Hearthstone's largest esports event of the year has concluded this past weekend and it was the World Championship! With $500k on the line, 16 card-slingers spent the year working towards the monumental event to take home their slice of the pie.
Below you can find the broadcast VoDs which include over 30 hours of coverage if you'd like to watch the event in its entirety. Coverage below is spoiler-free.
World Championship 2022 VoDs
You can start your adventure off with Day 1!
There are five videos in total from the event, with the main part of the event taking place on Day 3. The first two days were the initial group stage which reduced the number of players down from 16 to 8.
- Day 1 (Part 2)
- Day 2 (Part 1)
- Day 2 (Part 2)
- Day 3 (Quarter Finals -> Finals)
World Championship 2022 Top 8 Results
Expand the spoiler below to see the results. If you'd like to see the Group Stage results, you can find those on the official site.
World Championship 2022 Decks
With the World Championship going back to its roots and featuring 16 competitors, that's an impressive number of 64 decklists! You can find all the decks in our dedicated decks post, but here are some spicy facts:
- Not a single Death Knight has made it into the tournament. So much for that ban protection.
- 16 Rogues and 16 Priests, although not all of the same type.
- 13 Demon Hunters (all Quest) and 10 Druids.
- 5 Mages and 4 Paladins.
- 5 other classes may not be getting their representative this time around.
If you'd like to see the lists that the winner brought, expand the spoiler below.
Did you tune into the world championship this weekend? What did you think about the event?
Comments
Congratulations to the new world champion!
While not a fan of the tournament meta, the absolute maniac inside me loves long priest mirrors. Anyways, well earned win. Now can we please have some balance patch please!
Watched quite a lot of this and despite my accounts being connected, no packs! They don’t really matter, but at the same time they do. I’m sure a lot of f2p people rely on free packs like this to build their collections up.
Hopefully they’re just late, even though it’s been more than 48 hrs at this point. And hopefully Blizzard does not continue their YouTube only deal when it expires!
EDIT: Packs arrived finally. It makes me wonder if they can’t directly proc the packs so instead they ship a data log to Blizz, and someone on their side has to input that somewhere to proc the pack rewards? Would make sense why their system takes so long
Actually Youtube drops are quite random. Sometimes there are two, sometime one and sometime none. Btw I just got my two packs now: Monday, 5PM CET, while I finished the 2+2h 1PM of Friday ... and continued to "watch" all the weekend ... on a dummy PC :)
I got them sometime this morning. Just logged and saw them appear. It's just weird to me that YouTube is making a big enough play towards the streaming market that they sign exclusive deals with streamers and esports leagues, but their drops system is so bad
Yeah, Blizzard killed Hearthstone esports for the big Overwatch League and Call of Duty League payday. Absolutely disgusting move by the finance department. Now the numbers are down and you know for a fact that there's some dude looking only at the numbers and thinks that axing the entire program is the right business play. I don't think that would happen, but I'm certain they are looking to cut costs on "failing" esports programs, even though esports are supposed to be a money pit in the marketing budget.
And if they don't jump ship, they could do more to push the event to players. Why Hearthstone itself doesn't have something in-game to promote it (and getting free packs when it does work) is beyond me. They should have been able to make development time at this point for the largest event of the year.
To be fair, hearthstone's esport scene started declining way before this youtube deal even exist.
But more to the point, this is beyond youtube and twitch. Card games are simply not that viewer friendly to ever break the esport scene, so its not surprising to me that its simply 'thrown in' the deal with other games. Games are too long, having 35 seconds pauses between turns doesn't help, and there's generally no excitement or engagement until the very end. Compared to pokemon vgc for example, you can have an entire 2 out of 3 match completed within one hearthstone game.
I dont think the esport scene will get axed, and that's likely because the cost is likely much smaller than we think. We dont get those nice regionals anymore where top 16 guys are invited to the bahamas for their matches. Not even sure what happens next after this worlds, could be just the occasional online masters tours and that's about it. China isn't even in the next one.
If they do end up axing it, the one small token victory that I will take is that bunnyhopper actually won a worlds, that man deserved it. Probably the last of the old guard from the good old days.
The harsh reality is that if blizz wants hearthstone to go back to the 2016 days of esport, they would need to pump a lot more money into scene, and get the productions up a notch. Balance the game, or at least introduce some differences, like a noz rule where every turn is only 15 seconds long.
But at the end I think they'll just take that disgusting youtube money and forget about it, any day.
Remember that tavern brawl that we had the chance to play world champions lineups? Most fun that I had playing brawl
Looking back at old articles trying to see exactly when the exclusive deal ends, Hearthstone was described as being “thrown in for free”. So even when the deal was made, before viewership dropped, it’s like they didn’t really care about HS eSports.