A China-based tournament Hearthstone Global Inn-vitational will take place this week, lasting for four days. The tournament sees regional teams of 9 players pitted against each other in Standard Constructed, Battlegrounds, as well as the newcomer game mode Mercenaries. You can find everything you need to know below.
Teams
Each region will have a team consisting of 9 invited players - 3 for Constructed, 4 for Battlegrounds, and 2 for Mercenaries.
Americas
Asia-Pacific
China
XiaoWang
Europe
Tournament Formats
As the first official Mercenaries tournament, its format is somewhat of an experiment.
Constructed (Standard) Format
- Best-of-five Last Hero Standing with three-player teams.
- Each team will bring one deck for each 10 classes, four of which will be banned before each match.
Battlegrounds Format
- Both teams will have four players in play.
- The winner of each lobby will get 9 points, and the rest 1-7 points in declining order.
- Three rounds will be played in each match.
Mercenaries Format
- Best-of-five Conquest with two-player teams.
- Each team will bring 4 Mercenary parties, one of which will be banned before each match.
- Any two parties of a team cannot have four or more identical Mercenaries between each other.
- Any single Mercenary cannot be included to all four parties.
Stream Schedule
The schedule is the same for all four days, but the formats will swap their order for Sunday's final matches to Constructed - Mercenaries - Battlegrounds.
West Coast PST (UTC-8) | East Coast EST (UTC-5) | Europe CET (UTC+1) | China CST (UTC+8) | |
| Match 1 - Battlegrounds | 19:00 | 22:00 | 4:00 | 11:00 |
| Match 1 - Constructed | 21:00 | 24:00 | 6:00 | 13:00 |
| Match 1 - Mercenaries | 23:00 | 2:00 | 8:00 | 15:00 |
| Match 2 - Battlegrounds | 0:30 | 3:30 | 9:30 | 16:30 |
| Match 2 - Constructed | 2:30 | 5:30 | 11:30 | 18:30 |
| Match 2 - Mercenaries | 4:30 | 7:30 | 13:30 | 20:30 |
The order of matches will be as follows:
- Thursday, November 11th - EU vs APAC first, CN vs AM second
- Friday, November 12th - AM vs EU first, CN vs APAC second
- Saturday, November 13th - AM vs APAC first, CN vs EU second
- Sunday, November 14th - 2nd team vs 3rd team (by standings) first, the winner faces the first seed in the final afterwards
Streams
This tournament will be streamed on the Hearthstone Esports YouTube channel, as accustomed, but it will also be on PlayHearthstone Twitch! Choose your favourite way to tune in below. There will be no pack drops regardless of the method you're watching.
Comments
What a shame that Blizz didn't bring drops for this event, it seems like a really cool group of players that could get more exposure. Cause let's be honest, pack drops drive a lot of the viewership on these competitions.
Invitationals tend to follow their own peculiar rules, depending on who is in charge and doing the picks. Some names are definitely unexpected, to say the least. Even the China team doesn't include a lot of the more known 'heavyweights' (we don't really know their streamers and casters, so could be some of that).
I expect good production values and seeing competitive Battlegrounds or Mercenaries action is so rare, it might be worthwhile tuning in to learn some creative strategies.
Without drops we can really know how many people actually care about this type of tournament.
So we know if there's some kind of rule on how they pick the players? I see a lot of Liquid Team members, could they (or any other team) have some extra option to have their members selected?
Team Liquid was the only Western team invited to China's Gold Team Tournament earlier this year (which the constructed crew won), and I don't think it was the first time some of them were in Chinese tournaments so they definitely have good relations to there.
They have a good variety of the best players around.
Just to make it clear, I wasn't trying to make any negative comment. If they get to have players in the spotlight is because they've earned it!
No packs? Just checking
I wonder what that will do to the viewership figures.
Coincidentally I think I'm busy during this event and will miss the stream :)
Its about 4k right now in twitch, somewhat small for a tournament. Unsurprising, since its essentially streaming 3 different modes, hoping maybe that its audience actually plays all three modes and will gladly sit through all of them.
I watched some of mercs, and its honestly hard to sit through it all. The players tend to rope alot, and unlike hearthstone there's only ever three moves per turn, so there's not much excitement. Although admitably there were a few unexpected skillful plays, like those Cairne speed battles.
As stated in the article, no packs :P
Thanks flux. Bold move from blizz in my opinion.
Considering they couldn't even be bothered to promote the event, I'm not surprised we didn't get packs.
According to Eric from Blizzard Esports Publishing:
I understand they're short staffed, but I just find it so hard to believe there wasn't anyone who was able to put something small together to just tell people it was happening via an official blog. Blizzard has such an unbelievable amount of red tape they can't get anything done. Which is very funny considering the thread that Dean wrote late tonight which has as a part of it:
Now, of course, they are completely different teams at the company, but its just such an entertaining yet bewildering contrast. I'm so glad I'm not in that kind of position and I hope that anyone else on staff here never has to go through a million processes to get something live.
The quote is gone from twitter. LOL
Fixed the link so it didn't have the space at the end!
Also, fun fact: There was a reddit mod who won't be named that cried about us never linking our sources and we were a bunch of scumbags because of that. They were clearly too stupid to click on the author of the blue post block - and you just proved that the links are readily available.
just the link is wrong , have a in the end to be removed
China is the least inclusive region, only has 1 girl in the team.
as a brazilian I hope NaySil gets the first place for the constructed format.
I liked the mercenaries rules with many teams and them not being (almost) the same is a good idea