Photo: Carlton Beener / Blizzard
The region is ready to wash out its poor performance at last year’s championship.
After getting only one player through to the playoffs in 2015, North America is off to a much better start at this year’s World Finals. The quartet of Julien “Cydonia” Perrault, Will “Amnesiac” Barton, Hao “Bbgungun” Li and Edwin “HotMEOWTH” Cook is undefeated so far after playing some of Europe’s and APAC’s best on the opening days. While the Americas’ line-up mostly consists of up-and-comers with few to none prior achievements, they bested decorated players including Il-Mook “Handsomeguy” Kang, Ole “Naiman” Batyrbekov and Pavel “Pavel” Beltukov and while none of the four have secured a playoffs spot just yet, odds are looking good for the region.
Less so for the powerhouse line-up of Europe. The old continent was voted as the one with best chances to win this year’s World Championship but so far only Virtus.pro’s Artem “DrHippi” Kravets has managed to take a win and sub-optimal play cost marquee players Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk and Pavel their first wins in the tournament. ThijsNL, Pavel and Naiman are all now one loss away from a round one ousting.
APAC also has won just one match, thanks to Cheonsu “Cheonsu” Kim and the loss of their headliner Handsomeguy came as one of the major upsets of Worlds so far.
Second to the Americas comes China, which is looking much better than last year, too. The red flags are at 50 per cent win-rate with Jason “JasonZhou” Zhou and Zheng “OmegaZero” Lin showing world class performance and even Zhuo “Hamster” Wang coming close to a victory with his N’Zoth Priest deck.
2016 World Championship continues today with the four winners matches and by the end of the evening we’ll know the first players to punch tickets to the playoffs phase at Blizzcon.
