Photo: DreamHack
Europe prevailed over North America in a ten-game scrim to end the three-month marathon.
Even though they went undefeated through the upper bracket, Luminosity Gaming made a fatal slip at the end of their Trinity Series road. The Americas were paired against compLexity Gaming in the finals—a team which they defeated the previous day—only to see the Europeans get their revenge and win their first major gold since Jan “SuperJJ” Janssen’s triumph at SeatStory Cup IV in November 2015.
CompLexity’s journey to the Trinity Series cup was a rocky one. The team barely qualified for the playoffs, finishing fourth in the group stage ahead of Tempo Storm by narrowly edging out Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk’s team in a tiebreaker. This seeding meant they would face table leaders Team Liquid in the semi-finals and compLexity had to survive eleven games against the horses, a match-up they won in part due to Team Liquid’s questionable ban of Druid and disregard for Pirate Warrior—the arguable strongest deck in the meta right now.
CompLexity still had to go through the lower bracket after a winners finals loss to Luminosity Gaming. Great plays coupled with just a grain of luck helped coL get through Virtus.pro in an unfavored RenoLock vs. Tempo Mage match-up.
Luminosity got the first breakthrough by winning two in a row early in the series which put them in a comfortable position in Trinity Series’ Last Hero Standing format, which traditionally characterizes with drawn-out series due to players hard-countering each other game in and game out. Multiple wins in a row often mean a sure victory, but that wasn’t the case with Luminosity last night.
The two finalists kept ping-ponging games until Luminosity were faced with a difficult task: Win two games in a row with Hunter against coL’s RenoLock and Freeze Mage. In all seven weeks of group stage play preceding the playoffs, this was accomplished just once when Petar “Gaara” Stevanovic 3-0’d Cloud9 with Hunter in week four. For the majority of the tournament, Hunter was the go-to self-exclude class which no one wanted to play.
LG’s choice of Aggro Hunter nevertheless put them in a favorable position against the two control decks of coL but awful back-to-back rolls sealed their fate. LG’s Turn 1 tracking saw them discard both their [card]injured kvaldir[/card]s, which meant their [card]desert camel[/card]s could only pull inferior 1/1 minions like [card]alleycat[/card] from the deck. Their T3 [card]animal companion[/card] “rewarded” them with Leokk, once again the worst outcome in that situation.
Even though they still packed a lot of heat in their hand, the lights went out for LG when [card]kazakus[/card] healed compLexity just enough to keep them out of range of potential lethal, which ultimately meant championship for the European trio.
SuperJJ, Simon “Crane” Raunholst and Tugay “MrYagut” Evsan will split $75,000, half of the total prize pool, leaving the runner-ups from LG with $30,000 total.
