The Hearthstone Grand Masters 2021 has just kicked off. It is the first event for Hearthstone to feature the latest expansion Forged in the Barrens. We’ve seen some interesting matches thus far, as players discovered what the new meta is and what decks work best.
While this week’s events are just the first round. they give us a decent hint of what to expect from the rest of the month’s proceedings. Lets recap what has been going on thus far in Europe, and set the stage for the final matches.
The Hearthstone Grand Masters 2021 is taking place over seven weeks. However, there is a different format for these weeks as it progresses. The first week is part of Conquest, which is going to be running next week two. The two weeks afterwards are Specialist. Following this, there are two weeks of LHS, before finishing up with Conquest. The competition is played in three regions (Asia-Pacific, Europe, Americas), with a full day of broadcast happening back to back to back.
Our focus is Europe in this article, in order to break down the meta and how the decks are shaping up in the new expansion.
For the first seven weeks, players are competing in a tournament format. The first two days are a stage while players compete to place in the top eight. Then, they’ll go up against each other to rack up points. At the end of these the points are tallied to find the placement for the playoffs at the end of the event. Friday saw some Decider Matches take place, to determine the top 8 players per region. A single elimination format happened all across Saturday, and we are now down top 4 players left in all three regions.
After the first round, competitors were narrowed down to just the top eight contenders for the rest of the weekend. These were the group results and first elimination round results.
Europe Groups to Playoffs
The first elimination round saw four matches between each group winner and runner up.
Seiko and Leta matched up first in the elimination bracket match and played only four games. After winning his opening duel with a Dragon/Xyrella Priest, Seiko couldn’t move his Paladin deck a step forward and lost three consecutive games against Leta.
Thijs and Jarla followed, with a five game banger where Warlock deck composition made all the difference, but in the end it was Jarla’s Lunacy Mage that couldn’t seal the deal. Viper and Casie also matched up in a five match series and are the only two players to utilize a Hunter and Druid deck respectively. Viper came out on top, marking the 2nd Mage deck to fold in Game 5 of a series.
Finally, Bunnyhoppor and Warma played the simplest of all four series, with Warma ending up the victor in 1:3 fashion. Both players found success and solid draws with their Mage decks, but it was the Priest duel that sealed the deal for Warma.
The match ups for the semifinal are between Leta/Thijs and Warma/Viper. They are also the matches to look out for, as we get a nice mix of streamlined decks being played at this stage of the event.
We are still developing the new meta in this expansion, as decks are still getting streamlined and tested. Overall we notice both Paladin and Rogue decks utilizing Pen Flinger heavily while utilizing no cost cards to keep it in an out of play. Mage’s are built around Deck of Lunacy, with no minions and heavily focused on card draw.
Priest and Warlock decks revolve around surviving and controlling the board until they reach turn 9/10 to cast Dragons/Jaraxxus. Finally, Hunter and Druid while not seeing much player, are the only decks with a faster curve and rely on minion buffing to edge a match forward.
In general, every match revolves around staying on curve until at least turn 6, before heavily comboing out the board. Very rarely do we see missplays or even unlucky plays, as most matches mainly come down to the deck composition and strength of the draw.
Drops also came back to the game with the Hearthstone Grand Masters 2021. There are six packs that you can collect by tuning into the event. You can receive these on YouTube. Every two hours that you watch lets you get one pack. So over the course of the event, it shouldn’t be too hard to collect all six of the different pacts on offer. This is how the packs each week breakdown:
You’ll be able to collect these cumulatively too. So if you can’t manage the full two hours one day, you can carry on next time around. The first and last weeks have the shortest time spans to grab these packs. Over the course of the full Hearthstone Grand Masters 2021 though, you can collect all of these packs.
Overall, this season is shaping up to be the most entertaining of them all. The top players all want to start the season off on the best possible foot, but with so many more weeks still to come, it is hard to predict where this is going to go for the final. If you’re looking at Hearthstone betting though, these top players might be the ones to watch so far.
Read next: The Great Push is WoW’s new one-off event for 2021
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