Good games and damaging drama marked the final day of the event, as China took the lion’s share of the prize pool.
NA and China came into round three of the CN vs. NA Championship on equal footing. The host nation had taken a decisive victory in round one, but NA had equalized thanks to the all-killing run of Julien “Cydonia” Perrault in the next. Also due to the latter, the guests were leading in the money-won race and were looking forward to the doubled prize pool of 300,000 RMB in the decisive round.
NA soon found themselves in a predicament again as unconvincing games from Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk and Cydonia put them a pair behind right from the start against Zheng “OmegaZero” Lin from China. By the fifth game, Team China was already on match point, all their hopes on Keaton “Chakki” Gil’s shoulders.
Chakki’s and Team NA’s destiny was decided in game seven as the DH Austin champion met coach “LVGE” and pushed the match to the final seventh game. As Chakki was left with Miracle Rogue against Lvge’s RenoMage, the American’s chances were looking great for a possible turn-around, until a surgical [card]dirty rat[/card] from the Chinese pulled out Chakki’s [card]Edwin vancleef[/card] and decided the game very much on the spot, ultimately winning the tournament for Team CN.
The Dirty Rat play sprouted a controversy of itself, as NA captain Reynad took to social media, claiming Lvge took the risky play only because he could hear his teammates getting excited about what could the Rat possibly pull and playing it on turn two, considering Chakki’s mulligan and miss of turn one play, would otherwise be considered a terrible decision.
With the controversy blowing up on Reddit, the majority of Team NA has taken to Twitter or Reddit to make statements of their own.
“Big thing is that LVGE hovered and pulled the Dirty Rat out of his hand, then put it back,” Chakki wrote on TwitLonger. “After he grabbed the card, the Chinese casters went crazy and it was very easy to hear them. After the casters yelled, LVGE threw out the rat. You can clearly see him hovering it out of his hand in this clip.”
“The issue being the players were given in game noise and were only about 10 feet away from their team and can hear anything they say. Of course this time being especially bad obviously because it costed our tournament life,” Frank “Fr0zen” Zhang added, and continued: “Overall aside from this we truly enjoyed this event, the organizers treated us professionally much better than most invites we been to and didn't purposely do anything in favor of one side or another. I also don't think the Chinese players mean to shout on purpose after multiple warnings and it put lvge on a tough spot, I don't blame him entirely for doing the play since people watching the event tend to be results oriented he would likely be one of the players blamed.”
NA’s hero from round two Cydonia also seconded the statements made by the two LG players in a couple of Reddit posts, calling for Blizzard to “release official guidelines that Hearthstone tournaments should follow so the players can be assured a fair environment.”
The story is still developing on the Chinese side, and GosuGamers will be bringing exclusive coverage with statements from NetEase and Team China in the coming days.
UPDATE 17:38 CET: NetEase, Lvge and CN vs. NA production company make statements
