Pokrovac becomes the world first Legends of Runeterra player to reach Master rank

The Czech Hearthstone champion ikuláš "Pokrovac" Dio has become the first player in the world to reach Master rank in Legends of Runeterra this Wednesday, as announced by LoR official Twitter page.

Legends of Runeterra (LoR), a Riot Games-owned free-to-play digital collectable card game has been live for barely five days, and it seems five days is all Pokrovac needed to climb the ladder and become the world-first LoR Master rank player.

Since the game was released back on January 24, 2020, a lot of esports personalities and streamers have been attempting to create a perfect deck which would help them climb the ranked ladder and while not many saw any success in their ventures, Pokrovas seemingly found the right deck for him, featuring two champions – Darius and Elise.

His hand-crafted deck, which earned him the spot in LoR hall of fame has remained hidden until this morning when he unveiled his unique mid-range build, which helped him claim the spoils and reach the Masters rank. The spider-deck consists of 13 spells and a handful of followers, which proved to the most efficient in the current meta.

His aggro deck consisted of the following cards:

Pokrovas also has a list of other decks he uses while playing LoR. All of his decks can be found on his mobalytics page.

Pokrovac is a renowned Czech Hearthstone player, who started his career as a Hearthstone pro back in 2015 when he joined eSuba. In December 2016, he left the team to join Misfits, where he remained until January 2018 before he re-joined eSuba. 

In his career, Pokrovac has seen a fair amount of success in Hearthstone tournaments, with his career-best result coming from 2017 Hearthstone Global Games, where he represented his country and won gold, cementing himself as one of the best Hearthstone players in the world. In the same year, he also finished top-eight in 2017 HCT – Europe Winter Championship, StriveWire's Mega Cash 2017/09/26 and finished top six at Trinity Series Season 2.

In 2018, the Czech pro participated in HTC 2018/19 Season 1 and Season 2, where he finished 47th and 29th respectively. He also made an appearance at 2018 Hearthstone Global Series, where he failed to defend his title, as he finished 17th-24th after narrowly missing out on making it out of the group stage.

While Pokrovac failed to see any major success in 2019, his career achievements are not to be overlooked. His last appearance at a Hearthstone tournament came in June when he participated at Masters Tour 2019 Las Vegas, where he finished 283rd. Now it seems like he has devoted a lot of his time and energy into the newly released DCCG game, which seemingly is right down his alley, considering he has become the first player to reach the highest rank in the game in the European region.

Besides the European region, LoR also has two more regions – Asia and the Americas, which at the time of writing still don't have a Masters level player, according to mobalytics.gg.

The game has a total of seven tiers in its ranked ladder – Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Masters. The first six tiers have four division each, which is similar to the ranking system in League of Legends. Unlike how it is in LoL, however, in LoR, a player who reaches a certain tier, can't drop down to a lower tier. The said change was implemented so players can test out new decks and explore the meta without harming their rankings.

Since Pokrovac reached Masters tier in such a short amount of time, it's safe to expect Riot Games will look to add more ranked tiers in the near future as to increase the competitiveness and allow players to strive for higher goals. That said, no official announcements about that have been unveiled as of yet.