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What to take from the Hearthstone CN vs EU Champs
All the big stories, popular decks and important moments from the battle between China and Europe.
You’ve just won a major Hearthstone tournament. You’ve fought your way through 15 of the game’s best players across China and Europe to claim victory. It’s been an exhausting 10 days, but now it’s over. You are the champion. However, there’s one final decision to make before you can rest: what do you want your prize to be? Do you want €200,000 Euros? Or a Ferrari?
This was the very same conundrum XHope faced after his win over Dogggg in the finals of the Hearthstone CN vs EU Championship. Incredibly, he took the car and may soon be seen cruising the streets of his hometown in a sporty little number he earned from being really good at a digital card game. It’s a bizarre story.
On a more serious level, though, the tournament also taught us a lot about the current state of competitive Hearthstone now that players are well and truly settled into the Journey to Un’Goro expansion.
Here are some of the major stories from the event, including the most popular decks and some memorable player moments. All things to keep in mind with the HCT Spring Playoffs on the horizon.
Quest Rogue and Murloc Paladin are top picks
In a move that'll surprise no one that’s been following competitive Hearthstone recently, players do love the Quest Rogue. Well, those who are playing it do. The ones facing it have the nightmare of watching some of the game’s weediest minions get beefed up in strength and pummel them down.
The deck is steadily becoming the target of a lot of hate from the player base, eliciting everything from entire essays of pure rage to thoughtful and considered criticisms of the deck’s design. It is, essentially, this cycle’s Pirate Warrior. And every cycle needs a deck to hate upon. Considering it was the second most popular deck at the tournament, it doesn’t look like it’ll be going anywhere soon.
If you’re looking for the most popular deck, though, you might be in for a little surprise. Every player brought Mid-range Murloc Paladin to the CN vs EU Championship after weeks of toying and tinkering with the idea. Paladin wasn’t in a particularly great place competitively prior to Journey to Un’Goro, but the power of new Murloc synergy cards such as Vilefin Inquisitor and Gentle Megasaur have given the class a boost in power.
Other additions such as Spikeridged Steed and Stonehill Defender round out the deck nicely too, giving a control element to stall the fast aggro decks while unleashing the Murloc army. While this was already the type of deck players were bringing to the Global Games, it’ll be interesting to see if it’s popularity continues into the HCT.
No one likes Gul’Dan
Not one player brought a Warlock deck to the tournament, so maybe Gul’Dan needs some time back through the Dark Portal to reconsider his plans. Warlock has regularly been in a very strong place throughout the history of competitive play with a variety of deck types seeing play over the years. The loss of Reno Jackson in the latest cycle, though, all but ended the most common Warlock deck and nothing has come along to replace it.
At the launch of the expansion there was some excitement around Lakkari Sacrifice, but it hasn’t managed to find a place in the meta and most players agree that it can't work as a viable deck right now. Other ‘Zoo’ style decks haven’t gained any traction, despite this type’s regular association with the Warlock class.
The resurrection of Hand Lock was a brief event, too, as it failed to offer the same sort of consistency as it had in the past, despite new cards such as Humongous Razorleaf offering so much promise. Unless someone has a moment of inspiration, it’s likely we won’t see much from Warlock over the coming months.
‘Pavelstone’ is real, but has its limits
Pavel ‘Pavel’ Beltukov and his good fortune have reached meme-level status following the incredible number of situations he finds himself topdecking the exact card he needs, finding a perfect answer through discover mechanics or simply achieving the best possible result from any of the game’s random effects. There's definitely an element of confirmation bias at play here, as these moments are more memorable and have been immortalised in Hearthstone’s history following his World Championship win in 2016. Despite this, there were some prime examples during Pavel’s run in the tournament this weekend.
The standout, though, was his group stage match against Chinese player, Trunks. The two had been slugging it out for some time between their Taunt Quest Warrior and Mid-range Murloc Paladin decks. Both were sat at extremely low life totals and all that Pavel needed was for one of his ‘Die, Insect’ hero powers to connect with Trunk’s face, but it seemed the RNG gods were not smiling on him that day.
That was, until, when facing down a terrifying board state, including some buffed-up Murlocs and a Tirion Fordring, Pavel was able to nail the 17 percent chance and send the Ragnaros fireball sailing past the wall of minions to finish off Trunks. Honestly, it was never really in doubt. Unfortunately for Pavel, the luck didn’t follow him all the way through the tournament as he fell in the semi-finals to Dogggg.
Pirate Warrior is slipping
The scourge of the Standard seas may finally be heading to the murky depths of Hearthstone deck history. Though its most notorious card, Patches the Pirate, was actually the most popular legendary played in the tournament, only one player brought a Pirate Warrior deck. It may be because it’s a deck that hasn’t really changed much at all since Journey to Un’Goro launched. The expansion didn’t provide anything new to improve or tweak the existing card list and, in fact, gave more options to help counter it with the addition of Golakka Crawler.
Dogggg struggled to make the deck work at times, too, even when he seemed to have the best run of cards possible. A turn one Hungry Crab into XHope’s Murloc Paladin surely spelt an easy victory for the finalist, but he was unable to keep up the momentum against the mid-range deck. As Dogggg ran out of cards, XHope was able to stabilise and turn the board in his favour, leaving his opponent with no option but to concede. The Ferrari was his to take home.
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