Capcom’s latest competitive title, the real-time and turn-based card game Teppen, hosted the first Teppen World Championships where the top player from the Asia Pacific Region, Huai-Yong “Last Guardian” Wu took home the $300,000 grand prize.
This came after he blasted his way through his part of the bracket and clashed with one of the other top players from the event, Japan’s “tarakoman” in the grand finals, defeating one of the most common meta decks to claim his title.
Game one was a battle between two Morrigan Aensland decks that had both players fighting to stall out the other’s attacks while building up their Ibuki units to deal damage through any units trying to play defensively. Tarakoman was able to keep the game close, but his hand did not provide a counter to one of Guardian’s last Ibuki units, and that slowly whittled him down.
Because even the grand finals were only a best-of-two, that lack of counter put tarakoman on the edge of elimination. But he stuck with his purple deck and pulled out Morrigan once more, hoping that the meta advantage would still be his.
In response, Guardian swapped off of Morrigan and moved over to another mono-purple build, bringing out his Dante deck and hoping that his Devil Trigger ability would be able to block enough damage to outlast the stall strategy. And because of the lack of stall on his side, Guardian was pushed a lot further in game two.
Tarakoman was able to keep his opponent limited when it came to his approach, but it always felt like Guardian had more resources in his hand that helped turn things back around in the early game. But as the game went on, his cards became less useful and it appeared that tarakoman was poised to even the series.
Even with the five-minute timer, the game still felt like it took forever while the two players traded blows. It all came down to one key moment where Guardian had two Devil Triggers built up to protect him from damage and tarakoman made one misplay that ended up costing him the game and the tournament.
For winning the first Teppen World Championship, Last Guardian earned roughly $300,000 and a new Nissan Skyline.
The award ceremony was followed by the Teppen team announcing new plans for competitive tournaments and the next expansion The Force Seekers and playable character Akuma from Street Fighter. All of this new content will be available in 2020.
