Esports | Hearthstone | Hunterace — The Deciding Fifth Game at Taipei Heping Basketball Gymnasium

On Sunday, April 28, 2019, Casper “Hunterace” Notto and Torben “Viper” Wahl sat across the Grand Final stage inside Taipei Heping Basketball Gymnasium (臺北和平籃球館). Blizzard Entertainment’s publisher-run HCT 2019 World Championship brought 16 qualified players to Taipei for the last championship event in the Hearthstone Championship Tour system and distributed a $1 million prize pool.

Hearthstone is a turn-based digital card game in which each player pilots a hero and a constructed deck, spending a growing supply of mana to play minions, spells, and other cards. The central objective is to reduce the opposing hero’s health from 30 to zero before the opponent does the same.

The event used best-of-five Conquest matches. Each player submitted four decks from different hero classes and banned one opposing class; after the ban, a player needed to win one game with each of the three remaining decks, while a deck that lost could be used again.

This was the first major event after the April 9 Standard rotation and the launch of Rise of Shadows. Its public client context was Patch 14.0, with the Standard card pool comprising Basic, Classic, The Witchwood, The Boomsday Project, Rastakhan’s Rumble, and Rise of Shadows, subject to the April Hall of Fame removals; play was on event PCs, but no private tournament build or operating system was publicly disclosed, so neither is inferred.

Hunterace and Viper advanced from the dual-tournament group stage into an eight-player single-elimination bracket, then reached Sunday’s title match. Their final required all five possible games, and Hunterace won the deciding fifth game for a 3–2 match score.

The result made Hunterace the HCT 2019 world champion and awarded him $250,000, while Viper received $150,000 as runner-up. It also closed the Championship Tour era at the same event where players first tested a newly rotated Standard environment at world-championship stakes.

Blizzard’s venue announcement names the gymnasium at No. 28, Lane 76, Section 2, Dunhua South Road in Taipei’s Da’an District, and its schedule places the Grand Final there on April 28. The pin marks the arena building itself, not Blizzard’s offices, a hotel, or a broader Taipei-area label.

Sources: Blizzard event preview, https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/22927850/join-us-at-the-hct-2019-world-championship ; Blizzard venue and format guide, https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/22917554/ ; official final recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGnl7oLWcQs ; Reuters via ESPN, https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/26628099/hunterace-wins-hearthstone-championship-tour-final ; Patch 14.0 chronology, https://www.shacknews.com/article/111047/hearthstone-update-140-patch-notes-free-archmage-vargoth ; venue record, https://www.tpehpbasketball.com.tw/zh_TW/trafficStadium .

Photo: “Rain in Taipei Heping Basketball Gymnasium 20171207,” a December 7, 2017 exterior by Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rain_in_Taipei_Heping_Basketball_Gymnasium_20171207.jpg .