Another Hearthstone (Free)Tournament has ended as the Viagame House Cup #2 Hearthstone Tournament crowned its champion last night and, in a surprising twist, the two finalists didn’t come from the 8 pro players invited to the Tournament but, rather, from the only 2 qualifiers to make it into the playoffs out of the 8 who qualified for the Tournament. The final was between Sheng Yuan “Roger" Luo and Frederik (Hoej) Nielsen. Hoej defeated Roger with 4-2 to win the title of Champion and, along with it, $10,000 and 100 Hearthstone World Championship (HWC) points. Hoej’s domination came after a very rough start as he lost 0-3 to last year’s Champion, Aleksandr “Kolento" Malsh, and was close to being eliminated when he found himself 0-2 down in an Elimination match.
Hoej started the Finals series with a Druid deck, which didn’t fare very well, and then went on to switch to a Warrior deck. With Roger taking a 2-1 lead, Hoej stopped being nice and pulled out a Face Hunter deck, the current meta-dominating deck, and went full agro to sweep the rest of the series. You can check out Hoej’s and Roger’s decks here.
The Viagame House Cup is one of the largest of the year with a total prize of $25000 split amongst the first 8 and, new this year, and a total of 230 HWC.
For those unfamiliar with the format of the tournament, the contestants lived and competed in one house for a whole week. Group Play matches were best of 5 while the Semi-Finals and Grand Final were best of 7. The first match is blind picks for decks and the loser can’t use that deck again while the winner has the option to either play his or her winning deck or pick another deck. From match 2 onward, the winning player chooses decks first and the loser picks after the winning player.
There was some complaining yesterday that a Conquest mode, where the winner has to change decks while the loser can hold on to his or hers, would’ve made Hunter domination more difficult, but it’s obvious that Face Hunter will be dominating the meta at least until Blackrock Mountain releases on April 2nd.
