Image Courtesy: Wykrhm Reddy
Artifact, the Dota card game, is having its first live-streamed community tournament this weekend. A total of 128 Artifact beta participants competed in this two-day event for their share of $10,000. In the end, Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour winner Joel “heffaklumpen” Larsson emerged on top, not dropping a single game throughout the entire tournament to win the lion’s share of the $10,000 prizepool.
The event was quite hard to follow at the start since most of the people did not have a chance to play the game yet. The organizers listened to the feedback and added a caster to ask every question imaginable, which made it much easier to follow from a new player’s perspective.
The tournament kicked off with a Swiss Format Group Stage, before going into a Single elimination BO3 playoffs stage. Several prominent Dota 2 Pro and Personalities like Kuroky, SUNSfan, Torte De Lini, noxville as well as other CCG Pros like Raffael “GameKing” Iciren, Ole “Naiman” Batyrbekov, and Chris “Fenomeno” Tsakopoulos competed in the event.
After some stunning battles, the Top 8 the emerged including some of the top CCG players, streamers and surprisingly Dota 2 Pro Kuro “Kuroky” Takasomi. While Kuroky’s run through the playoff brackets saw him take down Austrian Hearthstone veteran Raffael “GameKing” Iciren in the quarterfinals, he eventually fell to the undefeated winner of the tournament, Joel “heffaklumpen” Larsson; falling to his unbeatable Aggressive Combo deck.
The Grand Finals saw heffaklumpen take on Spanish Gwent professional Miguel “MegaMogwai” Guerrero. heffaklumpen punished MegaMogwai’s conservative play, in both games taking the initiative and abusing his Double Sorla Khan deck to secure the 2-0 victory.
After the end of the stream, the BTS crew also announced that the streaming NDA for Artifact lifts on November 17, in preparation for the Beta launch on November 19. They will be hosting ‘a fun Artifact party to countdown to the beta!’
