The Nexus Contest is now over. National teams have fought for the crown in an amazing tournament, with many thrilling series for fans to enjoy. Back in January, the 2018 edition of the Nexus Contest set a high standard for this tournament, leading to a lot of hype, excitement, and expectation for 2019. Countries got their best teams ready and headed to the group stage. Everything indicated that this time the tournament would be even greater than the last, but on November 22nd, dreadful news appeared on the horizon: the main sponsor of the Nexus Contest had dropped them.

Hello guys, sad news today : our sponsors has dropped us We will release a full statement later, but we will keep the tournament going without cashprize !

— European Nexus Contest (@eu_nexus) November 22, 2019

Mourning

The loss of that sponsorship meant removing the tournament prize pool, and that was something not everybody could overcome. Some players abandoned their teams, resulting in many forfeited matches. In the last week of group stage, just after the announcement of prize pool removal, only three out of nine series were played.

It’s true some of these withdrawals may not be a consequence of the sponsor backing off. For example, some series like Belgium vs Norway or Spain vs Turkey were irrelevant, as all these teams were already eliminated due to losing all their previous games. However, after a victory in its first game, Denmark forfeited their next two games and lost any chance of advancing into playoffs. Something similar happened to Team Poland, which depended on a victory against the Netherlands to qualify and nonetheless inexplicably forfeited the match.

Another potential cause for these absences may be the qualifiers for the second season of Division S, which took place around the same time as Nexus Contest. HeroesLounge tried to avoid this conflict and schedule their qualifiers in a time window that ended a couple hours before the first Nexus Contest series. However, it may be difficult for players to play with their main teams and then swap to their national teams with different teammates and possibly even play a different role. Add in the fact that these are important matches with competitive pressure, not merely casual scrims, and the difficulty is obvious.

After the last week of the group stage disaster, things looked better with the playing field leveled again. The time window for playoffs was tight. The entire whole bracket had to be played in just four days, and with the time restriction of working days (there are few full-time Heroes players left) and Division S qualifiers, the result was an impossibility of rescheduling the Czech Republic vs France semifinal, and the Czechs had to forfeit. Having a seven game final overlapped with 3rd place match, so it couldn’t be live streamed on the official English Twitch channel (Khaldor’s stream).

The day after the finals, Nexus Contest organizers released an official statement on the sponsor issue explaining the situation and apologizing for the consequences it had on the tournament.

The Final Showdown: France vs Germany

Despite everything, the tournament has been a thrilling one. The final was a tense Bo7 between France and Germany that went to the seventh map and provided probably one of the most exciting series of the year. As if the games themselves weren’t enough, Khaldor was joined by Trikslyr in a reunion of one of the most iconic HGC casting duos.

It all began with a French victory on Infernal Shrines (with a Rexxar pick that would become the most contested hero of the series and an outstanding 100% win rate). After that initial stumble, Germany picked the half-orc, partnering him with Tracer and Mal’Ganis, a hero they’d already picked in the first game which also happened to be one of the German comfort picks. Surprisingly, France answered this draft with Nova, but the StarCraft ghost wasn’t enough to stop the Germans.

With the 1-1 result, France tried another way to defeat the Rexxar-Tracer draft, this time focusing on globals through Dehaka and Brightwing. They lost on Sky Temple, but the next couple of iterations of this concept—keeping Brightwing but swapping Dehaka for Abathur and adding Rexxar—would prove to be successful and resulted in two victories on Cursed Hollow and Alterac Pass. They showed the strength of Abathur’s symbiote on Misha and even managed to get a Slapathur finish.





After the first five maps, France was leading the series 3-2, but Germany managed to first pick Rexxar so the Champion of the Horde could lead them to the decisive seventh map. The last map of the series was Dragon Shire. To avoid the Rexxar factor, the German national team decided to ban him. France still had an ace up its sleeve in the form of Chen, though. With the large panda's easy backline access, the French strategy worked wonders and allowed them to constantly destroy Chromie, the top damage source in the German side. With that, France took their fourth map and became the Nexus Contest champions!