by hsdecktech - 6 years ago     show comments

After four long days of fierce competition, HCT Amsterdam has crowned a new world champion: Tom60229!

Tom dominated throughout the tournament, coming in second in a tough group and then looking nigh-unstoppable in the elimination bracket. Unstoppable, that is, until he met Fr0zen in the finals. Frozen took their first game–Big Spell Mage versus Jade Druid–using a combination of Geist and a metric ton of removal options allowed Fr0zen to stabilize at 1 life and run Tom out of resources. Fr0zen was then able to pull out an assertive win with his Razakus Priest, leaving Tom down 0-2.

At that point, it all looked over: confetti was prematurely dropped as the crowd chanted “USA! USA!”

That left Fr0zen with three games to pull out a Jade Druid win. Tom queued up Razakus Priest first–a matchup about which the community has very polarizing opinions. Although common opinion is that Jade Druid is favored, Tom was able to fight back and take the win–moving him to 4-0 with his Razakus Priest. The next match point was quick and dirty as Tom was able to pull an Innervate from his Swashburglar and use it to make a 10/10 Edwin Van Cleef on turn 2. As you might have guessed, not many decks have good ways to deal with 10/10s on turn 2. And with that, the momentum had shifted. The HCT World Championship would come down to the Jade Druid mirror. Perhaps the most interesting part of which was before even turn 1, when Tom kept Ultimate Infestation in his mulligan. The matchup often comes down to who gets the first Infestation and this time, Tom was at an advantage by keeping it while Fr0zen had to dig frantically through his deck to find his own. Unable to do so, Fr0zen was overrun by the card and tempo advantage, and left with no choice but to concede, making Tom60229 Hearthstone’s 2017 HCT Champion!

If you missed any of the action, decklists, brackets, and links to VoDs can all be found on Hearthstone’s official HCT Championship page. I know I’m going to go back and catch some of the matches that happened while I was sleeping. After you’re done watching your fill, let us know in the comments what you thought of this year’s HCT finals and what you’re looking forward to for next year!

Finally, as a personal aside, my champion, Purple, did not make it out of groups and, now that I have had two whiffs in a row, I’m no longer allowed to recommend champions.