Artifact Preview Tournament Day 2: Joel Larsson takes it all
Artifact, the Dota card game, had its first live-streamed community tournament this weekend. The 128 Artifact beta participants competed in this two-day event for their share of $10,000. The day 2 matches of the Artifact Preview Tournament were played out in the best-of-3 format. Throughout day 2, we got to follow Joel “Heffaklumpen” Larsson at the event through his draft and games all the way to the finals. To find out more about Joel Larsson, make sure to read our preview of this event.
Quarterfinals
The day started off with Joel with a Black-Green draft, facing off against Ole “Naiman” Batyrbekov. Joel’s draft was based around his two copies of Sorla Khan. It’s a powerful Black hero, with the signature card Assault Ladders, which is used for aggressively pushing for tower or nexus damage at the cost of the survivability of your minions and heroes. Naiman for the top 8 had drafted a Red-Green deck with two Ursas. Ursa is one of the strong Red heroes, with the signature card Enrage that gives a hero +4 attack and armor for this turn only. In the series, Naiman made a mistake early on that put him at a 1-to-0 disadvantage. The second game was closer, but Joel managed to close it out. Things went 2-0 to Joel Larsson.
A match worth watching
One of the other quarterfinal matches we highly recommend looking back on if you want to learn more about Artifact was the quarterfinals match between Raffael “GameKing” Iciren and Kuro “KuroKy” Salehi Takhasomi. The series ended 2 to 1 in favor of KuroKy, but it had a lot of interesting decision points that will help you massively when trying to understand the game at a deeper level.
The semi-finals and remaining quarterfinal matches were not very interesting to watch, as the games mostly went in favor of one player or the other from quite early on. If you do want to look back at these matches, you can find all the VODs of the event on the BTS Artifact Channel.
The finals: Heffaklumpen vs. Mogwai
The final match was between Joel with the Black-Green draft and Miguel “MegaMogwai” Guerrero with a tri-color draft. Mogwai’s draft includes Green and Black as main colors with Bristleback and a few Red spells to fill out the rest. The series was an uphill battle for Mogwai due to how the decks lined up, which he did not manage to pull off. The strength of the deck and level of play of Joel were too much for Mogwai to handle this time around. The finals ended 2 to 0 in Joel’s favor.
The winner
The star of the event was once again Joel Larsson/Heffaklumpen, defeating Hearthstone streamer Naiman, Dota legend KuroKy, and Gwent content creator Mogwai on his path to becoming the winner of the Artifact Preview Tournament. He took home the grand prize of $4,000. Larsson had great success using double Sorla Khans’ nexus push draft. Throughout the event, the drafts were very much in Larsson’s favor. He had very good heroes to use all throughout both days of the event.
Can’t get enough of Artifact? Check out our recap of day 1 of this event!
Featured image credit: Steam Store
