Master Yi has been the bridesmaid of Western Riftbound since Houston, and Hartford finally handed him the trophy. Factor took a Body/Calm Wuju Bladesman list through the 1,661-player Day 1 field at 14-1-1 and closed the finals 2-0 over bsweitz's Diana, making him the first Master Yi champion in the eight Regional Qualifiers the West has run, at the event the desk framed as the last Regional Qualifier of the Unleashed format. A week after Utrecht showed Master Yi converting 59% of his pilots to Day 2, the deck stopped teasing and won the whole thing.
14-1-1
Champion's record
2-0
Finals sweep
6 / 8
Top 8 decks on Chaos
1st
Master Yi title ever
The Top 8
The desk called it a “blurple heavy” bracket, counting three Dianas plus an Ezreal on the Mind/Chaos pairing and six of eight decks carrying the Chaos domain, which reads like a direct answer to the Chaos-free top cut Utrecht produced a week earlier. The quarterfinals removed the pre-bracket favorite when bsweitz beat Atlanta champion Prismaticismism, prompting the call that “the juggernaut of the top” 8 was gone and a new champion was guaranteed.
| Place | Player | Champion | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Factor | Master Yi | Body / Calm |
| 2nd | bsweitz | Diana | Mind / Chaos |
| 3rd | Bradykin | Ezreal | Mind / Chaos |
| 4th | Linsanity | Diana | Mind / Chaos |
| 5th | ASC Evansrhim | Diana | Mind / Chaos |
| 6th | CTCG Relivia | Lux | Mind / Order |
| 7th | Prismaticismism | Annie | Fury / Chaos |
| 8th | Mirru | Pyke | Fury / Chaos |
Placements and decklists from the official Hartford's Top Decks article; the bracket detail comes from the official broadcast.
The champion and the Cinderella
Factor's title comes with a revenge arc attached: his finals opponent bsweitz had beaten him at Vancouver a few weeks earlier, and the new champion's interview did not hide how that felt, saying that “getting my revenge there” was nice. The interview's best moment belonged to a card, though. The desk teased him about Ruin Runner, “the worst card that you had seen all” weekend by his own account, which then kept running to the top of his deck and ended up closing the title.
The other run worth remembering is Bradykin's. He came in with the goal of making Day 2, in his own words, and left as the only undefeated Swiss player at 11-0-1 and the first seed, riding an Ezreal that the desk said had posted an 84% win rate into Diana across the weekend. In a bracket with three Dianas, that matchup table made him the most dangerous player in the room until the semifinals stopped him.
Hartford Regional Qualifier · Winning list
Factor's Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman
1st place · 14-1-1 · Beat bsweitz's Diana 2-0 in the finals
Runes (12)
7x Body Rune
5x Calm Rune
Core cards
Lonely Poro · Pit Rookie · Scuttle Crab · Rengar, Trophy Hunter · Charm · Defy · Punch First · Sabotage
The meta numbers
Master Yi was the most played deck of the weekend at 10.9% of Day 1 and grew to 18.2% of the Day 2 metagame per the official numbers, with Diana second and Leblanc rounding out the top three. The desk noted that in a field of 1,661 Day 1 players, every deck outside the top three sat below that tier, which is a flatter spread than any Spiritforged event produced.
The oddity is what happened to Utrecht's heroes: Darius and Sett drew just 20 players each in Hartford despite both making the Utrecht Top 8 the weekend before, and Lux brought only 24 players yet still landed CTCG Relivia in the Top 8 after he played the role the desk assigned him as the tournament's villain, eliminating two-time champion Alanzq1 from contention in round eleven. Prismaticismism being at yet another final table while the desk cited his average placement across every regional as 13th tells you the player pool at the top of this game has gotten very small and very sharp.
Notable decks from the Top 8
bsweitz's Diana (2nd)
The runner-up Diana is the closest thing Unleashed has to a stock list done perfectly: 7/5 Chaos/Mind runes, the full Ravenbloom Student, Tideturner, Stacked Deck, and Stupefy engine, Vex, Apathetic as a three-of doing the meta-warping work the Vancouver desk described, and Sprite Fountain keeping the recursion loop turning. The flex row of Fizz, Trickster, Hwei, Brooding Painter, and Moonfall is where the personal choices live, and a list this clean beating another Diana on the way to the finals says the mirror is now a skill test rather than a deckbuilding one.
CTCG Relivia's Lux (6th)
Twenty-four players brought Lux to Hartford and the best of them reached the Top 8 on a Mind/Order list built around engines: Downstage Dramatics, Progress Day, and Seal of Insight churn cards, Forge of the Future and Sacrifice convert them, and Ekko, Recurrent gives the whole machine a second act. It was also the only deck at the final table without the Chaos domain, and the tournament villain arc was real, because the same list ended two-time champion Alanzq1's run in round eleven before its pilot ever reached the bracket.
Mirru's Pyke (8th)
Pyke's first Western final table came from Team PBG's Mirru on a Fury/Chaos shell that treats the discard pile as a toolbox: Bewitching Spirit and Void Seeker feed it, Treasure Hunter and Traveling Merchant refill the hand, and Blighted Battleaxe plus the Kai'Sa, Survivor package convert the loop into pressure. A player interviewed on the Utrecht Day 2 broadcast had already called Pyke “probably the second best deck behind Diana,” and one week later the Bloodharbor Ripper backed the scouting report up with a bracket seat.
What we learned
The Unleashed season ends with four different champions in four events: Irelia in Sydney, Diana in Vancouver, Azir in Utrecht, and Master Yi in Hartford, so the format never once crowned the same legend twice. Set against the Spiritforged season that needed a ban wave to loosen Draven's grip, that is about as strong an endorsement of the current design direction as results can give.
Diana leaves the season as the measuring stick even so: three of eight Top 8 seats here, a title in Vancouver, and the mirror in the Hartford semifinals guaranteeing her a finalist. Whatever the next set changes, the Mind/Chaos moon deck is the one every new brew has to answer first, and I expect the first big call of the new format to be whether anyone can do it without borrowing her own domains.
Looking ahead
The road map from here is already published: Vendetta, the fourth set, previews through July and releases July 31, and the Barcelona Regional Qualifier opens the new season August 21 to 23. That gives the player base roughly three weeks of the new cards before the first trophy is on the line, which is Bologna-to-Vegas turnaround speed applied to an entire format. The prize wall changes with it too, because the desks spent this weekend reminding everyone that Hartford was the last chance at the Origins and Proving Grounds Best-of cards before Vendetta ushers in its own.
I will have a full Vendetta preview here once the reveal season starts, and a Barcelona meta read once we have actual decklists instead of speculation. If you were in Hartford or watched from home, hit me up on X at @shadow618tv and tell me which of the four Unleashed champions had the most impressive run, because I have gone back and forth on it all week.
See you on the rift,
Shadow