORE: The Challenge: Battle for a New Champion: Meet the cast of champs and contenders competing on MTV

Not only does this Challenge season feature all non-champs, it also has the group competing as one team for the first time in 39 (!!) seasons (although, who knows, maybe that could change?). Competitors come from across The Challenge universe, including Australia and the UK.

This year’s format is broken into three distinct sections with Control, Chaos and Conquest. At some point, we will see the return of a collection of our favorite champs — to include CT, Devin, Tori and Kaycee among others — and things will evolve away from the group missions.

The first group mission was straight-forward and offered an opportunity to the group to add $50,000 to the base pot of $300,000 total prize money. Competitors had to run into a deep pit, collect heavy puzzle pieces, get everything and everyone out of the pit and then complete the puzzle … all in the 10 minute time limit (spoiler alert: it didn’t go great).

Let’s get to Contenders, Pretenders and who has work left to do from the first episode.