Blizzard Entertainment has taken the wraps off the new structure for competitive Hearthstone in 2022.
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Blizzard Entertainment has taken the wraps off the new structure for competitive Hearthstone in 2022. The updated structure will offer a total prize pool of $3 million, an expanded World Championship, and will focus more on Hearthstone’s ‘wider ecosystem,’ reads the release.
The Hearthstone esports system will feature two seasons in 2022, where the first season will run from February to March and will be split into three regions (Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe). Season 1 will see 48 players with a Grandmaster title competing in a four-week tournament. The winner of each region will move forward to the 2022 World Championship.
Season 2 that is named Grandmasters: Last Call, will feature 16 players, where the top four from each region and top four by Masters Tour Points will face each other for a seed in the 2022 World Championship. The 2022 World Championship will see 16 players going head-to-head to win a prize of $500,000. Also, eight spots will be seeded from Season Championships and four spots will be seeded for Chinese players.
In 2022, there will be around 6 Masters Tour online competitions, which will qualify towards one of the two Seasonal Championships that will have $50,000 prize money each. The number of qualifiers per Masters Tour event has been brought down to 60, while the number of ladder invites has been increased to 150.
The first Master’s Tour of 2022 will be held from February 18 to February 20, with further details aren’t out yet. The Hearthstone Grandmasters program was first started in 2019, and will be scrapped after the two final seasons in 2022 are finished. As per the release, the Grandmasters program “does not align with [Blizzard’s] goals for the program,” and the company’s focus will be more on a wider spectrum.
Apart from the Hearthstone esports ecosystem, Blizzard Entertainment has also announced the new Battlegrounds: Lobby Legends series. Throughout 2022, highly-ranked players from America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and China will be able to compete for prize money of $500,000 divided across several one-off events.
