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Hearthstone Wild Open Returns in Time for Wildfest

Standard tournaments are fun and all, but Hearthstone's biggest Wild tournament is ready to make a comeback.

Ozzie Mejia

February 14, 2018 11:50 AM

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With Hearthstone celebrating the Wild format over the next few weeks with the upcoming Wildfest, it feels like a great time for Blizzard to rediscover the joy of Wild tournaments. On Wedneday, the publisher announced the return of the Hearthstone Wild Open, which is set to begin next week and run through the end of March.

Sign-ups will run through February 18, with open qualifiers set to run during the periods of February 22-25 and March 1-4. Weekly qualifier winners will then advance to the regional playoffs, which will take place in early March.

Top finishers in the regional playoffs will move on to the Wild Open 2018 Finals, which will take place from the Blizzard Arena on March 31. Those players will compete for a $25,000 prize pool, with $8,000 going to the first place winner.

As exciting as the Standard tournaments can be, there's something fascinating about all the gloves coming off for Wild. That means old-school Hearthstone decks, like the Renolock deck, the Freeze Mage, the Oil Rogue, and several variations of Dragon Priest are all primed to make a comeback. Shacknews has also been a big fan of the Wild format, most recently chatting with Hearthstone Esports Global Franchise Leader Che Chou about it at the Hearthstone World Championships.

Open qualifier and regional playoff dates for each region can be found on the Hearthstone website.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?