The Ukrainian came into the $25,000 tournament as the heavy favorite and came very short of claiming yet another tournament for himself.
After a long preliminary period of online tournaments, eight players gathered at PAX Prime for the ONOG Summer Finals, the last LAN tournament in the west to give out HWC points.
The group stage finished without major upsets as Aleksandr “Kolento” Malsh and Jeffrey “Trump” Shih took the top spots. They were followed into the playoffs by reigning Assembly champion Wei Lin “Tom60229” Chen and one of Russia’s best in Pavel Beltukov. With that, the 4-man playoffs were ready to begin.
In the first semi final, Kolento took a rather decisive victory over Pavel, using a couple of TGT-infused decks like Secrets Paladin and Dragon Priest. In the other semi final, Tom60229 delivered the first big upset of the tournament, ousting Trump with a one-sided 4-1. Trump’s own Secrets Paladin was the only deck that brought him success and the rest of the line-up of Control Warrior/Fast Druid/Demonlock fell flat.
This made for a Kolento-Tom grand final which was also the most back-and-forth match of the night. In the decisive Tempo Mage versus Dragon Priest match-up, luck came to Tom’s aid as killing Kolento’s [card]Deathlord[/card] spawned [card]Archmage Antonidas[/card] and with no way to deal with it, the game ran away from the Ukrainian juggernaut.
The triumph of Tom stopped Kolento from taking his 13th tournament gold medal - he would have added another $10,000 to his $85,000+ of tournament winnings and reclaimed the #1 spot in the GosuGamers world rankings. For Tom, however, this is a second major LAN title after being successful at Assembly Summer earlier this month.
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