"Newcomer-2014. Winter"

The deciding game turned out to be epic. Both of us used up all our restarts, and in the end, it clearly swung in my favor: besides Aislinn, Charna also arrived. I played the first 2 weeks perfectly, built up Charna well: exp tactics, earth, armor, necro. Gathered 500+ bones (though there were 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. In the guild at level 4 they gave Town Portal, and one of the boxes in the treasury had the entire level 5, which means full control. Everything was great; I relaxed a bit. And then something terrible happened — Charna was killed (luckily 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. As luck would have it, I started getting distracted at home, the timer began to run out (we were playing on chess clock), chains weren't connecting, and I made idiot mistakes, like accidentally taking a wyvern to a battle against a hundred snipers and losing 8 of them. I managed to regain some spirit by getting an excellent Vokial with exp necro, ballistics, attack, archery, 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 off to grind, picking up some cons, hives, built flight in a ramp-secondary, and necropolis. In the end, the opponent caught Vokial on the move and sent him into oblivion (again, lucky that Vokial had no artifacts, otherwise it would have been an immediate гг). Tant became the main. He 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 low-tier heroes 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, without much hope I closed it off from birds and angels, hoping to hold out until round 2, but titans with a golden bow showed who was boss here. After that, 2k bones became useless.

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

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

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