In place of “The Competitive Recap”, today we’ll look at the top Hearthstone competitions in the next 30 days so that calendars can be marked and hype be elevated.
With the exception of the Summer Preliminaries and Truesilver Championship, August was a rather quiet month for Hearthstone. September, on the other hand, looks forward to picking up the pace and already began with Frank “Fr0zen” Zhang’s victory at ONOG PAX finals.
Below is a list of what’s on the agenda for Hearthstone in the next four weeks, focusing on the events that you shouldn’t, by any means, miss.
Sept 3-17: WESG Europe and CIS qualifiers
The list starts small, if that’s the right word for the qualifiers of a $300,000 LAN event played in China. The beauty of the WESG structure is that each region is chopped down to multiple sub-regions, giving competitors a better chance to reach the LAN qualifier finals and Kyiv and from there, potentially, make it to the global grand finals.
Every single registration link you’ll ever need is in our coverage hub here, so make sure to check it out.
Sept 5-9: The Deck Gauntlet 3
Nothing will beat the roaring success and grandeur of ATLC anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean other team events are not worth checking out. The Deck Gauntlet is running this week with a prize pool of $5,000 with some of the best teams in Hearthstone, featuring Complexity, Na`Vi, Virtus.pro, SK Gaming, and ANOX. Notably missing are G2 Esports from this line-up for European rosters, but the list is decent enough and the event is running in a short time-span so you wouldn’t be investing too much following it.
Sept 16-18: PGL Tavern Tales Bucharest
A day before the Summer Championships begin, 16 will be invited to Bucharest, Romania for the second Tavern Tales of the year. Even though PGL are scaling back on the player size and open seeds, this is still a major event with a $25,000 prize pool and top notch players. Half of the invites have already been announced and include Lifecoach, Kolento, StanCifka, SuperJJ, Rdu and more.
An additional twist to the tournament is the 9-class Last Hero Standing format, which is meant to introduce a degree of unpredictability to the competition, at least compared to the standard Conquest metagames observed at most Hearthstone events.
Sept 17-18: HCT Americas Summer Championship
The HCT Summer campaign will start with the Americas Championship mid-September. Overlapping with PGL during the weekend makes for an intriguing viewership battle, as HCT is the higher-impact tournament but features a pool of inarguably lesser known players.
The winner of this will join Amnesiac and Cydonia as Americas’ third representative at Blizzcon.
Sept 24-25: HCT Europe Summer Championship
A week later, fans can tune in for the European counterpart of the Summer Championship. Like its American cousin, the two-day single elimination event will determine who will take the precious Blizzcon seed and inherit the European throne from Naiman and ThijsNL.
Among the major storylines are the returning appearances of Georgec and DrHippi, who were seen competing at the Spring and Winter championships, respectively.
