Photo: HS Esports Twitter
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DECKS: All decklists from HCT Winter
A 150-minute marathon of a match became the highlight of Friday night.
Zheng “OmegaZero” Lin and Samuel “SamuelTsao” Tsao were the players who opened Group D of HCT Winter last night and ended up delaying the schedule by a significant chunk. The pair played a two and a half hour match going the full distance before a winner was determined.
The series came down to a Tempo Mage from OmegaZero versus Dragon Priest from Tsao. Although he established board control early with his high-health minions, Tsao was reminded just why [card]yogg-saron, hope's end[/card] was nerfed. The old god helped OmegaZero get back in the game and put him in a good position to turn it around, but a combination of fatigue and tough decisions on the later turns lost the Chinese the match in the end.
This was the first of OmegaZero’s two losses which threw him out of the tournament in what can be considered the first major upset of the week. A three-in-a-row Gold Series champion, OmegaZero came into HCT Winter as one of the heavy favorites not just in his region but overall, too. For the second time counting last year’s Blizzcon, however, China’s hopeful went out in the group stages.
At the end of the night, it was “LVGE” and Jeffrey "Tarei" Liu who took the top spots in their respective groups, joining Alexey “ShtanUdachi” Barsukov and Yevgeniy “Neirea” Shumilin in the playoffs. Today’s decider matches will be of huge importance, as they’ll have to answer some tough questions such as: Will Europe pin a perfect record; will APAC be the only region without a playoffs spot; and what will be the faith of heavy hitters Pavel “Pavel” Beltukov and Frank “Fr0zen” Zhang who, despite counted among the best at the Bahamas, are one loss away from elimination.
