Image : Capcom ( Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars )

It’s cold out here in the northern part of the country as we head into the dead of winter, with a major winter storm on the way reaching from California to Maine. A perfect time, in other words, to get snowed in and cozy up to the Frosty Faustings event taking place this weekend that’s bursting at the seams with random fighting game tournaments.


Frosty Faustings is a sprawling fighting game event based in Elmhurst, Illinois and now in its 11th year that features prize pools across dozens of tournaments. Top billing goes to Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, an excellent anime fighter that rarely gets its due at larger events dominated by the likes of Street Fighter and Tekken. BlazeBlue Cross Tag Battle and BlazBlue: Central Fiction will also be on display at Faustings, as well as more obscure games like Under Night In-Birth EXE: Late[ST]. Yes, that’s the name of a game and not my cat walking across my keyboard.

A special shoutout needs to go to the event’s Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars tournament. Among the 30 other competitions going on this weekend, the Faustings organizers managed to fit in one of the most oddball but underrated fighting games of the 2000s, pitting Capcom icons against the more obscure characters starring in classic Tatsunoko anime series like Casshan, Teknoman, and G-Force: Guardians of Space, the plots of which are too wild and contain too much energy to be described in this particular post.


Ever wanted to see Mega Man’s sister, Roll, beat the crap out of Yatterman-1 from the series Yatterman! Gan Takada? TvC has you covered. Did I mention that the game only released on the Wii? Fortunately, it supports fight sticks and GameCube controllers in addition to the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Unfortunately, Capcom’s licensing deal with Tatsunoko lapsed sometime in 2012, so we never got a sequel. Where there’s anime, there’s hope, though.



Matches across all of Faustings’ tournaments started today, with top eight brackets for some of them taking place this evening while the rest are slated to finish up Saturday night. You can find a complete schedule of all the matches over on the event’s website. A lot of the bigger tournaments, as well as TvC, will be hosted on Will English’s Twitch channel.

Elsewhere in the world of esports this weekend, the group stage gets underway in Dota 2’s The Chongqing Major, that game’s first big tournament of 2019. Matches start at 9:00 p.m. ET tonight, followed by the next round at the same time on Saturday night. You can watch that event on Dota Starladder’s Twitch channel.


Finally, Hearthstone may be stagnating a little but it’s far from dying, something that can’t be said of all card games. This weekend, the top players from the Americas will face off in the Winter playoffs. Matches start at 11:00 a.m. ET on the Saturday and end at 11:00 p.m. before resuming across the same hours on Sunday. The entire event will be streaming live on Blizzard’s Hearthstone Twitch channel. If you want to get a feel for the current meta and what decks will be big at the event, Hearthstone podcaster and analyst Steve Lubitz has an interesting breakdown of what all the big competitors are currently playing over on his blog. Hint: Hunter secret decks remain very popular at the moment.