Now that the Winter Season has ended, Blizzard is preparing for the first edition of Hearthstone's equivalent to the Olympics.
When in October Blizzard expectedly announced changes for 2017's Hearthstone Championship Tour, it also announced two new tournament series. The Hearthstone Global Games (HGG) and Hearthstone Inn-vitationals (HSI) are new, big tournaments aimed to bring more entertainment and competition to enthusiasts. Today Blizzard posted a blog with more details for the first Hearthstone Global Games.
Similarly to the Olympics, players will play for their respective countries. Each eligible country sends four players to compete, of which one is the countries highest point-earner during a certain period, while the other three players are voted for by the community. The electable players are selected based on their currently acquired competitive points, previous competitive results and their position in the community (beware, bm-ing ropers). It reminisces of the Overwatch World Cup last year, in which a similar qualification process was used.
The tournament uses three phases before resulting in the Grand Finals, and is structured as follows:
Format
- All three phases will use a best-of-five, class vs. class format with nine unique classes per team.
- Each player on the team will have two classes they are able to play.
- The ninth class will be designated as the “Ace Deck” and may be used for game five instead of previously un-selected decks of the “Ace Player”.
Phase 1
- The 48 participating teams will be seeded and placed into one of eight groups based on their country’s total Hearthstone Competitive Points for the Winter Season.
- Each group of six teams will compete online against each other with each team playing each other once (Round Robin).
- The top three teams from each group will advance to Phase 2.
Phase 2
- The 24 remaining teams will be seeded and placed into one of six groups based on their country’s total Hearthstone Competitive Points for the Spring Season.
- Each group of four teams will again compete against each other in a Round Robin.
- The top two teams from each group, and the four highest 3rd place teams based on tie-breakers will advance to Phase 3.
Phase 3
- The remaining 16 teams will then be seeded into a single elimination bracket.
- The top four teams will advance to the live Global Games Finals.
Global Games Finals
- The finals will use a best-of-nine, class vs. class format similar to the qualification period.
- The final four teams will be seeded into a single elimination bracket.
A total of 48 countries will be represented, and none of those will go home empty-handed. With a $300,000 prize pool and a dose of publicity, an appearance in the HGG is most certainly valuable to a lot of cardslingers from all over the world.