Update: Playoffs are live right now. They also have a separate pool of packs, so you can earn two more by watching the stream this weekend!
2022 is the final year of Hearthstone Grandmasters. The format will be retired in favor of more open Hearthstone Masters Tours and Masters Championships. Two final seasons will be a send-off to all the players who managed to stay in the game or have recently qualified.
Season 1 starts this Thursday (first day won’t be broadcasted, so you can watch it from Friday to Sunday) and lasts for four weeks in total. During the first three weeks, players will earn points based on their score, and then the top performers will qualify to Play-Offs during week 4.
In order to make Grandmasters more interesting, we’ll be getting a completely new, experimental format – Trio. Hearthstone Esports team will create five different sets of three Heroes (e.g. Hunter + Priest + Warrior, or Demon Hunter + Mage + Paladin) and players will pick one of them and will have to submit decks from the chosen set of classes. Then players need to win with all three decks (Best of 5). It’s an interesting idea to make things more “spicy” by giving players some interesting combinations, which include both powerful meta decks as well as forces them to pick some less popular ones. If done right, it can “force” players to bring more classes than they normally would, making it both a bigger deck building challenge and more interesting to watch. If the format will do well, Blizzard is thinking about implementing it to other tournaments as well.
YouTube drops also make a return. Players will be able to get two Fractured in Alterac Valley packs for watching Grandmasters 2022 Season 1 between week 1 and 3, and then two more packs for the play-offs. That’s four packs in total. Just make sure to connect your YouTube and Battle.net accounts in case you haven’t done it yet.
You can read more in the official blog post below:
Following the epic conclusion to Masters Tour Onyxia’s Lair, Hearthstone Esports is wasting no time keeping the 2022 competitions rolling, with the first season of Grandmasters beginning this Friday! As we announced last December, this is going to be the final regular-season of Grandmasters to see 48 of the top players from Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe battling to be the best in their respective regions and advance to the 2022 World Championship.
This season features three individual weekend tournaments, with players earning points to advance to the playoffs. Competing across Conquest, Last Hero Standing, and the brand-new Trio format, players are fighting for their share of the season’s $250,000 (USD) prize pool and regional invites to the 2022 World Championship. Read on for all the details you’ll need to know before the season kicks off!
Details
- Dates: Friday, Saturday, Sunday: February 25 – March 13 and March 25 – 27, 2022
- Broadcast Start Time:
- ASIA-PACIFIC: 2 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. CEST / 6 p.m. KST
- EUROPE: 7:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00 p.m. CEST / 11:00 p.m. KST
- AMERICAS: 12 p.m. PDT / 9 p.m. CEST / 4 a.m. KST
- Prize Pool: Global prizing of $250,000 (USD), split between $71,700 (USD) across all three regions each tournament for Weeks 1 through 3, and $34,900 (USD) for the playoffs
- Language Streams on YouTube:
New Format – TRIO
Grandmasters is being retired in style, with an experimental new format! Joining Conquest and Last Hero Standing is the brand-new Trio. We are excited to see how the Trio format performs when played at the pro level and if well received then we’ll consider how to possibly implement it in other Hearthstone Esports tournaments. Here’s how the format works:
- Hearthstone Esports team will create 5 unique groups of three classes each.
- Groups may share one or two classes.
- Players will choose one of the groups.
- They’ll submit three-deck lineups that include each class within their selected group.
- Group selections will be private, without any knowledge of what other players have selected.
- Matches will be best-of-five, with each winning deck becoming unavailable for the rest of the match.
Structure
During weeks 1-3, players will compete in a Weekly Dual Tournament format, starting each Thursday, to earn placement in the weekend Top 8 Stage. Players will receive points based on total number of wins each week, which will determine final standings before Playoffs.
- All 16 players in each region will compete against each other off-broadcast in Dual Tournament Group play on Thursday.
- On Friday, the 4 Decider Matches will be played to determine who joins the Top 8 per region, live on YouTube.
- The Top 8 players compete in a single-elimination tournament on Saturday, with the Top 4 advancing to Sunday.
- Gameplay format changes every week:
- Week 1: Conquest
- Week 2: Trio
- Week 3: Last Hero Standing
- Playoffs: Conquest
Drops Return!
