Musotom

🏆 Set 9 @TFT World Championship 🏆 🌏 Regional Breakdown - OCE 🌏 🇦🇺 Australia: 2 🇦🇺 When it comes to their reputation, Oceania as a region is the unfortunate victim of a truly bizarre reputational conspiracy. Despite consistently performing far above anyone ever predicted when it comes to the World Championship, year after year, the region finds itself discredited, forgotten, and ridiculed any time power rankings, or regional comparisons are made. Looking back throughout the years, Oceania has consistently landed some of their representatives in the top positions of the championship, especially considering the relatively low amount of players they usually qualify to the event. If we were to analyze the past performances of OCE players, we would see Razza finishing 5th in Fates, followed by @eschatv equalling that position in Reckoning. @TXE_9 would then become an absolute fan favorite following his 8th place in Gizmos and Gadgets, including a 2nd place finish in Day 1 and a 3rd place finish in Day 2 of competition. Coming into Dragonlands, both @Tamura77_YT and @HueyDeweyyLouie finished within the top 20 positions, at 12th and 19th respectively. Coming into the Monsters Attack! World Championship, despite @kahdei finding himself in an uncomfortable meta and falling to the lower part of the standings, @Skillfullism just barely lose the tiebreaker for final lobby to TexSummers, finishing in 9th overall. For Set 9’s Championship, the dynamic duo from Set 7 make a return, with Huey finishing in 1st place throughout the OCE stage of the East Asia Finals and Tamura ending the final day 3 as the tournament winner, in the first small taste of international competition as both OCE representatives battled it out against the Japanese and Korean qualified players. 🇦🇺 Huey - @HueyDeweyyLouie 🇦🇺 World Championship Participations: 2x Set 9 AVP: 3.83 Legend: Ezreal Huey has always been a hyper-competitive player, and even had a pro career in LOL as part of the org “Rich Gang”. Due to the time investment LOL required, Huey pivoted to TFT right as it first released, as this was around the time he started working fulltime and he couldn’t justify giving competitive LOL everything it required. With TFT he felt he could be very competitive but had much more ease multitasking while grinding and learning the game, so this was a viable solution for his competitive drive in the long term. In Set 3 he focused a bit more intensely on the game, and finally reached Challenger for the first time. Set 6 was his first set actually attempting to compete in tournaments, as he was unaware they even existed prior to this set. He made the final lobby in OCE regionals in his first ever attempt, but felt he wasn’t yet good enough to make it all the way. This changed in Set 7, as he was finally able to qualify to Worlds for the first time, finishing 19th overall. As a player who is known in OCE as a ladder grinder, Set 9 was unique as Huey was able to get his first OQ win, something he struggled as he somehow only managed to do well in bigger tournaments, but never in smaller ones. To give a more precise definition of what “ladder grinder” means in this case, Huey clocked in 1,155 games just on his OCE account during Set 9.0, and followed it up with 418(cmon, two more Huey) during 9.5, although he played a ton more games on his NA account in 9.5 specifically. All of this while continuing to work a full-time job in finance, the multitasking required to pull it all off is mindblowing. With this amount of sheer dedication, it’s no surprise to see Huey as an absolute mainstay of OCE’s top 5 spots pretty much at any time in the set. Throughout Huey’s career, he’s made many different friendships throughout the OCE scene, but he admits he is a unique player in this day and age as he preps mostly solo and is not a part of any study group. Leading into Bruiser Cup and East Asian Finals, Huey was faced with a tough decision. He knew he wasn’t comfortable playing Urf, as he had not touched the legend all set long and had mostly played Poro on ladder, while occasionally playing Ornn or Ezreal when they were too dominant to ignore throughout several patches. Because of this he felt locked into Ezreal, with the idea of flexing between Azir and Multicasters. As Bruiser cup wrapped up, Huey quickly learned Azir was simply not worth getting into, and pivoted fully into forcing multicasters as often as he’d be able to during OCE’s regionals. This ended up being a very fortunate decision, as he had been practicing playing 4 or 5 way contested multicasters on NA ladder in the week leading up to the event, and so when he found out he was only going to be contested by Kahdei in most games, he was very relieved and knew with his very specific prep that he had a very good chance of getting truly promising results. And that he did, as he managed to end up Day 2 as OCE champion and move on to the East Asian Finals with compatriot Tamura, who ended up going on to win it all on the final day! Leading up to Worlds, Huey is confident in his own level of play but also realistic about his difficulties matching other competitors' workload when it comes to preparation. Huey is still considering if he will be playing Ezreal, Ornn, or Poro, and also has to find the right gameplan for this weekend considering Multicasters took a massive hit in the latest patch. He feels mentally he will be prepared as he has already felt the pressure of the Worlds stage before, but time will tell if Huey will be able to lock down his strategy in the coming day and show up in a big way for OCE as so many others have done before! 