The last two days of the four-day opening for the Hearthstone World Championship finals have played out and out of the sixteen who started on the first day, the eight who have advanced to play on stage at Blizzcon next weekend have been decided in rounds of nail biting, clever play from all.

Day three was dedicated mainly to seeing which of the eight who won their first matches on days one and two would secure the first four places in the Blizzcon line-up and saw an equal balance in the number of matches that were more dominated by one player of the pairs and those matches that ended up coming down to the final game to decide who would advance. Of those four games played, the players who advanced were Thijs and Ostkaka of the European team; and DieMeng and Zoro of the China team, with Zoro in particular pulling out a win against the only player in the sixteen who had been in the 2014 tournament: Kranich of the Asia Pacific team.

So for the eight still remaining in contention, it all came down to the four matches on the forth day of the Group Stages – the winners would claim the remaining four spots at Blizzcon and the other four would not. It was as simple as that.

Funnily enough, every match that was played on day four was a pairing that had already been played earlier in previous days: Kranich vs LifeCoach and Pinpingho vs Purple from day one; JAB vs Kno and HotForm vs Neilyo from day two. While there was a chance for the players who had previously lost the match up to win this time, the resulting winners were the same as the first time each pair had met before. Of particular note was that Kranich made up for his day three defeat by going 3-0 against LifeCoach during the first games of Hearthstone played on the day; and HotForm won a very narrow match against Neilyo going from losing 1-2 to winning his last match with a deck (Rogue) that was at a disadvantage against his opponent’s Warrior deck to take the spot at Blizzcon with a 3-2 victory. This also made him the only member of the Americans team to advance to Blizzcon.

In the end, the other four victors were as previously mentioned HotForm of the Americas team and Kranich of Asia Pacific, as well as Kno and Pinpingho also of Asia Pacific.

So next weekend we will see eight players compete for the title of 2015 Hearthstone Champion, with Asia Pacific being the region in with the best chance fielding 3 players of the eight, while Europe and China each have 2 of their players in and the Americas team having just one person still remaining in the running for the title and the grand prize.

If you missed any of the matches so far, catch up at Blizzard’s Hearthstone Youtube with the posted VoDs so far.