Amelia Savery, Blizzard Entertainment

“Best served chilled?” Kenn Øster “Zaelia” Rasmussen read aloud from a juicebox backstage.
“Well, I’m chilled,” he continued, heading back to sit with his team, “but I don’t know about the juice.”

The final day of the MDI Spring Finals kicked off with a lower-bracket semifinal match between MDI East’s Team D and MDI West’s Abrakeydabra. The two teams jumped into King’s Rest for the first match of the final day of the MDI Spring Finals, and everyone in the player lounge gathered around the screens, stretching out on beanbags and couches. The players watched closely as the dungeon unfolded, giving commentary and cheering as if it were a football game.

On the final boss, with less than 3% on boss HP separating the two teams, everyone began screaming, and Chinese team Team D finally took it 4 seconds faster than Abrakeydabra to rapturous applause. The Method teams stood up and gathered their peripherals, filing out of the lounge to prepare for the upcoming matches...

In his post-game interview after defeating Team D, José “Drjay” Curcio of Abrakeydabra proudly declared that he would be playing a Mage in his team’s upcoming match with Method EU. The chat flooded with Pogs, everyone excited to see an off-meta composition at the Mythic Dungeon International Spring Finals. The doctor delivered.

“I’m a committed mage player,” he said at the end of day one. “I enjoy the class so much, playing around cooldowns. I put the fun factor over everything and try to make the class work. I’m not sticking with it too much in competition because when you want to win a tournament, you have to play the best [composition] you can. But usually you will see me only playing mage on live...

The sun finally broke through the grey clouds that had been blanketing Sydney, Australia, on the day before the Mythic Dungeon International Spring Finals. Teams from Europe, North America, and Asia ate their breakfast in the hotel lobby before heading to the studio for photography and interviews with the broadcast team. Here are some tidbits of what we learned the day before the tournament. 

Jdotb on What Makes Method NA Special

John “Jdotb” Daniel is everything one would expect of a team captain, a clear leader who takes control of the conversation as the casters asked what it was like working together as a fresh roster. “As team captain, it fell to me to build the team this time around and one of the things I was looking for were guys who really study the game,” said Jdotb, “Guys that knew what they were doing and what the other teams were doing.”

Jdotb was emphatic about the clear differences between the very good and the best, explaining that most pe...

As the Arena World Championship (AWC) moves into its third Cup of the Spring Season—live now and throughout the weekend on Twitch, see the full schedule for broadcast times—we think it’s about time you got to know the competitors a little better. Throughout the AWC, we’ll be bringing you a series of profiles of the gladiators who grace your screens week to week. To kick things off, allow us to introduce you to a North American favorite.

“I started back in Burning C...

This year, StarCraft celebrated its 20th anniversary. If it were a person, it would be in college, or out working a job, trying to find its feet—it would be a time of life in which big change is nigh inevitable.

Here at BlizzCon 2018, in front of a standing-room only crowd that needed to be capped by venue security, StarCraft went through a transition: for the first time in its history, a non-Korean won a global final event. Joona "Serral" Sotala, the soft-spoken, trilby-wearing Finnish Zerg, won the WCS Global Finals.

The most engaging plotlines are those with twists. How sure we all were at the beginning of BlizzCon—how perfect!—how the stars had aligned for the perfect match between Serral and Terran player Cho "Maru" Seong Ju. Both dominated their respective circuits throughout 2018, winning every event they participated in, setting the stage...

Demetrious Johnson is for the Horde. He’s married with two kids, a Rogue main whose favorite pastime is ganking the Alliance in War Mode. He’s also known as Mighty Mouse, the inaugural and former UFC Flyweight Champion, now signed to ONE Championship, the prominent Singapore-based MMA league.

For Johnson—or DJ, as he’s known—the journey in World of Warcraft began with Burning Crusade. “I was at the gym training and a buddy of mine was in it. He was like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to try this game called World of Warcraft.’ I was like, ‘I’ve never heard of it!’” DJ said, laughing. “He was like, ‘Dude, they just came out with the Burning Crusade!’ So, I went and grabbed my first copy of WoW. I remember it had a Blood Elf and a Draenei, and you opened it and it had Illidan in it. That’s when it all started—I went straight to Horde, I made a Blood Elf.”

He was inst...

The Arena World Championship (AWC) at BlizzCon kicked off Monday during Opening Week, with the first and second rounds of the upper bracket being played out in front of a live audience at Blizzard Arena Los Angeles. No teams were eliminated, though the results did fill out the first round of the lower bracket. Let’s break down the true lessons of the tournament’s opening day.

Dark Iron Dwarves Reinforce the Alliance

Latin American representatives always seem to enter BlizzCon brackets as underdogs, but Unitas shrugged off that descriptor in the first round of competition, sending North American third seed Super Frogs to the lower bracket.

Although this may have been a surprise to some, it definitely wasn’t to Unitas DPS player Francisco “Hozitojones” Toriello. “Our expe...