Artifact Preview Tournament Day 1 Recap

Artifact, the Dota card game, is having its first live-streamed community tournament this weekend. A total of 128 Artifact beta participants competed in day one of this two-day event for their share of $10,000. Throughout the day we got to follow four players at the event through their games and drafts. To find out more about the four players, make sure to read our preview of this event.

Event Recap

The event was quite hard to follow at the start since most of the people did not have a chance to play the game yet. The organizers listened to the feedback and added a caster to ask every question imaginable, which made it much easier to follow from a new player’s perspective.

The main star of the event was Joel “Heffaklumpen” Larsson, who was one of the players competing live in the studio. Throughout the Swiss stage, he managed to win seven series in a row. In both draft phases, Joel managed to get quite incredible decks. Many of the other players competing noted on social media they would hate to face him in the Swiss stage.

Dane vs. Lifecoach, a series worth looking back to

The best series of the event was between Hearthstone streamer Dane “DaneHearth” McCappin and Adrian “Lifecoach” Koy. This was round 6 of the Swiss phase; both players were at a 4-win and 1-loss score in the Swiss. This series was one of the most intense we got to see throughout the day, with some of the highest stakes. Whoever won this series had to play one more to qualify for the top 8, whereas the other would be out of top 8 contentions. You can look back on the series on the BTS Youtube channel.

Top 8 competitors

Ultimately, Heffaklumpen and Dane proceeded into top 8. The other competitors who made it into the top 8 include Hearthstone streamers Chris “Fenomeno” Tsakopoulos and Ole “Naiman” Batyrbekov, Gwent players Raffael “GameKing” Iciren and Miguel “MegaMogwai” Guerrero, Dota 2 legend Kuro “KuroKy” Salehi Takhasomi (whom some might know for winning Dota 2’s largest tournament, the International, in 2017 for over $10 million), and an unknown going by the name of “space_loner.”

Day 2 of the Artifact Preview Tournament will continue later today at 09:00 a.m. PT/ 18:00 p.m. CET / 12:00 p.m. ET on Nov. 11. The tournament will be streamed on the Beyond the Summit Twitch channel: twitch.tv/BTSartifact.

For more of our esports coverage, check out our analysis of the Q3 results of Blizzard and the potential impact on Hearthstone.

Image credit: Beyond the Summit / Artifact