Beta Preview Tournament Summary

The first streamed Artifact tournament just concluded and ended with a flawless victory for the Swedish player heffaklumpen over Mogwai (2-0) with a Green/Black deck that you can find here.

After a long first day of competition in Swiss format, only 8 players (including DotA2 TI winner KuroKy) were left to fight for the title and the first place $4,000 prize. Ultimately, heffaklumpen's drafted deck and talent proved too strong for his opponents as he defeated his quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals opponents without dropping a single game, ending his tournament run with a flawless 13-0.

The tournament saw a good variety of decks as it was played in draft mode and competitors had to pick the best cards they could get. The players that went the furthest in the tournament were almost all running a two-color deck, but we got to see an interesting 4-color deck (or 'rainbow' deck) ran by the Chinese player 张伯伦 (or Chamberlain). Unfortunately for him (and for our curiosity), he would end his tournament on a disconnection loss against the eventual finalist, Mogwai.

For heroes, Meepo saw an unsurprisingly low picking rate (the ugly rat was only included in 2 decks) showing that his reputation in DotA 2 followed him to Artifact. On the other side, the 3 most picked heroes were all basic heroes (Debbi the Cunning, Farvhan the Dreamer, Keefe the Bold, in that order) showing that despite being default cards, they can have a great value in most decks. Finally, Drow Ranger was probably the low-rate pick we expected the least, as the hero card was deemed to be very powerful during the beta until the tournament. 

You can find all the information about the preview tournament decks and cards stats on Artifaction's website.