You can earn up to 4 total packs as you watch Grandmasters! On any of the above YouTube channels, watch two total hours to receive one pack and two more hours for your second. Time watched is cumulative within each of the two reward blocks, so even if you can’t watch for the full four hours in one sitting your time will still count toward earning the Drops.
- Grandmasters Week 1 – 3: Fractured in Alterac Valley (max 2 packs)
- Grandmasters Playoffs: Fractured in Alterac Valley (max 2 packs)
Connecting Your Accounts
Before you can receive rewards, you’ll need to link your YouTube and Blizzard Battle.net accounts. Here’s how:
- Log in or create an account on YouTube.
- Navigate to Account Sharing under “Connected Apps” in Settings.
- Select “Connect” next to Battle.net.
- Follow the simple prompts to finish connecting accounts.
- When connecting accounts, be sure that you’re currently logged into the Blizzard account on which you’d like to receive your Drops.
- Click here for a full set of official rules for Hearthstone Grandmasters 2022 Season 1 YouTube Drops.
Keep up with all of the latest Hearthstone Esports news and content on the Hearthstone Esports website, Twitter, and YouTube. Good luck, have fun, and we’ll see you in the Tavern!
Has anyone who got packs for the previous weeks also gotten them for this week? I’ve been watching for well over two hours and nothing yet. The previous two weeks packs were delivered fairly quickly.
I know I’m answering it late, but how quickly they deliver packs really varies from event to event and week to week for me. Sometimes I get them immediately. Other times I have to wait a few days. Sometimes they don’t even arrive at all. YouTube drops sadly aren’t very consistent and pretty much all you can do is wait.
I have found out something interesting lately about this.
My advice is to open the stream on the “Hearthstone” channel, and not “Hearthstone Esports”. When I viewed the latter, my packs arrived inconsistently, 1-2 days later (though I got all of them eventually so far). Then I tried to use the “Hearthstone” channel and got them almost immediately after each 2 hours during all the last three events.
I do not know if it affects anything, but I live in Central Europe, and my Hearthstone account is in the European region.
I also paid attention to follow some other advices I have read somewhere on this site earlier (though I also did all this while viewing the Esports channel):
– keep the browser tab with the stream in focus in your browser window
– mute the browser tab, not the YouTube video directly
– keep the stream actually live, don’t let the red dot on the YouTube console become grey (if it falls back, just pull the video to the very end on the red timeline)
I watchedthe starts of each region and it seems that each region got different buckets to choose from?
That might be interesting to know and ask why they choose which in interviews.
Also, i might be mistaken but apart from the buckets people actually play, they don’t seem to say which 5 they were offered?
I like that they try to mix meta’s up, but this format feels a bet too artificial for my taste.
Then again, i did like the idea of Specialist format, hoping that it would provide the incentives to be original while instead everyone brought the one best deck and you saw only mirrors.
Ps. I am getting packs and quickly. So maybe double check the link between yt and battlenet of you don’t.
I take the pack also in this week, i mean 2 pack last week and 2 pack this week what happened?
I have no idea, it looks like it’s 2 packs per week after all. That’s not what the announcement said, but people are getting them nonetheless.
Apparently buried in the legal jargon it did say two per week.
I gave the YT another chance and watched the play for ~2 hours and guess what, they still don’t deliver the packs. Scr*w this YT sessions and everyone who thinks YT is good idea for tournaments.
I still didn’t receive my packs from last week … account is connected. Very strange.
If we’re talking about experiments, might as well throw in some RNG factor instead of fixed Trio.
I think we’re gonna expect some players quickly choose their own best trio.
But if they just pick a random trio, then everyone would have the same chance of getting their best or worst class. I mean, it would be fair and balanced.
Anyway. YT again. It still felt awful after wasting ~4 hours and not getting any drops some months ago. Don’t know if it was technical issues, or just connection issues. But it worked before that, hence the problems might not be on my side. So, I’m not gonna waste anymore second on YT for anything anymore. Twitch is still the best job for this.
The only good thing of GM is the good time to watch for the drops, at least in EU and sice you have three weeks for two pack you have all the time in the world.
Let trio die. It would be an abysmal idea for other tournaments. Maybe in GM it could half work but not in single elim tournaments.
Very much looking forward to the new format. It brings a breath of fresh air and certainly makes watching interesting.