In two weeks, the four best teams of Hearthstone’s premier team league will fight to split $135,000. Team Liquid, Luminosity Gaming, Virtus.pro and compLexity have survived the seven-week culling and are headed for Burbank, March 16-18, leaving a lot of great teams to watch from the sidelines.

And while there will always be times to praise the winners, it’s not often that one looks back to those who fell, even if losses are equally good teachers. Today, we gather to figure out why such fantastic teams such as Alliance or G2 Esports will bring home only minimal winnings.

8th place: Alliance (2-5)

Alliance had no business being on the bottom of the table, least of all with the abhorrent -13 tiebreaker record. While every league always has winners and losers, having not only a world champion on your team in the face of Sebastian “Ostkaka” Engwall, but also two-long time practice partners in Harald “Powder” Gimre and Jon “Orange” Westberg—the latter of which has been playing out of his mind in individual tournaments—should account for a more respectable scoreboard.

An on-paper super team, Alliance crumbled from the beginning. The honor of playing the very first Trinity Series match against the best team in the world became a curse for the Swedes. These were the days the ETS meta was being shaped and no team had time to develop intricate line-up tactics but for Alliance the fall was hard and brutal.

The start of the league caught them utterly unprepared. With no strategy in place to counter Murloc Paladin—a deck which every team would bring in the opening weeks due to being virtually the only viable build for the class—resulted in one of the two clean sweeps in the tournament and also contributed to Alliance’s second lass in week two. Just two matches in, Alliance were down to a -10 tiebreaker score, nine of their game losses delivered by a single archetype.

Going forward, Alliance remained a predictable team which struggled to read and counter the meta. The rare displays of heroism such as Powder’s reverse sweep on RenoLock against Virtus.pro sat side by side with more demoralizing losses. In week six, Alliance recorded another to Cloud9’s very standard Questing Miracle, another deck against which the Swedes should’ve prepared a stalwart defense, especially when leaving it open.

Finally, the three-way communication which helped teams like Luminosity and Liquid to the top of the rankings stifled Alliance’s encumbered marched. The otherwise fantastic individual performers Orange and Ostkaka suffered more than they gained having other voices in their heads. Truly a perfect storm of circumstances which picked apart one of the strongest line-ups in the game.

7th place: Cloud9 (2-5)

“Brains don’t combine additively,” wrote Cong “StrifeCro” Shu after Cloud9 won one of their only two matches in all seven weeks, an upset victory over tournament favorites G2 Esports. In that match, only two Cloud9 players were present and mostly kept to themselves, limiting two-way communication as much as possible.

If Alliance had their own communication problems, the discord within Cloud9 in their other matches was even more apparent, amplified by the personalities of the three players which were brought in to play together. James “Firebat” Kostesich, the original Hearthstone world champion and one of the most successful and winning players in game’s history, had already focused his attention to streaming and organizing tournaments, but his lack of connection to the professional scene was nothing compared that of Drew “TidesofTime” Biessener.

The WEC champion has had an on-and-off relationship with Hearthstone throughout his entire post-2014 career and his last major tournament attendance was at DreamHack Austin in the May of 2016. Traditionally known for being an off-meta deckbuilder with his own unique view of the meta, an out of the box thinker like TidesofTime could’ve potentially been a huge asset to Cloud9 as long-running leagues tend to test contestants’ playstyle diversity more than weekend-long tournaments, but that only works if the thinker is well in-tune with the standard so that counters and curveballs can be designed.

Even with three exemplary innovators lined-up however, Cloud9 stuck to traditional decks most of the time and kept being sloppy in their play, either making amateur mistakes or just becoming victims to their own heterogeneity.

6th place: G2 Esports (3-4)

G2 Esports’ sixth place finish is arguably even more shocking than Alliance’s flop. No other team in Hearthstone has won more titles and has been together longer than Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk, Adrian “Lifecoach” Koy and Radu “Rdu” Dima. The ATLC champions came into the league as a true family and with unparalleled practice regimens and discipline. Surely they were to be unstoppable.

And unstoppable they were in the opening weeks. Not only did they go three weeks without losing a match, but G2 at the same time set the standard of how three-way communication should work, having a distinct pilot, co-pilot and a third player to sit quietly and only think of the big picture and find the macro play. Even when they score their first loss against Cloud9, G2 went the full eleven games and were unmatched in their tiebreaker score.

The loss to Team Liquid was the beginning of the end. G2 Esports kept to the same ban strategy they’ve been using since week two—get rid of Rogue and Warrior—but leaving Shaman open allowed Liquid to run away with the victory. The following loss to compLexity in week six was another 6-5, which kept G2 Esports with a good tiebreaker but nevertheless threatened their elimination should the final week go south.

It was that seventh week which put G2 out of contention. With Shaman nerfed, all teams had the option of getting rid of two Tier 1 decks at once by banning Rogue and Warrior (i.e. G2’s original ban strategy) and design anti-midrange/control line-up. Instead, G2 came with a Paladin ban, leaving Warrior open.

Even though that very disregard towards Warrior in favor of Anyfin Paladin—a deck which has underperformed in Trinity Series at 42% win-rate—ultimately led to G2’s demise, it’s a move worth examining. Murlocs OTK is traditionally strong against Reno decks and especially against RenoLock. With highlanders being a staple in G2’s line-up, the ban would mean protecting them against the Murlocs while leaving RenoMage and/or Midrange Shaman to stop the Pirate Warrior of Tempo Storm.

Unfortunately for G2, Tempo Storm had a back-up plan for killing highlanders, a Freeze Mage whose two wins contributed to the elimination of the Europeans.  

5th place: Tempo Storm (4-3)

Tempo Storm might be the unluckiest team in Trinity Series because their elimination has little to do with how they played.

Tempo Storm were consistently the most diverse and unpredictable team in the entire league. Their daring deckbuilding saw them prepare Zoo, Handlock, Hunter and even Pirate Paladin and a lot of the times they were successful because nobody ever expected these archetypes. Tempo Storm’s communication was also on point and well segregated akin to G2’s and had Victor “VLPS” Lopez act as a primary shotcaller for his team. Despite being either absent from or struggling in recent tournaments, the Tempo Storm gang played fantastically together and finished with a win-rate percentage worthy of a top four spot.

In hindsight, Tempo really did nothing wrong and the only thing that cost them their playoffs spot was their vulnerability to Mage. Swept by LG’s Tempo Mage in week two and losing five to Alliance’s RenoMage in week three while winning only three games themselves between the two matches put them in an uncomfortable position where they fell victim to a very trivial nemesis: the rulebook.

ESL’s Trinity Series rules state that tie-breakers such as the one between Tempo Storm and compLexity will be decided first by matches won, second by games won and third by win-rate. Losing the second checkmark by mere three games meant elimination for the boys in blue and while losing by such a small margin has to be painful, Tempo Storm can at least say they played their best and prove our power rankings (which placed them on the very bottom) dead wrong.

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Images courtesy of DreamHack.