Everything You Need to Know About Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest
Blizzard has detailed the upcoming Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest that will be taking place this weekend. A ton of players will be converging on the location in Bucharest, Romania to compete to see who will come out on top. As such, this is one of the most exciting pro events of the whole year.
Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest Details
The Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest is the latest event in the string of events that have been happening this year, beginning with the Masters Tour in Las Vegas earlier this summer followed by the Masters Tour in Seoul, South Korea a couple of months later.
Blizzard is good about hosting at least three Masters Tour events each year with each one representing one of the three major regions in the esports. Masters Tour Las Vegas was for the North and South American region while the Seoul event was for Asia.
European players are finally getting their moment in the spotlight with the Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest this weekend. There are a total of 300 of the best players in the whole world who have been invited specifically by Blizzard to come participate in the huge tournament.
Players are competing in the tournament for a share of the massive prize pool that is being offered but that’s not all. There is even the chance of winning a tournament like this changing the lives of that player forever. But, of course, you’ll likely want to be there to watch it yourself.
How and When to Watch the Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest
Being that this is a Hearthstone Masters Tour event and not a live tournament at one of the major conventions or the like, it is not something that fans are able to watch in person. However, the entire event will be broadcasted live for players to enjoy as the matches are going on.
You are able to watch it live as the event is happening at the PGL Studios in Bucharest, Romania as they happen on the official Twitch channels for the popular card game. You can watch all of the action on the main channel for the game on Twitch if you want to see all of it in English but there are other languages being offered as well.
There are channels on Twitch also available for the following languages so that they can enjoy the matches as well:
- English
- Mandarin
- Korean
- Japanese
- Russian
- Portuguese
- Latin American Spanish
Fans who wish to watch the stream in those respective languages simply need to go to their region or language’s specific Twitch channel. The event is going on Friday, October 18 through Sunday, October 20, 2019 with three days of intense matches and competition throughout the weekend.
However, because this event is happening in Romania, which is hours and hours ahead of the time zone in the North and South America regions, there is a significant time difference for the weekend of events. The broadcasting for each day begins on the previous day actually for some of us or right in the middle of the night otherwise.
For instance, the broadcasting for today’s matches, in fact, actually began last night for us at 11 pm PT (2 am ET, October 18) on October 17. This is the schedule that the livestreams will follow for the rest of the event as well. Each day’s broadcasting will begin the previous night.
So, tonight at 11 pm PT on Friday, October 18, the day two of matches will proceed while the final day of matches will begin tomorrow night on Saturday, October 19 at 11 pm PT. As you can see, that is really late for those of us on the Western Hemisphere but, thankfully, there is a solution.
Players are able to still watch the matches on the official Twitch channels of your choosing after the livestream has already ended through the recent broadcasts section of the channel. This will allow you to keep up with anything you might have missed when the time works better for you.
The entire English Twitch stream will have a slew of popular casters who will be commenting and hosting the event for fans watching. These include Simon “Sottle” Welch, Alex “Raven” Baguley, Daniel “Falcone” Falcone, Darroch “Darroch” Brown, and Neil “L0rinda” Bond.
Masters Tour Bucharest Organization and Schedule
Like we mentioned, there are 300 players who have been invited to the Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest event. The three days of play begin with the first day of competition where players will compete in a surprisingly different schedule format than we are used to.
Previously, players competed in a ton of Swiss rounds to see who came out on top but that is changing with this tournament and moving forward. Players will still compete in various rounds of Swiss matches throughout the first two days but how they work is much different.
Players will compete in a four-deck format where they select four decks to use within the competition. They will battle it out in Conquest matches where it is the best of five rounds rather than the traditional best of three. This means that whoever gets the best of the five rounds wins the match.
Of course, this Conquest format comes with some stipulations in the fact that there are a couple of banned cards from the competition. There are two main ones that Blizzard has noted in the official rules for the tournament. The first is Whizbang the Wonderful.
Whizbang the Wonderful is a legendary creature card that can be summoned using four mana. It has the solid stats of four attack and five health but the ability is why it is banned. It allows you to play the match with one of the Whizbang Wonderful decks.
