SPOILERS WARNING

This article contains heavy spoilers from the recently concluded VGVN Naxxramas Release Tournament.

If you have not yet, be sure to watch the games at their Twitch channel.

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Preface

I’m not one for tournament reports, but these past few weeks have been the most exciting of the Hearthstone meta for a while. This is, of course, in direct result of the Curse of Naxxramas release. VGVN has taken on this excellent opportunity to bring us a high-class semi-open invitational tournament. What we have was 3 days of quality matches, with the 3rd one in particular having nail-biting series. The most memorable of all the matches was undoubtedly the Grand Finals, between Realz and Liquid.Amaz. The stakes were high and the players brought their all, giving the audience some of the tensest Hearthstone yet seen.

I’ll be incorporating some text and mostly video format in this article. While I’d prefer to use text all the time, making a commentary video is the only option I have that retains my sanity. There would be simply too much to write, and I say this as a writer. It’s simply less efficient, and would only murder me in the process.

Gameplay footage are downloaded VoDs, so they are susceptible to any problems the live stream may have had, as well as being completely muted. There’s nothing I can do about it since the game doesn’t have a replay system, sorry. They are also only viewed from a single perspective. Due to this, I’d be employing a point-of-view analysis. I (and the viewers) will only be seeing one side of the game, eliminating information bias that you have as a caster/spectator. I will be focusing on making the right plays and explaining my thoughts, instead of the result-oriented one. This, after all, meant to be educational. I’ll be keeping the player’s deck list up during the game so that it’s easier to see just what card they have left in the deck, as this is the kind of information accessible to all anyway.

There are 9 videos in total, 1 for each video and 1 for each player’s deck lists. In total, there’s about 2 and a half hours worth of commentary in here, so be prepared.

Decks & Bans

Real’s Deck List Analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VejHgWmOfKE&feature=youtu.be

Amaz’s Deck List Analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_h1YK4gIM&feature=youtu.be

Amaz banned Realz’s Aggro Rogue.

Realz banned Amaz’s Zoo Warlock.

Game 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWR0mWA6BNU&feature=youtu.be

Game 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3xiMCx2bjc&feature=youtu.be

Game 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrMUjfsBZJI&feature=youtu.be

Game 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ZTjgvyvA&feature=youtu.be

Game 5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9sFWGuMH18&feature=youtu.be

Game 6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne9v9dZ09e0&feature=youtu.be

Game 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3jGoSGVqbs&feature=youtu.be

Post-mortem

That was actually a hell lot of work, certainly so much more than I previously anticipated. A lot of the production issues towards the end bothered me a lot during recording, but that’s not something I can do anything about unfortunately. On the context of delivery, I understand I could certainly do things better. However time constraints and just general perfectionist mentality told me that if I keep trying to do things ‘right’ then I’ll never finish it. So what you have here is about, at most, the 2nd take of any single video. There are also the occasional noise that got in, despite my best efforts. I do apologise.

Outside of that though, I believe this is the first time something like this has ever been done, and I’m eager to see just what people think of it. Even comments on things like speech patterns, pacing etc. is fine. It’s not how I normally talk, but forced into due to recording hardware. The random pauses, weird punctuation etc. are mostly because of this. Otherwise it’s just because words keep escaping my thoughts.

About the Author

Someone facing massive identity crisis.

I can be found exposing human psychology on my blog, but only ironically.

I also have a Twitter account, or a Twitch channel where I stream absolutely anything.

While on the subject of shameless promotion, my youtube is actually mostly composed of Dota 2 things.

The featured song for this article can be found here.