Pick a Hearthstone Championship Tour winner for BlizzCon, earn some free cards

Even if you don’t watch competitive Hearthstone, you have a new reason to pay attention.

Blizzard announced the Choose Your Champion program for its market-leading digital card game today. Players pick one of the 16 competitors in the 2016 Hearthstone Championship Tour finals on November 5 during the BlizzCon fan event in Anaheim, and they receive rewards based on how well their picks perform. This is an interesting way to get people invested in the upcoming championships.

You’ll get a pack of cards from 2015’s The Grand Tournament expansion just for making a pick, and then you’ll earn an additional Grand Tournament pack for every best-of-seven match your chosen champion wins. You’ll receive these rewards the week after the tournament.

Hearthstone is one of the biggest games on Twitch, but fans usually prefer watching their favorite streamers play at their homes. Some Hearthstone fans complain that the tournaments don’t have enough compelling stories to follow, or that matches too often come down to randomness to be a true show of skill. This Choose Your Champion idea should increase the audience for the Championships, which is Blizzard’s biggest Hearthstone tournament of the year. Its competitors are competing for a $1 million prize pool.

The Grand Tournament is an older set. In fact, it leaves the Standard format when the first expansion of 2017 comes out. Still, these are free cards, and you’ll still be able to use The Grand Tournament in other formats. You can also just turn them into Arcane Dust, which you can use to craft new cards.