Utrecht Regional Qualifier Breakdown

The Azir masterclass, again

The casters introduced him mid-tournament as “the Lille regional qualifier champion” who was, to nobody's surprise, again on the Azir deck, and called his stream game “an absolute masterclass” with basically no mistakes. The champion's own explanation, given in an interview while sitting at 11-0, is the closest thing this game has to a mission statement: sometimes you play well and lose and that is fine, but losing to your own bad play is different, because “that's something you need to work about because it's your fault, not variance or whatever.”

Azir surviving the rotation into Unleashed intact is its own story. The legend that was a punchline before Lille has now beaten two different metagames from the same Calm/Order identity, and at some point the format has to stop treating the emperor's results as a coincidence.

Master Yi's absurd weekend

The defining number of Utrecht came from the Day 2 conversion screen, and the desk flagged it themselves as “insane”: of the 184 players who queued with Master Yi, 108 made Day 2, a 59% conversion rate from the most played legend at the event. The usual trade-off is that popular decks convert poorly because everyone targets them, and Utrecht broke that rule completely, with Master Yi both leading the field and smashing through it.

The rest of the field breakdown told the story of a format still finding its shape: Diana drew 175 players for roughly 10% of the meta share, and the desk noted that Irelia, “the queen of riftbound,” had fallen to third place in popularity for the first time in the game's Western history. On battlefields, Arena's Greatest led the way at 30% with Aspirant's Climb at 21%. The event drew roughly 2,000 players by the desk's count, with around 300 surviving into Day 2 after nine players finished Day 1 at 8-0.

The strangest desk moment of the weekend came before the final Swiss round, when the casters pointed at a Volibear, a Sett, and Squirtle's Azir among the locked top-cut decks and realized those are “three decks without the Chaos Domain,” asking on air when that had ever happened. The Volibear ultimately slipped back out of the cut in the last round, but the observation held: after a Spiritforged season where Chaos was in nearly every winning list, Europe's first Unleashed top table had exactly one Chaos-identity deck in its top three.

The Top 8

No Top 8 broadcast exists for Utrecht on the official channel, but the official standings do, and they read like nothing the West has produced before: eight different legends in eight seats, including the first Rek'Sai and the first Darius to reach a Western Regional Qualifier final table. The Swiss coverage adds the texture, with CTCG Collin K locking his second Top 8 on Sett, sealed with a round win over Atlanta champion Prismaticismism, and telling the desk it feels incredible to play his favorite legend at the highest level and beat “one of the goats” of the game doing it.

Placements, the 32 best-of-legend decklists, and the full lists are in the official Utrecht's Top Decks article, and the best-of set is worth your time: one deck for every legend that showed up, which is the widest legend spread a Western event has produced so far.

Notable decks from the Top 8

The rivalry watch

Dhawally gave the interview of the weekend on the Alanzq1 rivalry, recalling that after losing to him, Alanzq1 told him “if we played 100 more games, we'd be 50/50,” and revealing that the two were, as far as he knew, on the same Diana list again in Utrecht. The Houston champion also said he brought a build he thinks is “better for the top tables,” which is the kind of sentence that tells you these players are now building for each other rather than for the field. Dhawally backed the talk up with a fourth-place finish while Alanzq1 missed the cut entirely, so the scoreboard between them tilts again, and Hartford is only days away.

See you on the rift,
Shadow