About Myself, Teams, and Secret Tournaments

About Me

Some of you know me as the Hearthstone player, monk. Some of you may know me as that Hearthstone guy from Teamliquid. But most of you know me from my roots in Starcraft II. I started off as a somewhat casually competitive Starcraft player, trying to get pretty good at the game, but without any progamer ambitions. However, my favorite part of the game was talking and writing about strategy. I wrote a few strategy articles on Teamliquid and eventually got on staff, as was the natural progression on TL.

While on staff, I wore many hats as a moderator, writer, and editor. I also traveled to many events to do coverage and interviews. (Of which this is probably my most famous.) Some examples of my work on TL include heading the development of the 100+ page PvZ guide, founding a new department of TL called TL Strategy, heading Proleague coverage, organizing the Best Games of 2012/2013, and serving a brief stint as the writer of SC2 Power Ranks.

Then Hearthstone beta came out. I received a key from Teamliquid and decided to try the game with the intention to become a casual player. I thought I was pretty decent at this fun and addictive game, but didn’t really think twice about it. Then the first Hearthstone rankings came out and I surprisingly found myself rank 5. I remember being out that day, but when I got back home, I found six messages on skype telling me of my ranking. It wasn’t the actual rank that left the biggest impression on me, but more that other people thought that it was a big deal. Somewhere around that time, Teamliquid began to become interested in covering Hearthstone and I was suddenly the natural fit to lead the team.

On Practice Groups and Teams

It began from there. My first step was to develop our Hearthstone coverage team. Because there weren’t many(any?) big tournaments yet, we were limited to strategy articles and fun articles. I kept an eye out for the best players with the intention of having them write articles for Teamliquid. As a player, I think I have a strong eye for Hearthstone talent, picking up some of the best players on NA before they had achieved anything. Although it has been alluded to in many interviews, I’d like to give an overview of our group. Our members consist of myself, ChanmanV, curi, Kisstafer, Kithros, koyuki, Sylas, StrifeCro, and Trump.

If you’ve been following the Hearthstone scene closely, you’ll recognize most or even all of these names. Combined, we have over 20 tournament wins with many more top 2 placements (mostly from knocking each other out in finals). And as of this writing, a majority of members on the team are top 10 on NA ladder at the moment. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of members of the team is the development of curi Warlock and Kithros Rogue, the two decks that defined the metagame over the last two months.

The intention was never to form a practice group, but that’s what we became. Because of our often silly sleep schedules, we always have someone to talk Hearthstone with. To give you an idea of how much Hearthstone we talk about, we average about 2000 messages in our group on Skype every day. Because of the group, we also always had practice partners to custom game with, which was especially important because the pre-patch ladder system was frankly terrible for practice.

Here’s another example of our how effective a team can be. One night, we had eight members online, so we wanted to test a matchup. We all got in a skype call, paired up, and grinded that matchup for half an hour. Then we switched sides. For the entire time, we talked about just that one matchup, getting insights that we noticed throughout the games. From there, we had a huge sample size of 40 games, which we could use to accurately judge the %win rate for both sides of that particular matchup. We also gained an insane amount insight together on how to play the matchup and talked about the weak cards in each of the decks we played. You can imagine how much of an advantage this gives us over other players who don’t have organized practice groups like this.

Right now we’re one of the two most known practice groups in the scene, along with Team Doge House. So here’s another example of how influential these practice groups are. Our group is based in NA while Team Doge House is based in EU. When I talked with members of Team Doge House, they told me that the NA ladder is much more competitive right now because practice groups are driving the ladders and our NA practice group is simply bigger than their EU one. That to me is just mind blowing, the monster that we’ve created.

I hope more of these practice groups or teams will form quickly in the future. Competition and rivalries between teams will advance the metagame of Hearthstone by a great deal, create storylines, and bring legitimacy to Hearthstone as an esport. Who knows? Maybe we can even have team leagues in the future. Speaking of team tournaments…

On Secret Tournaments

As some of you might know, I participated in a “secret” Hearthstone tournament over the last week hosted by ESGN. The idea was to get members of the two most known (only known?) practice groups and have them face off in a team format. For the purposes of this tournament, our team borrowed Kripparian as an honorary member.

I don’t want to bog you down with details, but teams will face off in a five bo5s in the Blizzcon format. Each player from one team will at first play once against one player of the other team. Then, there will be an ace match bo5, even if the score isn’t 2-2. Of course, you can expect Teamliquid to cover all of this with previews and reviews of all the matches.

We all flew in two days before the filming, so on the day before filming, both teams held Hearthstone bootcamps. Yes, that’s right, Hearthstone bootcamps. While on the plane traveling to the event, Hearthstone was actually patched with significant changes, completely rebalancing the metagame. Our team spent the entire day coming up with the best decks for this metagame. Meanwhile, the practice group members that were still back at home laddered to the top of the NA ladder and gave us advice on what they were seeing at the top. They also shared deck advice and even gave us entirely new decks to use.

Obviously we can’t reveal anything about the results before the matches air. But I will say this: every single person who participated agreed that the games played were the most high-level and exciting games ever played in any Hearthstone tournament yet. Both teams were literally on the edge of our seats at one point in every match, very often even jumping out of our seats at the excitement and surprises of the matches.

Probably my favorite part of the tournament was that it was hosted in a team format. With the team format, each match means something more beyond that match and storylines can be more easily developed. Emotions and tension run high on the bench with every draw, every move, and especially every RNG. Partly because of the team format, Artosis, probably one of the most traveled personalities in esports, commented that it was the most fun event he had ever been to. It was especially nice meeting everyone from Team Doge House in person. Though we have a sort of rivalry, everyone on the EU team was really cool and we all had a great time together.

But let's talk more about me. Out of the eight players at the event, I felt like I had the most unique experience going to this event. Artosis and StrifeCro are very used to going to event as players and celebrities. Kripp and Trump are also used to being in the spotlight with their streams and Blizzcon. Meanwhile, the rest of Team Doge house was used to going to WoW TCG tournaments as players, even though this was their first esports event. For me, however, I was used to always being on the other side of the coin; even though I very frequently traveled to events, I always worked behind the scenes, mostly interviewing players, personalities, and game developers. Being a player for the first time taught me two lessons: One is that you never think you’re prepared enough for the tournament; you always think you could have used that one extra day. Second is that god, it’s nerve-wracking up there.

But seriously, this tournament is the real deal, the first top-level Hearthstone offline event ever(sorry Blizzcon). The level of production was top notch, probably the best I’d ever seen for an esports event. The play was top notch. The decks were cutting edge, the best that existed at the time. All in all, it was the perfect event to launch Hearthstone into the next step of becoming an esport. I know you guys can’t wait, the event will start airing Janurary 6th after a lot of post-production. Trust me, it’s worth the wait.

Thanks to ESGN for hosting the event and treating the players so well. Thanks to everyone in the practice group who helped us with games and I’m sorry in advance if I missed one or two of you when I was giving shoutouts during filming (there’s way too many of us to reliably list without practice atm ). Also thanks to Exactable and sp0h for practicing with me when everyone else was asleep. Special thanks to kyouki for helping out with one of my decks in particular. That’s it for now, but I’ll leave you all with more pictures of my experience in Germany.