The last king of the Americas for 2016 will be crowned this weekend. These are the 40 decks to be played at the championship, now fully equipped with Karazhan cards.
Two more seeds into Blizzcon are available for the Americas and one of them will be assigned to the best player of this weekend. It's championships time in California with the eight players who went through the preliminaries in August.
The list is notably lacking any big names and consists of young aspiring gamers. One exception is Jeffrey "Tarei" Liu, who competed in the first ever World Championship in 2014, tasting elimination in the round of eight by runner-up Xieyu "TiddlerCelestial" Wang.
HCT AM Summer Championship will be one of the first majors to have the full Karazhan available to the players, giving a glimpse of what the metagame will be like moving forward. The majority of the competitors are sticking to the fantastic four of Druid, Shaman, Warrior and Warlock, though notable deckbuilding differences can be observed.
MalyYogg Druid has become a staple Tier 1 deck alongside its Tokens cousin. The class itself is being brought by every single player in the championship, as are Shaman and Warrior. Shaman builds are sticking to the aggressive archetype, though [card]Spirit Claws[/card] and [card]Maelstrom Portal[/card] can be seen as tech cards in some decks. The Warrior class is seeing diversification with Dragon Warrior being accompanied by [card]C'Thun[/card], Control and OTK builds.
Zoo has totally overtaken the Warlock class, though it too has its variations. [card]Malchezaar's Imp[/card] and [card]Demonfire[/card] are often seen in current Zoo lists, while players like Pascoa have gone full DiscardLock with [card]Silverware Golem[/card] and everything.
A handful of Mage, Hunter and Paladin decks color up the metagame picture, just enough to offer something to look forward to this weekend.
