It was a rather busy end to the first month of 2017.
128 players travelled to San Antonio, Texas for the first major LAN for the Americas region, hosted at PAX South. Organized by ONOG, the tournament offered $10,000 and 75 HCT points but felt lackluster in its execution.
Players were seeded into a single elimination bracket, a format officially allowed by Blizzard but disliked by the vast majority of Hearthstone professionals. The short notice announcement of the tournament also meant that only a few top pros could attend, with about a dozen of them going against a field of unproven first-timers.
Seven rounds later, tournament favorites including Jon “Orange” Westberg, Cong “StrifeCro” Shu and Will “Amnesiac” Barton lay defeated while “Leadpaint” took the title over Raymond “Rayc591” Cipoletti in the finals, both of them very much securing their spot in the Americas Winter preliminaries.
RELATED: ONOG PAX South bracket
In the online space, a two-day team-league came to ease the hunger ESL’s Trinity Series is leaving every week. Battle of the Best 2017 offered a $9,000 prize pool and a twist to traditional team league formats which have been tried so far. Each of the three players on a team would choose three unique decks and then ban a single deck from each opponent’s line-up – a major reason why Hunter saw play in the first place.
After a couple of insane comebacks, Team Liquid reached the finals, beating CompLexity and Fade 2 Karma along the way only to be one-sidedly stopped by Luminosity Gaming. LG’s own run through the championship included a 6-2 over Tempo Storm, 6-4 over eSuba and 6-2 over Liquid, a truly dominant performance.
RELATED: Battle of the Best bracket
Another online tournament mixed European and Asian players in the next Kinguin for Charity invitational. The first two groups were played out over the weekend and featured a handful of upsets.
The first one was Sebastian “Ostkaka” Engwall’s elimination at the hands of G2 manager Jakub “Lothar” Szygulski, who defeated the world champion twice to make the playoffs. Over in Group B, coming out of a semi-dormant professional career, Harald “Powder” Gimre ousted the former GosuRanking king and 2016 player of the year Sebastian “Xixo” Bentert also beating him twice 3-0 and 3-1. The rest of the groups will be played out February 4-5, with the playoffs slated for February 13-14.
RELATED: Kinguin for Charity event coverage hub
South of the PAX Major in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the fourth and final tournament of this weekend took place, away from the eyes of the western community. The first issue of Copa America for 2017 crowned Brazil’s “Coglorin” as the Latin American champion, awarding him with $4,000 and 15 HCT points, the same amount as Leadpaint got at PAX South.
RELATED: Copa America Winter bracket
Competitive Hearthstone is expected to resume with a more normal, unsaturated week starting Wednesday with the third week of ESL Trinity Series matches, leading up to the conclusion of the KFC Invitational group stage on the weekend.
