Grandmasters Americas 2019 Season 2 Odds & Preview: fr0zen Favored

• Season 2 of Hearthstone Grandmasters Americas begins on August 23rd
• The winner of Season 1, PNC, enters with 12-1 odds of going back-to-back
• Fr0zen is the favorite to win after having the best record at 12-2 during Season 1

Season 2 of Hearthstone Grandmasters gets underway on August 23rd and features a lot of changes to their competitive format. The new format and the new expansion, Saviors of Uldum, should shake up the results that we saw in season one and make it incredibly difficult to predict the winner.

Grandmasters Americas Season 2 Odds

*Odds taken 12/08/19

Season 2 Changes

In Season 1, Hearthstone Grandmasters used the Specialist format where each player brought a single deck each week to use in a best of three. For Season 2, the format is switching to the much more common Conquest style where each player brings multiple decks and can only win a single game with each unique deck.

On top of the format switch, Hearthstone recently released a brand new expansion that will test how quickly the competitors can adapt.

All of the changes make the Season 1 results kind of irrelevant. However, that’s what the odds are primarily based on. Fr0zen might still deserve to be listed as the favorite. He was dominating Season 1 as he had the best record through eight weeks at 12-2.

He may have been able to dominate the round robin stage, but in his first playoff match, he was forced to forfeit game one after using the wrong deck list. He went on to lose that set against Purple. Fr0zen has constantly been one of the top players in the Americas.

He was the runner-up in the 2017 Hearthstone World Championship and is constantly near the top of the Hearthstone ranked ladder. With all the changes and the amount of randomness in Hearthstone, I don’t think the value is there to bet on Fr0zen as the favorite.

The Defending Champ

Normally the winner of an event would enter the next season as the favorite, but that’s certainly not the case with PNC. In the Season 1 Finals, PNC didn’t drop a single game as he swept Purple and Eddie with his mage to win it all.

Hearthstone Grandmasters is made up of a lot of the big names in Hearthstone, and PNC is a little less well-known. He hasn’t made it to the very top of many-large scale Hearthstone tournaments, but he performed incredibly well in the drawn out eight-week format of Grandmasters Season 1. The value is there to bet on PNC on going back-to-back in Season 2.

Longshot Value

PNC’s teammate Nalguidan is someone to watch in Season 2. He missed out on the playoffs in Season 1 but he’s been a very consistent player over the past year or so.

Hearthstone is a game that is constantly evolving and consistent results show that a player is able to adapt and understand each and every meta. The new expansion will be only two weeks old by the time Season 2 begins and Nalguidan is someone who should be able to figure out what works best.

Since the beginning of 2018, Nalguidan has a bunch of top 8 results including qualifying for the HCT Summer Championship and nearly missing out on the Winter Playoffs.

Pick: Nalguidan (+1500)