Dota 2 Auto Chess is undoubtedly the most famous arcade game in Dota 2 so far. In fact, the game gained 4 million subscribers in the Steam Workshop just last week. What is more impressive is that currently there are over 5 million subscribers, which is just insane.

Like I mentioned before, Dota 2 Auto Chess is following the footsteps of Dota 2 itself. Once, it was just a custom game that wasn’t even as popular as Footmen for example. Fast forward a couple of months and DotA suddenly became more popular than WC3 itself. That’s how Dota 2 was born, with a little help of Valve of course.

Gaben and his crew kind of confirmed that they are paying close attention to the game, which means that we can expect a new Valve title coming really soon. If it sees the light of day, it will be definitely more popular compared to Artifact.

Auto Chess Staff Cup

There have been a few tournaments on Dota 2 Auto Chess so far, however, the Auto Chess Staff Cup takes it to a whole new level.

“This will be a fun unique twist on the normal chess events for this is a team event with 4v4 matches. Using a strategy on how to manipulate the community pool while battling the variables of AutoChess and possibilities of facing your own teammates. Which org will win and hold bragging right till the next cup?” - a statement, written by BTS on Reddit.

Format

Each organization team will consist of four players who have to play in all matches. In total, there will be four group stage matches where teams are going to be matched up against four other random teams. All games are played in a best-of-one format. A team gets eliminated once it is out of players. The top four teams will advance further into a Single Elimination Bracket.

The tiebreaker rule for this tournament is very interesting. All teams have to make a screenshot the moment before they win in order to capture the remaining health of all players. The head-to-head result will be used if there are tied teams after the group stage.

Participants

Gonna have to carry these boys. Shouldn't be a problem tho 🙂 https://t.co/vTfmy7cbMe — Henrik Ahnberg (@AdmiralBulldog) February 27, 2019

Each of the big organizations will have their own representative.

BeyondtheSummit - Hot_Bid, Lumi, Dakota, Icelement

MoonDuckTV - Zyori, TrentPax, Purge, Eosin

WePlay! Esports - Feol, CEBKAJE, Cocofudge, Slink

Starladder - Bafikk, Vladyslav, Banakh, Vandersar

NA casters - Capitalist, LyricalDota, BreakyCPK, syndareN

EU casters - ODpixel, Sheever, TobiWan, PyrionFlax

Evil Geniuses - GranDGranT, Swim, Fireworks, Sam Galey

compLexity - BSJ (one of the first organizers of an Auto Chess events - check here), Waga, Superjj, Crane

Alliance - AdmirallBullDog (as we all know, he streams Auto Chess pretty much all the time, thus making him my favorite :D), Loda, Powder, Tickeling

Chaos E.C - Greg, Pandaego, Sean, Harf

The tournament will start this week (3 March) at 10 AM PST. If you don’t want to miss the action, make sure to watch BTS’s twitch channel.

New Heroes

After the last update to Auto Chess, there are three new heroes in the game.

Death Prophet

The Undead Warlock is a hero with zero armor. Similar to Dota, her most powerful spell is Exorcism. It does an insane amount of damage. However, in order to do that, the hero needs to stay alive, which is an issue. That’s one of the most differentiating factors when we compare it to an Enigma for example. Shiva’s Guard could be very useful on the hero if you manage to get it of course. All in all, DP is a pretty good addition to the game.

Mirana

Similar to DP, the Elf hunter also starts with zero armor. Mirana’s arrow is the first spell that is capable of crossing the chessboard. The way that the spell works is a little bit hard to explain. To make a long story short, the longer the distance, the more damage, and longer stun duration.

Riki

Like I mentioned before, the addition of Riki also introduces a new race to the game. After testing him out in various combos, I find him to work very well with the Assassins. His most useful spell has to be the Smokescreen. It has the same effect as in Dota: it silences and makes the hero miss their attacks. Similar to the other new heroes, Riki starts with zero armor and does 50 damage.

You can read more about the latest update HERE.