The biggest names of western Hearthstone will have to survive the qualifiers to battle the Chinese contingent in January.
In October, StarLadder and ImbaTV announced their joined league partnership. And if the two organizations had already taken root in the biggest esports in the world like Dota 2 and CS:GO, this was also good news for Hearthstone players and fans.
Both ImbaTV and StarLadder have been running their own Hearthstone tournaments but neither were truly international. The current season of ImbaTV’s i-League for Blizzard’s card game is one of the premier offline tournaments in the country with a prize pool of $78,000 but the language barrier makes it so that it never reaches western audiences. In contrast, StarLadder’s StarSeries, despite reaching out to the majority of the big names in Hearthstone and offering good production quality, was but another one in a year full of LAN tournaments with prize pools in the lower five digits.
The partnership between the Ukrainian and Chinese organizations, however, promises big things for the Hearthstone scene. $50,000 are put on the line for the grand finals of the first joint event, where the west will battle the east in Minks, Belarus in January. The prize pool alone could enough to set the tone for the tournaments to come in 2016, as it’s higher than the majority of LANs in 2015, including the $40K DreamHack Summer and Winter.
A lot of star power has been summoned to fill the World Division. HWC finalists, big streamers and champions and Korean superstars make the pool of 20 names that will start competing for the limited grand finals spots. The start date is set to December 1st, when Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk, Cong “StrifeCro” Shu, Jason “Amaz” Chan, Frederik “Hoej” Nielsen and Alexey “ShtanUdachi” Barsukov will play their opening matches.
