The Hearthstone Championship Tour World Championship at Amsterdam has already provided fans with legendary matches. From the giant Jade Golems stomping the life out of Dire Moles to the comically large amount of Corridor Creepers filling the halls of the Beurs van Berlage Conference Centre, this weekend has been nothing but hype. My personal favorite match of day three had to be America’s Fr0zen against Sintolol from Germany. The series went down to a final fifth game, with Fr0zen eventually managing to secure the win after a crazy case of RNG gave Sintolol’s Priest a Death Knight Mage makeover.
After the match, Fr0zen was elated and exhausted, but still managed to share a few words at a press conference. Laid back in his chair with arms folded, he spoke like a man who just had the weight of the world lifted off his shoulders. “Honestly, we both had no idea what we were doing,” Fr0zen reflected on the last game. “He threw like three times at the end and I threw around two. We all had the right idea, we just didn’t play the match up to know what we were doing. It was easier for me to win because I had all the removal and he had all the minions.”
The game started off like any traditional Mage/Priest match as both players gathered the proper combo pieces in their hands. Sintolol blew his combo buff on minions that were destroyed by a high damage AOE spell. “Since I drew my three Secrets, I had one inch to life left,” Fr0Zen said. “I was favored to roll six or seven on Dragon’s Fury, so it wasn’t that shocking.”
Then, the magic and insanity of Hearthstone kicked in and Sintolol managed to pull a Frost Lich Jaina out of a Drakonid Operative. “I knew that if I played Skulking Geist to kill his Inner Fires, the only way he could win would be Frost Lich Jaina,” Fr0zen said. Drawing Alexstrasza without any of his hard removals, like Polymorph and Firelands Portal, allowed Sintolol to catch up. Then the ping war began, using Jaina’s hero power to generate 3/6 Lifesteal Water Elementals. Each player had to do calculations in their head while the timer rope fizzled out, making sure that no minions on the board were left with one health.
“The turn I Polymorphed the Water Elemental, I ‘mathed’ it out and realized that it’s really easy to generate another one and I could use Meteor on his,” Fr0zen said. “It didn’t work out quite as I planned. There were multiple times I could have pinged another minion down to five or four health and set up future elementals, but him pinging his own minions made things complicated. If he didn’t do that, I might not have misplayed, but who knows.”
Though the match was hard won, Fr0zen believed that without the Death Knight it would have been much easier. “I would have preferred if he had never gotten Jaina and then the game being over,” Fr0zen said.
Next up, the American protege is playing Jasonzhou, which Fr0zen believes his decks are favored for. “There’s no bad matchups left, they all field a pretty standard line-up,” Fr0zen said. “I think my chances look good.”
