After a couple of exciting weeks the EU Nexus Contest is finally over, and it’s been a wonderful sample of what the community can achieve in hosting its own tournaments. For many of us, it has become a rediscovering of Heroes esports, a whole new beginning.However, it doesn’t follow the path of previous esports tournaments, which seems to herald the beginning of a change in the European balance.

The 2017 Nexus Games was dominated by Poland, who cleaned house with an overwhelming 15-3 map score. The rest of the top four consisted of teams from Sweden, Germany and France (not something that should be too unexpected). These are the countries that have birthed some of the great players in the HotS scene and in esports overall. Whichever esports title you follow, you'll notice these four countries popping up again and again.

However, the 2017 champions didn’t make it out of groups this time, losing first to Ukraine—a team that last year placed last in its group but this year achieved fourth in the whole tournament—and Russia, the new Nexus Contest champions. Though not a part of HGC, these players have been competing at the Agon League, a tournament for the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) region. But what’s changed from last year to make these two teams so much stronger? We’ve talked to some of their players to find out.

Congratulations, Team Russia @eu_nexus #savehots #agon #agonleague #season2 #hgc #hots #heroesofthestorm pic.twitter.com/leOIx0KmVV

— AgonLeague (@AgonLeague) December 24, 2018

Team Russia: Stalk

If we’re going to discuss Russian history in Heroes of the Storm, we must first go back to the beginning in 2015 to a team called ArthasStroitHram, later Virtus.pro). After its disbandment, Synergy would rise from its ashes as the only Russian team to make it into HGC. Stalk was once part of ArthasStroitHram, later on lending his talents to the other mythical Russian team of the time, GoogleIshetZont (picked by Epsilon eSports for some months). Since then he has been a regular of the European Open Division.







As Stalk says, the Nexus Contest hasn’t been the first tournament for this Team Russia roster. In fact, they intend to keep the same roster for Division S qualifiers and other upcoming tournaments (as we saw at All Hallows Cup 3). However, the Nexus Contest had some inconveniences for the Russians, namely a time zone that’s slightly different to the European ones:

Ukraine: Witness and CandleLight

We talked before about Synergy, the last great Russian team, but not all of them were Russians. Synergy’s roster wouldn’t have been nearly as big without CEBKAJE and PowerOfDream, their two Ukrainian players. After Synergy disbandment, both of them disappeared, and that was almost everything we knew about Ukraine…until now.

After a poor result in the 2017 Nexus Games, the Ukrainian team has been almost fully revamped, keeping only two of its members: CandleLight and Valamaks. However, the team we’ve watched in this Nexus Contest has been a fearsome one, taking down Germany and Poland and forcing the Swedes to a fifth map. Witness and CandleLight from Team Ukraine explain the emerging talent in their country:







Witness tells us that currently there are about ten high-skilled Ukrainian players, but they’re split into different teams. In fact, only Shamzik and Witness were in the same team before the Nexus Contest.

We’ll make sure to keep track of all these amazing players through the Division S qualifiers and Season 3 of Agon League, which will take off next March.