In case you haven’t heard, Blizzard is upping the stakes for viewers in this year’s Hearthstone World Championships. Each of us viewers has the opportunity to pick a champion, winning one Grand Tournament pack for each game our champion wins. Of course, before making my choice, the stat hound in me wanted to weigh my options, and the result is this full guide to the odds of BlizzCon 2016! Read on to learn the chances for each player to advance through the group stages and onto the ultimate prize: the title of “World Champion.”

The first step to finding the World Champion is to understand the tournament format. The World Championship is played in two stages. The first stage is a group stage with four double elimination brackets, with the top two players from each bracket advancing. The last stage is an 8-player single elimination bracket, the winner of which is crowned “World Champion.” For each round, the players are playing a Best-of-7 Conquest match with 1 ban. The groups have already been decided, and the decks have been locked in, giving us a wealth of information to use in our quest.

Dissecting a Match

Each match follows the standard Conquest format. Each player brings five decks, and can then ban one of their opponent’s decks. From there, a player must win with each of their remaining decks to advance. To simulate this, I made heavy use of the matchup statistics from the latest vS Data Reaper Report and a two-step ban phase where each player bans the best deck against their lineup after taking into account the deck they expect their opponent to ban. While we already know what the deck populations are going to be before bans, this gives us some insight on how the lineups will change after players have a chance to ban decks.