In a specially picked tavern in the Netherlands, one Radu “Rdu” Dima, two-time DreamHack champion and the leader in the HCT points standings has gotten his first victory in the Last Call Invitational for Europe. The prize for a championship run is invaluable – the last remaining spot at the 2016 World Finals. Despite playing outstandingly throughout the year, Rdu has only now made it to an official Blizzard event and this is his first and last shot at making it to the big stage.
Shortly after his specifically designed line-up eliminated Team Spirit’s Alexey “ShtanUdachi” Barsukov, Rdu caught up with GosuGamers’ own Tom “Matthieist” Matthiesen for a lengthy chat. Sparing no words, Rdu goes over his choice to bring Discard Zoo to the tournament, how would HCT’s structure look in his dream world and how is he dealing with the community negativity that he’s still getting two and a half years since his breakout at DreamHack Summer 2014.
I'm here with Rdu just after his first victory at the last call invitational. How do you feel man?
I feel really good. I really like it here and it's very nice where you can win the first series that you play since you have a lot of time to relax and to prep for the next one.
Out of the possible opponent you can face in the next round, who would you prefer?
BunnyHoppor for sure, since Sintolol has a very good line-up against me. So if I face Sintolol, it will be a very hard time for me, whereas against BunnyHoppor I am favorite line-up-wise. Sintolol is actually the only player I don't want to face in the entire tournament. But of course, that's on paper. Pirate Warrior is a strong deck but it's not played for a reason: It's a very risky one.
Yes, you see it sometimes appear on the ladder but people dodge it in tournaments due to lack of consistency. But let's talk a bit about the preparation you did because we know that the G2 group is very tight and you practice a lot together.
I prepared with a lot of people that are not involved in Last Call, mostly. I talked with Casie and Sjow and with Noblord and talked and played with Impact, Thijs, Crane and StanCifka. Hopefully, I didn't miss anybody. I tried to get a group of really solid players which will not be here at Last Call.
Thijs, Crane and Impact were my main practice partners. StanCifka helped me mostly with my Druid.
How did you settle on this line-up? Out of all five decks, the Discard Zoo is the kind of the odd looking one, why pick it?
It's just a consistent deck overall and it made sense for me. I didn't want to play Warrior because of ShtanUdachi and I also had to play Rogue and Hunter because of him if I wanted to get past round 1 since I knew I was playing him and I know his tendencies. Other than that, I really had to take Zoo, because there was nothing really left: I couldn't play Warrior, Priest is unplayable and I don't think Paladin is that great at the moment. Then there's Tempo Mage which is flimsy and Freeze Mage requires totally different strategy with totally different ban - you have to ban Warrior to play Freeze - and I'm not that confident playing Freeze in the most important tournament of the year. I brought it to DreamHack, I considered it an experiment but at the biggest tournament? I don't have the balls, it's a lot of pressure.
"I felt cursed playing the Prelims, I felt I just couldn't win."
You want a deck that you feel super comfortable on. Tempo Mage is like that for me but I don't feel it's that great in that line-up, especially against Shtan. Tempo Mage is good against Shaman and I wanted to ban Shaman with my strategy, so Mage, Priest and Paladin didn't fit and Warrior I just couldn't play because Shtan is known for his anti-Warrior line-ups.
As you mentioned, you've been an advocate of Tempo Mage in the past. Do you think the meta shift has anything to do with the deck falling a bit in power?
Yeah, it's just how the meta changed. When I won DreamHack, nobody was playing Druid. Then, everyone started and realized it's ridiculously favored against Tempo Mage. Other things happened, too: Hunter dropped in favor, Zoo gained popularity, Aggro Shaman lost popularity and Midrange Shaman gained popularity, so all things went bad for Tempo Mage.
Tempo was the right deck at the right time at DreamHack, but since then everything changed: All the good match-ups disappeared or became worse and new bad ones came to light. So even if the deck gained some good cards with [card]Babbling Book[/card], I still don't think it's good enough.
This tournament is the only Blizzard tournament you've made this season. Does that add any pressure on you?
No. I think I played OK in Prelims and I remember in the last two Prelims I just got 0-2'd due to draws I couldn't do anything with, I got demolished. I brought strong decks, I didn't try to counter the meta as other guys. I just brought a normal line-up which was probably a mistake. Then I had the worst draws in all of the tournaments I have played. I felt pretty cursed playing the Prelims, I felt I just couldn't win: I tried to read the meta and the in-game situations to make the best possible decisions but nothing worked.
It was upsetting but that's how card games work. Double eliminations is a rough format too: You lose early then you have to win a ton of games.
You've been quite vocal on Twitter about the HCT system and particularly how the Last Call Invitational is structured. How would you change it?
I will tell you what I'd do about this year's tournament. Having preliminaries was fine but I don‘t think double elimination is the way to go. I think there should be more advantages to the people who are high seeds, they should get byes or something like that.
Like last year?
Yes, though last year was way worse. Blizzard made progress, and I'd like to see progress all the time. Obviously, I talked about how badly APAC was structured and about Last Call I only complained about it not getting enough spotlight. Prelims get way more and Last Call is, in theory, better and it should get more respect from Blizzard. It felt a bit rushed: one-day tournament, us playing from taverns instead from the same venue and so on.
If I was to make the Last Call with a limited budget, I would probably just rent out a venue like they did last year in Prague and have all the players and casters on site - obviously different casters for each region - and get the fans to come and watch and just have a two-day tournament with more exposure for the players. Now, we don't even have interviews between the games, only the finalist gets interviewed. Also, it's Conquest.
