With three teams in the Hearthstone Global Games now guaranteed a top 16 spot, they no longer have to worry about winning. There are 12 other teams sitting at the three win mark, one away from securing their spot in the playoffs. It’s time to see who will step up in the clutch in HGG Week 5.
Brink of Elimination
The United States has to win the next two to get in. They had a strong showing last week versus Kazakhstan. This week they’re likely to have a good battle against Denmark who just squeaked by Hungary last week.
Canada and Japan will be slugging it out this week to see who will move on to the next week of play. Norway and Russia is shaped up to be another good elimination match.
After getting blown out last week by South Korea, Germany has to defeat the reigning champions this week, the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic are surely going to be motivated after getting handled by Ukraine last week. Germany still has three team mates from the same organization, so they could use that experience together to their advantage.
Questionable Scheduling
Team Germany’s Raphael “Bunnyhoppor” Peltzer took to Twitter to voice his concerns over the organization of the tournament:
Regarding the current #HGG pairings: @HSesports Why are the 3 teams that are currently 4-0 and therefore 100% qualified not eliminated from the bracket?
The result would have no byes and also there is currently 2 down pairings which could be eliminated?— Raphael 'Bunnyhoppor' Peltzer (@TL_Bunnyhoppor) August 24, 2018
The reason he brings this up is because Team Sweden is the only team that has a bye this week. This means that they will only have to win next week to have a chance at the playoffs. That would give them only three wins total, even though four should be required to advance. They still will have to win on tiebreakers and are in an overall awkward position.
The other strange side of this is that the undefeated Ukraine will face off against Taiwan. Taiwan lost last week to China, which was their first loss of the tournament. When you have a team that has already made the next round paired up against a team that still has everything to lose, Team Ukraine might play more loose and give up a loss.
The two other undefeated teams, Brazil and China, are simply facing off against each other this week in what can be considered a meaningless match. However, it could also be treated as practice for a potential future match between the two teams in playoffs.
State of Global Games
Bunnyhoppor is definitely not the first player to complain about the setup of the tournament. Many players have said they don’t like the complete randomness of game matchups. It throws away the strategy of picking a deck in order to try to counter-queue.
The deck selection process can be a little confusing. Teams have decks for all nine classes, they then ban out four at random, to play the remaining five in a random order. It only requires three wins to win the match, but different players will always be playing a different deck, with no reappearing decks through the up to five game set.
Either way, we will see how this all pans out over the next two weeks, and hopefully we can come to a happy resolution for the players. Week 5 action will begin on August 28 and can be seen on the PlayHearthstone Twitch channel. You can find the bracket with the current standings on battlefy.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via their official website and the PlayHearthstone Twitch channel.
You can like The Game Haus on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more sports and esports articles from other TGH writers along with Gino!