There is a similar situation for the other banned card Zayle, Shadow Cloak. This fellow legendary creature costs two mana to summon rather than four for Whizbang and has the stats of two attack and two health. Summoning it turns your deck into one of the Zayle evil decks.
Both cards allow you to circumvent the official rules of registering your four decks ahead of time and put an entire element of randomness that just simply doesn’t work within the confines of an official event. As such, players are unable to use these two cards in official tournaments like the Masters Tour.
Beyond that, anything is game so long as the player registers their four decks ahead of time and that they comply with everything that they are supposed to. Players will be using those four decks to play through five rounds of those Swiss best of five matches.
That means that players will have a guaranteed five opponents in the first day of competition rather than the usual seven or so that we’ve come to expect on the first day. This means that there will be less rounds than before the rounds themselves will likely take longer at the same time.
How it works is that if a player gets a third loss during the five rounds, they will be immediately removed from the competition. On the other hand, if a player is able to get three or more wins from the first five rounds of the tournament, they will get to move onto the second day of competition.
There are a good number of players who will likely move onto the second day of competition on Saturday in Bucharest. From there, those remaining players will compete in some more Swiss rounds that are best of five. In total, they will do four more rounds of Swiss on Saturday.
While that is less than the rounds that were done on Friday, they are meant to create a leaderboard of who has the most wins and the least losses throughout the event. From there, Blizzard will select the top eight players from that leaderboard and select them to move onto the final day of competition.
On day three, Sunday, those remaining eight players will be split up into a tournament bracket and compete in single-elimination tournament matches. They will compete until a champion is crowned from among the final eight players. This is much simpler than the typical two-bracket system.
Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest Rewards
For competing in the competition, players will get a set share of the prize pool, depending on how well they did. The Masters Tour Bucharest competition has a pretty massive prize pool of $500,000 in total that will be shared among the competitors.
In addition to a share of the prize pool, some of the competitors will receive an additional reward for them. There are nine Swiss rounds in total between the first two days and those players who are able to get a record of at least seven wins and no more than two losses will receive an additional benefit.
Those few players will be invited back automatically to participate in the upcoming next Masters Tour in Arlington, Texas. They will also be allowed to participate in the next Masters Tour competition that will be happening after that, which has yet to be officially unveiled.
What’s interesting is that players who tune in and watch the livestreams of the events will also receive some rewards for their efforts. That’s right, Blizzard is hosting yet another Twitch drops event during the competition.
For those who don’t know Twitch drops, it is a style of giveaways where a streamer can give something to their viewers just for showing up. It is sometimes randomized but, in this case, players are guaranteed to get some rewards so long as they show up for the streams.
Unfortunately, it does look like these free rewards only apply to those who actually show up during the livestream and watch all of the action live rather than checking out the previously recorded broadcasts. That said, if you are able to spare the time to watch the tournament, you can win some prizes.
For those who are able to watch at least three hours of the broadcast on any of the official channels during the designated timeframes, they will be able to earn themselves a free card pack from the recent summer expansion Saviors of Uldum that released back in August.
If the Twitch drops work as they did with the previous Masters Tour event, you should be able to accumulate the three hours of watch time throughout the weekend of livestreams rather than just having to watch for three hours straight.
So, this means that if you are only able to watch an hour of the livestream each day, that would add up to three hours and you would receive your card pack reward. But if you’re aiming to get all of the rewards, you will need to tune in for longer because those dedicated fans will be rewarded for their time.
Players who go above and beyond, and watch at least six hours of the livestreams in total over the weekend will receive another card pack from the recent expansion for free guaranteed. But the rewards don’t stop there, as there are some randomized rewards also given out throughout the streams.
Every hour, 1500 lucky viewers will be selected randomly to receive a classic card pack for the game. This will happen every hour during the livestreams so the chances of receiving one are decently good. In order to win any of these rewards, though, you will need to link your accounts first.
Thanks for joining us for a closer look at the Hearthstone Masters Tour Bucharest. Stay tuned for more Hearthstone news and updates.
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