Coming this weekend is the first major LAN event in the west and the group drawings portend a great tournament.

Going to Minsk, Belarus on January 22-24 are the LAN finals of the $50,000 StarLadder i-League to awaken the much dormant Hearthstone scene. The qualifiers for the tournament have been going on since December last year in both China and the west and around Christmas we got to see who will be the eight players to compete for the $20,000 first place prize.

Each group has three western and one Chinese representative who will be thrown in a round robin competition to determine the six players to advance to the playoffs. The group drawings were done recently and fans should be excited seeing a very stacked group to open the tournament.

Aleksandr “Kolento” Malsh and David “Dog” Caero stand out as the favorites to top Group A. The Cloud 9 player made it to seven grand finals in 2015, keeping his reputations as one of game’s most consistent players. Dog also had a great year, finishing second at DreamHack Summer and carrying the American team to victory in the CN vs NA Challenge last August.

Those two will be joined by Fade 2 Karma’s Gareth “Cipher” Rouse and Edward Gaming’s Yuan “lvxiaobu” Lin. Neither are strangers to the spotlights, with Cipher placing second in the $50,000 Vulcun Deckmasters in July and Lvxiaobu being a 2014 World Champion finalist.

This isn’t to say that Group B has less talent. Two of Hearthstone’s rising stars in Justin “JAB” Black and Jung Soo “Surrender” Kim are paired with veteran competitor Jason “Amaz” Chan and Team Story Cup runner-up Robin from Yolo Miracle.

The tournament will be cast by a line-up of star casters, led by Frodan, Noxious and Gnimsh.