▲ The EU Nexus Contest begins tomorrow, crowdfunded by members of the HotS community.



Once the Heroes of the Storm World Championship concluded at BlizzCon in November, Mandon “Dittri0” Florent went to work creating his own tournament to supersede the Nexus Games event that weren’t returning in 2019.



The appeal of the Nexus Games in the past was that it took place during the competitive offseason and pitted amateur teams within the same region against one another for pride and a cash prize.



He took to Twitter to seek help from the general population as creating a tournament of this size is not a task he wanted to take on alone and, to his surprise, help arrived.

One of those individuals, Arnaud "Ouille" Pontonnier, contributed half of the $2,000 initial prize pool and has worked with Dittri0 to acquire additional funding, a sponsor and has helped overall to organize the event.



Currently, the event, which begins tomorrow, has accrued a prize pool over $2500 and has secured a partnership with Razer headsets to be given away to the winners.



Neither Ouille or Dittri0 are not taking any funds from any revenue that the tournament may generate.

▲ All 16 participating teams from across Europe.

When it came time to acquire the players to compete in the event, Dittri0 searched the in-game Grand Master leaderboards. From there he reached out to the top players from each of the 16 participating countries within Europe who then filled out their rosters.



For Dittri0, this is how esports is meant to be.

“I always thought that esports shouldn't represent companies like Fnatic or Dignitas but a country because people like a certain country and representing it.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t want players associated with large teams and organizations to avoid this tournament altogether. In fact, quite the opposite.



Dittri0 and his team reached out to numerous professional players, casters and even Blizzard to seek advice and to see if they would be interested in lending a hand in the tournament.



To his surprise, not only did pro players want to be involved but other parties did as well.

“It's amazing. We were not even expecting players to even want to be coaches," said Dittri0.

Help from familiar faces

Quite the opposite, in-fact as European pros such as Thomas "Ménè" Cailleux, Kenn “Zaelia” Rasmussen, Nils “Nurok” Gebhardt and Arkadiusz “Bl3kitny” Czarnecki all offered to work with their countries’ teams.



Throw in Thomas “Khaldor” Kilian, Albert “Halorin” Haley, Kurtis “Kala” Lloyd and Dob “QuackNiix” Engström on the casting desk and you have a tournament with a star-studded roster of talent.



Even Blizzard themselves has offered to promote the event and offer codes to in-game content to those who tune in to watch the tournament on Twitch.



Pool play will begin tomorrow on Twitch between France and Finland.

All information for the event, include the countries in each group stage, tournament structure and prize pool can be found on their website here: http://nexuscontest.eu/



Although Blizzard ended the professional Heroes of the Storm global championship last month, the community isn’t done supporting the scene just yet.