The Hearthstone Championship Tour's Spring preliminaries kicked off this weekend, narrowing down the European field to the final eight. They'll be playing next month for their share of $80,000 and an automatic spot in the Championship at BlizzCon in the fall.
While the Winter European Championship featured a lot of new names this time around, the final will feature some very recognizable players and teams. There are few names bigger than Thijs 'Thijs' Molendijk of G2 Esports, winner of the Curse Trials, the 2015 Hearthstone Europe Championship, and who was only one game away from making last year's overall championships. Thijs went 15-7 with meta-friendly Renolock, Miracle Rogue, Aggro Shaman, and Tempo Warrior decks.
Speaking of Tempo Warrior, its emergence in the last couple of weeks after success on ladder has represented a seismic shift in the style of Warrior play seen in the tournaments. Various Control Warrior styles, ranging from the traditional to dragon builds, along with last year's addition of the Grim Patron, have dominated the types of decks we've seen from Warrior going back to beta. But new cards like Ravaging Ghoul, Bloodhoof Brave, and Malkorok combined with old cards like Arathi Weaponsmith, Kor'kron Elite, and Cairne Bloodhoof, have resulted in a stable Midrange Warrior build that gains tempo, something we're not used to seeing in tournaments. Tempo was the most popular Warrior deck, with almost as many players bringing Tempo as Control and Patron put together.
Joining Thijs are Esteban 'AKAWonder' Serrano of SK Gaming, winner of ESL Katowice 2016, and Simon 'Crane333' Raunholst and Mateusz 'Loyan' Roszkowski of Complexity Gaming. If you've lost to a Midrange Shaman using Bloodlust on ladder in the last couple of weeks, Loyan is partially to blame, as he finished the April season as the number one EU player, streaming his build extensively in the final week of the month.
15-year-old George "Georgec" Connolly also made the European Final. While he hasn't been seen much in the tournament so far, he ranks fourth in Europe in HCT points, thanks to finishing in the top 20 every season this year on ladder. Rounding out the top eight are Marco 'Turna' Castia from the Italian team Powned It, Iner, and Casie.
Some other big names just missed the finals and took home the consolation prize of $2,500 include last year's champion, Sebastian 'Ostkaka' Engwall, Jeffrey 'SjoW' Brusi, Jan 'Faramir' Engelmann, and Stanislav 'StanCifka' Cifka.
With 222 players, we saw a wide variety of decks, including some surprises here and there. N'Zoth Paladin was a popular deck before last week's DreamHack Austin tournament, but was likely helped by Keaton 'Chakki' Gill's piloting of the deck to a win. This week, 109 players brought an N'Zoth Paladin (tallied by GosuGamers), the most popular deck and more or less the only Paladin deck we saw. The trend toward either bringing an Aggro Shaman or no straight-up face deck continued, with Hunter not being shut out but clearly still not a preferred deck.
In a long tournament, a lot of less refined decks tend to be weeded out due to inconsistency and the larger sample size, so most of the decks of the final 16 were "by the books." 14 of 16 players had Shamans, all the Rogues were Miracle, the Mages Freeze, and most of the Warriors were Tempo. Nearly a quarter of the players in the tournament brought a Priest deck but not a single one made it to the the last two rounds. With such a variety of decks in the meta, the conventional wisdom is that as a reactive class, Priest tends to suffer in an unstable meta, and nothing this weekend countered that belief.
A few surprise decks did make it through to the final two rounds. StanCifka brought a Yogg-Saron Warrior, the only one in the tournament, with Tournament Medic, Nexus-Champion Saraad, and Hogger. AKA Wonder brought three C'Thun decks (Warrior, Druid, and Renolock), the only player in the final 16 to bring any C'Thun decks. And Christian 'Devou' Westre Solvang brought a Beast Druid with Mark of Y'Shaarj, a card I'll always have a soft spot for since we got to reveal it here at ESPN.
Next up: The Americas Prelim.