Mana Grind’s EU Friday Night Swiss Hearthstone tournament took 48 of the top Hearthstone players into a Swiss style tournament, with the top 8 at the end of 6 preliminary rounds heading into a single elimination playoff.
Kaldi managed to secure the 6th spot in the preliminary rounds, moving on to the Quater Finals to win 2-0 against Jaeska, and take down Detrox 2-0 in the Semi Finals. Finally making his way to the Best of Five grand finals against Ylijao, it was a long fought battle for both players, but Kaldi managed to secure the victory 3-1 finishing in 1st place overall!
Happy with his result, here’s what Kaldi himself had to say about the final round:
“I knew that the last round would be really tough, Yiljao had already beaten me in the preliminary rounds and i knew him from the ladder as a strong player. The match was really tough as we were running almost identical decks, and then a smallest advantage can really snowball into a victory. I ended up winning 3-1 but it could easily have gone 1-3”
I managed to sit down with Kaldi and get a few questions with him the day after the final round;
So Kaldi, I’m here with you, having watched you stream your win MG EU 5 last night, are you worried you might reveal any strategies to future opponents by doing so?
“No I dont think so, the deck I was playing yesterday is a very standard Druid deck that most people have seen before. I posted some of my decks in the Reddit AmA a while back so overall I’m not worried about that.”
Cool, so you had a fairly lengthy process to get to the final tournament – in the qualifiying you lost a couple of games I believe, how do you personally improve yourself after a loss?
“I have been competeing for a very long time and I have almost blocked that stuff out. For me, there is a big diffrence to how you lose if it’s an important tournament, if you make a mistake or if you get knocked out by a loss. For example at Dreamhack Summer I played 2 great StarCraft 2 games against Stephano and got out-played so at the end of that I wasn’t upset at all. It gets a lot trickier if you lose to someone lower-ranked and get knocked out, but yesterday I lost games to a Paladin and a Druid. The Druid, Ylijao, played some excellent Hearthstone and I wasn’t upset at all of losing to him, I also played a Paladin in the game with Detrox where I was ahead and he managed to pull a comeback with Equality so that was a bit annoying but overall it didn’t throw me off”
Interesting stuff, so finally what’s your end-goal with Hearthstone, how far do you want to take yourself?
“That’s a really hard question. I would like to compete in big international events and represent my team & country there. But at the moment my goal is to do well in tournaments that I enter, and try to balance Hearthstone, Starcraft and my studies.”
A very grown-up answer, nice to see that Kaldi. So, last thing of all – any sponsor’s you’d like to shout-out?
“Yes shout out to Steelseries, Mobafire, IT rentals, Esports Clothing and hitbox.tv. I wouldn’t run without you.”
