"Newcomer-2014. Winter"

The deciding game turned out to be epic. Both of us used up all our restarts; in the end, it clearly swung in my favor: in addition to Aislinn, Charna also arrived. I played the first 2 weeks perfectly and built up Charna well: exp tactics, earth, armor, necro. I racked up 500+ bones (though I had no necro artifacts), captured both secondaries (one of which was a double), and entered the treasury. On the 3rd week, I took two 1-unit Dragon Utopia + black market, acquiring all 3 necro artifacts in total and some stats. At level 4 in the guild, I got Town Portal, and one of the boxes in the treasury gave me the entire 5th level, which means full control. Everything was great; I relaxed a bit. And then something terrible happened—Charna was killed (thankfully without artifacts): for some reason, I didn't notice that tactics had apparently been disabled in the hero options, so instead of the "Do you want to retreat?" prompt or a screen with the hero fleeing the battlefield, I got a defeat screen, and I mechanically pressed "OK". That was it; after that, the game was over. To make matters worse, I started getting distracted at home, the timer began to slip (we were playing on chess clock), chains weren't connecting, and I made idiotic mistakes, like accidentally taking wyverns into a battle against 100 snipers and losing 8 of them. I managed to lift my spirits a bit by getting an excellent Vokial with exp necro, ballistics, attack, shooting, wisdom, advanced earth, and basic logy. At this point, I could have basically pressed the opponent, whose situation was clearly worse, but for some reason, I went to grind—picking up some cons, hives, built flight in a ramp-secondary, necril. In the end, the opponent caught Vokial on the move and sent him into oblivion (again, good thing Vokial had no artifacts, otherwise it would have been an immediate гг). Tant became my main. I had a red orb, so I wasn't afraid of magic. It all ended with the opponent digging up my Charna with full control, and using her and his own scrubs with flight and Town Portal to cut down everything possible in 1 turn, and then he settled into the main. I attacked him in the Castle; the catapult didn't break the wall in 1 turn, and without much hope, I closed it off from birds and angels, hoping to hold out until round 2, but the titans with the golden bow showed who was boss here. After that, 2k bones became useless.

The opponent played well; everything he did was clean. As for me, after a regrettable mistake, I got "stuck" in the game and couldn't capitalize on my advantage.

Thanks for the game—a 100% deserved, strong-willed victory. Good luck moving forward!

A big thank you to the organizers and judges, especially Pit, for the tournament! :)