🇦🇺 Tamura77 - @Tamura77_YT 🇦🇺 World Championship Participations: 2x Set 9 AVP: 3.73 Legend: URF The 21 year old out of Perth has had an explosive career when it comes to TFT, with this being his second qualification to the World Championship after only having started competing at a serious level in Set 6. The main inspiration was learning from players like @BebeAutoChess back in Set 4, as well as seeing Razza competing at Worlds representing OCE, but especially seeing @eschatv competing in Set 5. He caught a lot of the top players in OCE at the time reviewing Escha’s games throughout the tournament, and was blown away that a community so dedicated to the highest echelons of competition existed. This inspired him to hit challenger for the first time in set 5.5, and lit a fire that is still burning brightly to this day. Set 6 was the fundamental basis of his career, but it was in Set 7 that he really started popping off and producing tangible results from his efforts. It was during Dragonlands that Tamura started focusing in creating Youtube content for the game, and when he managed to qualify to the World Championship it was unexpected, but extremely satisfying to him as a competitor. Tamura feels he was very fortunate for all the help he received from top SEA and OCE players throughout Set 7 on his road to Worlds, players like @KjaosTFT and @josepao1o , as well as many of OCE’s brightest minds, saw him streaming and essentially helped him vod review and understand a lot of fundamental flaws in his game, which he is incredibly grateful for to this day. He managed to finish in an astonishing 12th place position in the Dragonlands Championship, but unfortunately was not a huge fan of Set 8’s hero augment mechanic, and paired with a hectic new full time job Tamura had to sideline TFT until he could find a way a better work/life balance. Leading into Set 9 Tamura managed to restructure his schedule to find time for TFT while still working full-time, although he felt rusty in his return and didn’t have the best of results right away. Near the end of the Set, Tamura knew the last OQ would be his final chance to still stay in contention for the OCE regionals circuit, and he started prepping URF religiously in the coming weeks, testing all viable lines and getting some key insight from top OCE players such as @AngoraTFT who played on the Chinese Super Server and had a lot of valuable insight from that week of competition, such as the value and flexibility of the vertical bruiser line, especially in tournament. Tamura was able to execute everything he learned to perfection, finishing 2nd in the Open Qualifier, 5th in the Bruiser Cup, and eventually having a cool, calm, and collected run to finish 2nd overall for the OCE region in Set 9, knowing how to navigate all the strongest urf line to perfection in each and every one of his games. Tamura believes Urf’s apparent strength leading into patch 13.21 will be a huge advantage for him as a player, as he has essentially been locked in with high level preparation on roughly the same gameplan for several weeks now. As this will be his second time qualifying to Worlds, Tamura believes he has a significant mental egde over many of his competitors. He also believes he will be able to more efficiently handle the schedule leading up to worlds, understanding the value of worlds level scrims and also how to better approach preparation for the event. Having spoken to Tamura, I believe anything other than surpassing his 12th place finish in Set 7 would be a disappointment for the Australian player. A month ago maybe he would have called me crazy, but as Tamura locked in further and further into his full potential, he had immediate feedback, both external and internal, that his play was becoming cleaner and cleaner and that he would be reaching the World Championship stage in very strong form overall. Tamura already knows he can outbench every other player at Worlds, but can he outplace them as well? OCE’s passionate fanbase will have to cross their fingers and wait to find out this upcoming weekend as the Set 9 World Championship finally takes place! Closing Words Throughout my time prepping for broadcast and talking to OCE players across past sets, I want to make a special section for a player who from what I hear is considered the best and most consistent in OCE, and who has had a huge impact on many player's preparation throughout the past sets, and that is @AngoraTFT. Although he just barely missed out again on a Worlds spot, I hope he stays determined and continues to chase this goal relentlessly, like other top ladder players such as Maikel, Ego Illusions, and Setsuko have in the past, and finally is rewarded with a chance to show what OCE is all about on the international stage. 🫡