Masters Tour Arlington Survival Guide (January 31 – February 2)

Masters Tour Arlington is the first Masters event of 2020, and it will happen this weekd, starting Friday! It will be the first major tournament after both Descent of Dragons and Galakornd’s Awakening launched (although the latter only partially). Around 360 best players from around the world, who got there through qualification tournaments or high ladder finishes, will fight for their share of $500,000 prize pool. Find all of the necessary information below!

General Information

• Where: Esports Stadium Arlington
• When: January 31 – February 2, 2020
• Qualified Players: You can find a full list here.
• Format: 4 deck, best-of-5 Conquest with a ban
• Prize Pool: US $500,000 ($250,000 base + Dragon Masters Bundle crowdfunding, which already hit the cap).
• Casters: Dan “Frodan” Chou, TJ “Azumo” Sanders, Simon “Sottle” Welch, Erik “DoA” Lonnquist

Format

While we had LOTS of format changes last year (basically every big event was played in a different format), it seems that – at least for now – it is consistent with what we’ve seen during the final Masters Tour event of the last year.

Here’s how each of the days will look like:

• Day 1: Five rounds of Swiss.
• Day 2: Players with three or more match wins (3-2 score or better) will play through four more rounds of Swiss.
• Day 3: The Top 8 players will advance to single elimination bracket and the winner will be decided!

Additionally, each player who finishes with AT LEAST 7-2 score (so goes through both days without dropping out) will be automatically qualified to the two upcoming Masters Tour events – Masters Tour Indonesia and Masters Tour Jönköping (details of the latter weren’t announced yet).

Where to Watch

Broadcast start at 9 AM CST each day. That’s (to showcase a few more common time zones) 7 AM PST, 10 AM EST, 3 PM GMT, 4 PM CET and midnight KST.

Here’s a full list of streams in different languages:

• English
• Mandarin
• Korean
• Japanese
• Russian
• Portuguese
• LatAm Spanish
• Arabic

No Drops?

Masters Tour Arlington will be the first official tournament streamed on YouTube instead of Twitch, since Activision Blizzard and Google signed an exclusivity deal. Before that, during bigger tournaments, Twitch drops were active and players could get extra packs just for watching the tournament.

While we might get a last-minute announcement tomorrow, right now it seems that there will be no drops at Arlington. YouTube DOES have a drops functionality, but my guess since it’s a last second change from Twitch to YouTube, they might not be activated for Blizzard games yet. If something changes, we’ll inform you!