China’s premier team league will have two western invites for its Season 3 playoffs

The total prize pool is set to $115,000 with two foreign rosters looking forward to competing for $40,000.

The successor of the NEL – the so-called Hearthstone Team Story – is ready for its third season. China’s highly prestigious team league is looking to expand not just in the amount of teams it features but also the regions it will pull invites from.

Although during its NEL origins the league used to consider western teams for an invitation, most notably issuing ones to Team Liquid in Fall 2014 and Tempo Storm in Winter and Spring 2015, the Hearthstone Team Story (HTS) of today has remained exclusively Chinese. HTS debuted with a $162,000 season with eight players and resulted in Team Celestial’s championship run as they took $65,000 of the main prize pool. Season 2 expanded the roster to nine teams and introduced a multi-phase structure with two round-robin and two playoffs stages and after months of competition eStar (formerly known as Yolo Miracle) pocketed the lion’s share of the increased $190,000 purse.

For its third season, HTS will go easier on the prize pool, getting it down to just $115,000. The tournament is scheduled to start September 20 and will run for four months till mid January 2017.

Despite the decreased prize pool, a unique opportunity will be given to a couple of fortunate western teams. Seeded into the final phase three of the tournament – a four-team single elimination playoff – two foreign franchises will take on the host nation for the $40,000 final phase cheque. Details on who the invited teams are still missing.

The invited Chinese teams are:



Celestial eStar Gaming Invictus Gaming Newbee TongFu World Elite Edward gaming Veteran Gaming OMG Star Horn Royal Club AHQ NGA



The structure of the tournament is as follows:

Phase 1:

Round robin

12 teams

Top 6 advance to Phase 2



Phase 2:

Single Elimination

Top 2 from phase 1 have one BYE

Top 2 advance to Phase 3



Phase 3:

Top 2 from phase 2 will take on the 2 teams invited from the west

Format:



Each team brings 9 decks

Each team sends one player to battle. The player brings 2 decks with him

The match is played in Last Hero Standing

The deck that has lost once cannot be played again

The player that has lost with both his decks cannot be playing again

The team that wins 6 matches first will win the team match.

Prize - $115,000 total:



Phase 1: $51,000 (340,000 CNY) One team match win = 5k CNY, paid right after each match day. 5k * 66 matches = 330000 CNY. MVP: 10000 CNY



$51,000 (340,000 CNY) Phase 2: $24,000 (160000 CNY) 1st: 80000 CNY 2nd: 40000 CNY 3rd-4th: 20000 CNY



$24,000 (160000 CNY)