The Ukrainian juggernaut netted yet another tournament victory defeating underdog Noxious in the finals with a convincing score of 4-1.
For this iteration of Challengestone, the theme was dubbed "True Highlander" - in an adapted best of five Conquest format, each player had to bring three decks, but all of them of the same class. Aditionally, across all three decks, every card was allowed to only be used once or, to put it differently, you get 90 different cards to build three decks out of them.
Aleksandr "Kolento" Malsh came into the finals after defeating Tempo Storm's newest addition Haiyun "Eloise" Tang in the first round and later Celestial's Austin "SilentStorm" Li in the semifinals with a very close 3-2 victory. For his decks he chose Shaman and created a Mech version, a Murloc build and an interesting Control/Deathrattle hybrid which featured cards like [card]Onyxia[/card] as well as the [card]Feugen[/card]/[card]Stalagg[/card]-combo. His opponent in the finals, Kacem "Noxious" Khilaji, had the easiest first round of all the competitors as Travis "Freshca" Boyer didn't show up and Noxious was therefore handed a win by default. Like Kolento's, his semifinal also was a tough one has he had to go through all five games to just barely score a win against Fnatic's Jökull "Kaldi" Jóhannsson. Noxious decided to bring Priest to the tournament, building an Aggro, a Mech and a Control variant.
Once both contestants had reached the finals, most people thought Kolento would take this one down easily, as he had done so many times before. To their surprise, Noxious' Aggro Priest proved to be too much for the Ukrainian's Control build, so the Canadian was off to a good start. Nonetheless, Kolento proceeded to crush Noxious' Mech Priest with all three of his decks - the clash between Murlocs and Mechs was particularly exciting and a game to remember as Kolento came back from a seemingly lost position with a [card]Lava Shock[/card] of all cards. The finals were not over yet though, because in contrast to the rest of the tournament they were played out in a best of seven. Kolento revived his Mech build to take on the Control version of his priestly opponent - only to finish him with an uncontested [card]Mechwarper[/card], [card]Micro Machine[/card] and [card]Whirling Zap-o-matic[/card] into [card]Bloodlust[/card] combo.
Shaman thus seems to be the king of one-deck-formats, not only taking down this tournament but also the recent One Deck Derby. It might be the case that Shaman is not in that bad of a spot at all, instead maybe we're all just playing the wrong formats all the time.
On a side note, it has been six weeks since the first Challengestone tournament, so maybe we will see the next iteration around mid of August. Of course, this is only speculation, though it has been confirmed that both finalists, Kolento and Noxious, will be invited back for an eventual continuation of the series.
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