The eight-week long journey of the Hearthstone Grandmasters came to a conclusion this weekend with Grandmasters Playoffs.
The top 6 players from each region (top 3 from each regional group) went head to head to take the regional champion title and book their ticket to BlizzCon Finals later this year. Let's take a closer look at how things unraveled.
Grandmaster Decklists
First things first, here are the decklists of all the 18 players involved across regions (in alphabetical order).
Asia-Pacific
- Alutemu's Conjurer Mage
- DawN's Conjurer Mage
- Shaxy's Conjurer Mage
- Staz's Midrange Hunter
- Surrender's Lackey Rogue
- Tyler's Lackey Rogue
Europe
- Bunnyhoppor's Conjurer Mage
- Feno's Conjurer Mage
- Hunterace's Conjurer Mage
- Kolento's Conjurer Mage
- Orange's Lackey Rogue
- Seiko's Lackey Rogue
Americas
- Dog's Lackey Rogue
- Eddie's OTK Paladin
- Fr0zen's Pogo Rogue
- Monsanto's Lackey Rogue
- PNC's Conjurer Mage
- Purple's Bomb Warrior
VoDs
For those who want to witness the games themselves before delving into results, here are the links to Twitch playlists for each region's playoffs. Be careful not to hover over the playlist on the left side of the stream window or you might see some spoilers!
- Asia-Pacific Grandmasters Playoffs playlist
- Europe Grandmasters Playoffs playlist
- Americas Grandmasters Playoffs playlist
For those preferring Youtube over Twitch, all games should get uploaded to this playlist at some point (at the time of writing Day 3 matches are still missing). You will get some spoilers from video titles though.
Results
BEWARE, SPOILERS BEGIN!
Due to the sheer amount of brackets involved we will not be displaying them here. For those that want to find out the full results in all their glory, click the following links for APAC brackets, for Europe brackets, and for Americas brackets. For those settling on the Finals only I can tell that
- Surrender beat Alutemu 3-1 to take home the APAC title
- Feno didn't lose a single game in the whole tournament, sweeping Seiko 3-0 in the final
- PNC sweeped Purple 3-0 for the Americas crown
There was a mention-worthy rare mistake seen in the Americas semifinals as Fr0zen picked the wrong decklist for the first match against Purple and was consequently handed a match loss despite winning the match.
Short Recap
This was not the most diverse tournament meta ever, eight Mages and seven Rogues making the most of the decks. Multiple Americas players seemed to try something different but in the end the Mage player won. Only Surrender was able to fend off the class to win with Rogue.
In case I'm interpreting the viewership data correctly (wouldn't count on that), the finals weren't pulling huge crowds despite the promise of free packs. In each region's case none of the matches were able to surpass the top 5 viewer peaks of the respective group stages, and were way behind the viewer numbers of the Masters Tour event in June.
I believe Blizzard has mentioned earlier that this would be their first spot to reflect on the current esports system and make changes if deemed necessary. It'll be interesting to see what will happen in the coming weeks.
Hearthstone Grandmasters 2019 Season 2 will kick off on August 23, and even before that we'll visit Seoul (August 16-18) for the second Masters Tour event of this year.
Comments
Correction to the article as the esports viewer stats I was looking at seem to be updated now. From Europe two Finals day matches made it to top 5 viewers peaks of the Grandmaster season, and in Americas all three Finals matches went to top 3 peaks. In APAC nothing changed, and the peaks are still far behind Masters Tour peaks.
Specialist format is simply very low interest. Very few classes represented, zero surprising decklists, tons of mirrors or almost identical matches over and over. And literally nothing in all of hearthstone is more boring than watching a control warrior mirror match that can go as long as an hour.
the tournament format is just boring thats why... you only see a few classes( mage warrior rogue and sometimes hunter) and thats it, and it always the same deck with few card changes but the core remains the same.
Specialist was boring.
I know Blizzard wanted something new but as its seemingly impossible to balance all the classes, watching control warrior mirrors and endless rogues and mages do the same thing over and over again got old very quickly.
Variety is the spice of life and all that. Specialist doesn't allow for that.
I guess you‘re right. I just want to add the fact that the sepcialist format needs more than balance. Variety on ladder is much higher which indicates a healthy balance between most classes (warlock and priest crying in corner).
In this format, flexibility is key. Murloc shaman for instance would never see play in a specialist format because it‘s near impossible to tech it against bad matchups. Mage has taken the throne as the most flexible deck and sets the baseline for everything else.
Im glad that Surrender is back in the fray after losing the semifinals of the World Championship in 2017 due to poor RNG. He's also speaking English now so good for him!
So many Mages, it feels like the College of Winterhold
... okay, I'll show myself out
Nah, that was good! :)
My results are 2 ros packs and 3 classic packs... Seems like not that maby people were watching
Same here, because less than 40k was watching.
I left it open on another window and only got the RoS packs... I say you were lucky! Good for you!
This was my first time ever getting those random Classic packs, and I managed to hoard 3 as well. Two of them were right from the start of the streams so I share the impression of not too many viewers based on that too.