Asia-Pacific Continental Championship – Recap

The second stage of the 2024 Continental Championship series took place on 15th-16th June. The Asia-Pacific Continental Championship (APAC) had big shoes to fill after the exciting show that was the American Continental Championship – and it smashed all expectations.

After three years of falling just short of the APAC title with consecutive top cut finishes, Jai managed to fight through a grueling losers bracket run against hard matchups and nightmare openings to become the first ever APAC-resident player to win the local Continental! 

The final – an all-timer of a game – came down to the wire with an amazing feint push from Jai. Runner up CheekFake aka DeeR had to try to close the game out on R&D with a scary Finality + Twinning combo, accessing a frightening eight cards – but they were unable to find enough points and Jai scored the final agenda to take the title.

The list of participants qualified for the Intercontinental Championship on July 13th is getting more stacked by the tournament. As well as APAC champion Jai, the players who have earned their way into this prestigious club are:

• DeeR (playing under the name CheekFake in this tournament), who has been a consistent presence in cuts at Nationals, Continentals and Worlds over the past year
• Australian National Champion and second time APAC top cut contender MrStyx
• Up-and-comer Amarum, who made a deep run in their first ever top cut at a high level tournament
• The lone Thule player in the entire field, 2023 APAC Champion Santa

It’s so interesting to see the metagame developing so quickly between all of these tournaments. This time around, Haas-Bioroid was the clear winner, making up 54% of Corp decks in swiss and 75% in the cut. The speed of efficiency of HB made it well-positioned to outrace the slower value engines of World Tree Arissana and reg Hoshiko that took the Runner field by storm. I for one am super excited to see what choices players are going to make in the next few weeks!

That’s all the news from APAC – next weekend players will be playing offline for a change in Bergamo, Italy. The European, Middle East and Africa Continental Championship (EMEA) looks likely to be the biggest offline tournament of 2024 outside of Worlds. Better start packing already! Or, if you can’t join us in Italy, clear your weekend – the whole tournament will be streamed on the Null Signal Games Twitch channel, starting Friday 28th June.