The Hearthstone 2019 Wild Open Finals will be the only segment of the Wild Open that will be streamed. 300 Players qualified last month through finishing top 100 on ladder to make it into the tournament. Only eight players will get their chance at the finals in the only Blizzard event for Wild play.
The Playoffs starting on February 16 are going to be a brutal bloodbath. 100 players from each region are going to be playing a Swiss style tournament with a top eight playoff to qualify. The entire playoffs will take place over the course of only two days. It will be a best-of-three, three decks with one ban tournament.
This format means that everything is really up in the air, given the short sets and the Wild meta. Due to the huge amounts of decks that are competitively viable in Wild, there might not be any consistency in who actually performs well in the tournament. Many of the participants are Wild only players as well, so some names might not be familiar to most players.
Once the final eight competitors are decided, they will all play a playoff to determine who is the champion of Wild. There is a total prize pool of $30,000. For those that make it to the top eight, they will make at least $1,500. The first place winner gets a nice $11,000 for their prize money.
Despite this being a Wild event, many of the top competitive players went all out in order to qualify for this tournament. A few of the top players from the Wild Open last year actually had some really good years in the Standard format as well. There’s also some Wild specialists to look out for in the tournament.
There quite a number of European and American pros this year in the 100 man brackets. Most notably there are three players headed to the World Championship in the pool. Torben “Viper” Wahl from Germany, Mihai “languagehacker” Dragalin from Canada, and Brian “bloodyface” Eason from the US have all proved they can apply their skill across both formats.
There are a couple of players that participated in past Wild Opens making a return. Jesse “Control” Chrysler finished second in the 2017 Wild Open and is in the pool for the Americas. Also to be there is the Wild specialist “RenoJackson” who finished in the top four in the 2018 Wild Open. He was playing in Asia at the time but has since moved over to the Americas region.
Going down the list of other pros that have had solid years in Hearthstone, there are names like Thomas “Sintolol” Zimmer from Germany and Facundo “Nalguidan” Pruzzo from Argentina. Both players have Seasonal Championship experience in 2018, and Sintolol was in last year’s World Championship.
Jace “DrJikininki” Garthright switched out Hearthstone competitive play in favor of focusing on his casting. He has shown some interest in the game competitively still as he qualified for the Wild Open this year.
Unfortunately, the Qualifiers won’t be streamed anywhere, but hopefully some of the players will stream their perspectives. Though, the Final will be streamed on February 23.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via their official website.
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