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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Hearthstone World Championship

Why does getting up to legend on the constructed ladder matter? Well, other than just wanting to be the best and making a number get bigger (smaller?) there's also a pretty majour tournament which uses ladder rankings as part of the qualifying method. They haven't announced a ton of details about the world championship itself in terms of when/where it will be but they have posted the qualification details.

As far as I'm concerned the basic idea is the top 23 point earners in the US/Canada get qualified into a tournament, with the top 8 getting some extra byes. Beyond that the winner of the fireside series, whatever that is, gets in as well. And then 16 more people who advance from a last chance tournament get in as well. In order to qualify for the last chance tournament you need to have earned at least 2 points total between the months of January and August.

Ok, but how do you earn points? Get into the top 100 on the ladder each month to earn some points. Or participate in tournaments to earn a lot of points for finishing very highly. It isn't currently very clear to me what these tournaments are or how to join them. Some of them (the fireside things) seem to be local events sort of like Magic FNMs? But the closest one on the list is in Ottawa and that's sure not going to happen for me!

There's also the problem that tournament formats require playing 3 or 4 different classes. They sound like pretty interesting formats, but my collection doesn't really allow for building real decks for that many classes right now. Even if they provide the cards (which it sounds like some tournaments do) I don't have the ability to test other decks right now. I've also lost a chance at points from January since I wasn't playing constructed at all then.

So realistically my 'in' would be to just earn 2 points sometime in the next 7 months and use that to get into the last chance qualifier. You get 10 points for top 50 on the ladder in a month and 1 point for top 100 in a month. So I need to get 50th or higher one month, or 100th or higher in two months. I feel like that's actually very plausible. Maybe not this month, but the more I play the more cards I'll get and the more I'll know about the format. I'm pretty confident I could pull this off in a few months.

As far as this month goes, I actually hit the win cap in terms of earning gold yesterday. (10 gold every 3 wins, 100 gold max in a day, so I won over 30 games yesterday alone.) I'm also up to rank 2 on the ladder after making some minor changes to my deck. I'm still not thrilled with where I stand but I have won almost 59% of the 85 games I've played since I added secrets to my deck. I have started getting absolutely dominated by fast warlock decks though... They don't seem to use any expensive cards either, so maybe I should give that a try for variety's sake. And for learning! SCIENCE!

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