Winter Championship Recap

Winter Championship Recap

The 2019 Brawlhalla esports season has started with the Winter Championship! The stage has been set, and there are some new names to watch out for this year as well as some old mainstays that continue to be a dominant force.

In the European 1v1 bracket, Blew continued to dominate the opposition with his forbearing Koji, firing precision arrow shots into his opponents. Second place finisher simpLe showed he has a massive pool of Legends to pull from, presenting a Brynn, Hattori, Diana, Scarlet, and Koji in Top 12. In third place came the Mordex main, Macheeeete from France. The European region continues to have so many strong contenders for Top 8, but Blew and simpLe have shown they can survive the test of time and remain on top after taking first and third respectively in the 2018 Autumn Championship.

In North America, we saw the #1 Power Ranked player, Boomie, destroy the competition. He dropped only a single game in the entire tournament. In second place, @BornGG’s Simba continues his hunt for Boomie. In 2018, Simba publicly declared he would overcome Boomie, but in the Winter Championship Boomie proved how difficult a task that is. Simba did, however, defeat @GlobalBreakout’s Cosolix 3 – 0 in the Losers Final with a dominating performance. Cosolix had a great bracket of his own, achieving Top 3 and winning sets against @Lazarus’s Remmy and @GlobalBreakout’s Crockie just to get into Top 8. Phazon looked absolutely insane in the lower bracket beating out the reigning World Champion, @WildcardGG’s Sandstorm, with an unexpected Legend pick of Jiro. He went on to defeat the second place finisher at the recent World Championship, @WildcardGG’s Wrenchd, and ended up placing 4th in this tournament.

The 2v2 landscape saw a similar tale, where the team of Blew/simpLe, after winning Gold and Silver the previous day, go home with the Gold in European 2v2s. The surprise team of Blaze/Acno came out and won second place. Coming into 2019, they weren’t on anybody’s radar, but they showed up to play and made a huge splash in the competitive scene. In 3rd place, Hermisen and his longtime teammate Aerial continued their streak of impressive showings. Earlier in the European 2v2 bracket Blaze/Acno won against the 2v2 World Champions @TeamPHZ’s Addymestic/Cake in the Losers Semi-Final, shutting them out 2-0 after beating the 2nd place World Championship 2v2 team of Aggz0/VipR3. Another unexpected team of Fizz/jkzyder100 made a leap into 2019 taking home a fifth place finish. Fizz has achieved Top 8 before, but this was our first time seeing jkzyder100 in the Top 8 of a Seasonal Championship.

The North American 2v2 bracket showed the continued absolute dominance of Boomie. Boomie went through all of 2018 winning all but one offline 2v2 event that he participated in, and it looks like he’s poised to exceed that for 2019 by winning the Winter Championship 2v2 tournament alongside the current Brawlhalla World Champion, Sandstorm. 2nd place was taken by @FlashPoint’s Isidroo/Cody Travis. This double axe duo had been looking incredibly strong through the latter half of 2018, and with Cody Travis showing he can perform in high-pressure situations like the World Championship stage, it will be exciting to see how they do in 2019. Finishing in 3rd place, Cosolix/Jokedown’s twin Scarlet combination proved to be a fearsome mix of devastating hammer plays from Jokedown and the ever impressive lance play from Cosolix, who is widely considered to be the best lance player in Brawlhalla.

After winning it all in 1v1 and 2v2s, Boomie took to twitter to say this: “Hard work beats talent until talent works hard ”. He has established his talent, but now he’s showing that he has been working hard to dominate Brawlhalla esports in 2019 and defeat any competition. We reached out to Boomie to see what he had to say about the event, as well as his expectations for 2019, and his response was simply: “BIG”. With few words, he is letting his gameplay do the talking for him and the results speak for themselves. In this tournament, Boomie lost only 2 total games across the entire weekend in 1v1s and 2v2s and managed to win a nearly flawless game in the 2v2 Grand Final with Sandstorm.

Impressively, Boomie, Blew, SimpLe, and Cosolix all finished Top 3 in both 1v1 and 2v2 Winter Championship brackets in their regions. The 2019 season has only just begun and these players are really setting a strong tone for their future performance in 2019.

That’s not all for the 2019 Winter Championship though, as the International Winter Championship weekend will be kicking off February 22nd through the 24th which will feature 1v1 brackets for Brawlhalla’s server regions in Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Australia. Top players from around the world are competing, and the action will be streamed all weekend on twitch.tv/brawlhalla!

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