You'd prefer Last Hero Standing?
No, I don't like LHS either. I think there needs to be a different format.
What would it look like?
I would have to think of it but if my job was thinking of formats, I would make one. I don't use my time to do that, it's pointless - I am not the one that decides how the format would look like. But I'm pretty sure there are some smart people who can come up with something better than Conquest because conquest eliminates the pick order aspect. If one guy doesn't want to play the pick order game, then neither guys play it, and mathematically if one guy randomizes it just doesn't matter if the other does, too. That takes away from the competition and even though I like forcing the opponent to win with every deck, it feels bad to queue random match-ups because you can queue all the bad match-ups in one series and that's it - you lose.
"One of the biggest issues is that every tournament calls itself a major and viewers don't know what to care about."
You expressed your fondness of the PGL format with its nine decks, I remember you were actually in the Twitch chat during an episode of The Innervated talking how it's amazing and everything. Do you think it can be incorporated to add strategical depth to HCT?
First of all, even if you play with nine decks you still have to play Last Hero Standing with nine decks. Even PGL couldn't apply it that well. They could've done many other things like show the pick/ban phase as this is a very important aspect, bur they rather just did the pick/ban pre-game rather than on-stream. That would've made the broadcast more nuanced, allow the casters and analysts shine.
PGL had the right idea but not the best way to implement it.
Would you keep the HCT structure for next year?
Well, I would like to see something more special. What I had in my mind - although that's a bit weird - imagine all the players and casters were at one of the events and use that as a qualifier. In my dream world, instead of having preliminaries for the Winter Season, for example, they could add some more money to the prize pool of DreamHack Winter and just make that the preliminary. Have a three-day tournament, all the players on site, you can run swiss easier and you can call it a major.
I think one of the biggest issues is that every tournament calls itself a major and viewers don't know what to care about. If Blizzard would do what I suggest, they would pick DreamHack for the European Winter preliminaries, in Spring the would pick PGL, etc., kind of what Valve does. That would be difficult to implement but I think it will make it cleaner and more awesome for the players. You get one of the most amazing experiences in your life as a player if you go to one such event and it will make you love Hearthstone even more.
Furthermore, the way I would have players qualify for that is cut ladder altogether, invest into a site made by Blizzard - that's of course still dream world scenario - with one or two online cups per week with a decent prize pool and you can only sign up for the tournament if you have a specific ladder rank. Then HCT points are given to the top 64 - it would be very hard to qualify otherwise if you had only two cups - and then you just invite the top part of HCT earners to the seasonal prelims. I don't think we'll have this, however.
What's your take on tournaments banning cards?
I don‘t think it should be needed. Blizzard just needs to do balancing more often. Not super often because then they'd just change cards based on what the casual guy on Reddit complains about and people will always complain about something, but you can see when something is out of line.
For example, I can see that even now Shaman is out of line. You don't have to always nerf what's best, but I don‘t think we should be at the point where bans are necessary to enforce balance.
Going on a bit about the nerfs we got recently as compared to what we got with the previous batch - do you like the current one more?
Yes, I think [card]abusive sergeant[/card] should've been nerfed int the previous batch and in my dream world I would change [card]ragnaros the firelord[/card], because the card is obnoxious but that will never happen because it's a powerful character in the WarCraft lore and it has the 8/8/8 bullshit...
"We shouldn't be at the point where bans are necessary to enforce balance."
How would you change it?
I don't know, just delete him from the game or something. I don't like a card being so influenced by high variance. Obviously, he's not that bad for the game as [card]tuskarr totemic[/card] was - he's late game RNG - but that still counts. He's not the worst problem but it's annoying sometimes.
In terms of how Blizzard approached all the cards they nerfed, some were upset about how in the past [card]starving buzzard[/card] was essentially removed from the game, for example, same with [card]warsong commander[/card] and then with Whispers they did the same to [card]blade flurry[/card]. Do you think that they did better with the most recent changes?
Yes, it's pretty obvious it's way better now. They are way more carefully balanced.
The last topic I want to touch on is your interaction with the Hearthstone community, which has not always been as smooth as you might've wanted, as you have strong opinions on many topics. How important is it for you that you're liked by the community?
I am not always politically correct in my statements but I know historically people didn't like me, they like to hate on me, and that's obviously not great for me. I am human, I feel bad when I get huge amounts of insults from people who've never met me and got an impression of myself based on one stream or one interview they watched for five minutes. It's weird, I don't think these same people would like if they were on the receiving end of that attitude.
But that's the internet, that's its downside, you have situations like that. you saw it very well after I won my first DreamHack, that was basically a situation where most people realized I was being set up by some jealous guy who just wanted to get revenge because I beat him in some tournament beforehand and I forgot to delete him, because nobody was deleting anybody at that point, those were the first tournaments in HS and you never expect somebody to be so evil.
After that, I felt like the main character from the movie "The Hunt", everybody hates you and you have done nothing. It's a continuous circlejerk now and sometimes it bothers me and gets to me. Sometimes I relax and it passes but it's not cool to deal with internet bullying. Some say that insults should be ignored, but it's different when a lot more people do it.
It's kind of like being in school where the whole class bullies you. Even if there's one guy that says "you're cool" it doesn't really matter because we feel the bad things people say about us way more than the good ones.