Games Played Record Rank 1 - 50 22 - 28 Gold1 51 - 100 34 - 16 Plat2 101 - 150 28 - 22 Plat1 151 - 200 25 - 25 Plat1 201 - 221 12 - 9 ???

Promotion Match

Towers of Doom

Draft

Match

Final Thoughts

Sometimes it's hard to put into words what it feels like to accomplish a goal. It's good to set incremental goals - attainable, short-term goals to go along with difficult, but not impossible, long-term goals. The idea being that you work toward the short-term goals and they help you reach your long-term goal(s).For the final ranked season of 2017 I set two goals: play a minimum of 150 Hero League games and to reach Diamond5. My thinking was that if I placed in plat 2-3, 150 games felt like the number of matches I might need to grind in order to hit Diamond. If you've read my previous blogs , you know this didn't quite go according to plan. Placing gold1 wasn't part of the equation. Requiring 99 games just to get back into plat2 wasn't something I thought I'd have to do. But that's the circumstance I put myself in. Once I was back at my baseline-rank I played over 100 games between plat2 and plat1.Here's one way to look at the whole season: Chopping it up into four 50 game bits with the final 21 at the end.Before my coaching session with Kala I had a relatively brutal weekend session going 4-9 and back into plat2:There seems to be a prevailing notion that weekend HL is worse than weekday HL. For the season I was 59-49 on the weekends (54.6% w/r) versus 62-51 (54.9% w/r) on the weekdays. Statistically speaking, that's identical, but that's just one anecdote in a sea of many;. This particular weekend was not very good. You might notice the Gazlowe-games are sandwiched right in the middle of this stretch. I went into my coaching session badly needing a pick-me-up. Time was running out on achieving my main goal for the season. After the coaching session I watched a couple more replays to see if I could identify the same things Kala was seeing. Come Monday night I was ready to apply the lessons I had learned and subsequently had a good night going 4-1.I was pleased with my Malth play on the ToTSQ game in which both Greymane and Alarak took turns trying to lane against me. They did not fare well. Tuesday night went well too; 3-1. The Dragon Shire game included getting matched with someone on my friends list; doesn't happen often but when it does it's pretty cool - feels like old school duo'ing. The 9-minute loss on BoE our Diablo disconnected before the game started and never returned. In reality, the game was over at 4-minutes. It sucks, but these things happen. I finished the night with a win on Volskaya in which our comp was Junk/Alex/Guldan/D.Va/Malf - The Malfurion pick was a mistake; he was looking to draft a tank but panic-clicked as time waned (or so we were told). We still won with passive lane pressure and good rotations. Once we hit 20, Gul'dan/Junkrat AoE damage was too much for them to handle. It was a rewarding win considering the disadvantage we put ourselves in with the draft (No tank!).Wednesday nightstarted with a 28-minute loss on Cursed Hollow. Two separate but equally awful boss-calls were our undoing. I tried to ping the team off the boss. Arthas and Varian weren't having it and so we bossed and threw. The thing is, we needed the boss to end. Our siege damage was non-existent but in both cases the enemy team was up and healthy so that the timing of the calls was poor. The next game was Volskaya and the enemy team went solo-Uther heals. Gul'dan into solo Uther is a match made in heaven - for Gul'dan. EZ game. Then came BoE. The draft had a lot of constructive communication and I got to last pick Lunara into Varian/Artanis/Cassia/Jaina (all decent match-ups for her). One of the few times where everyone communicated their picks and made adjustments based on our own comp and the enemies as well. EZ game.Hello Darkness my old friend...I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at all nervous. The main difference I felt in myself versus other times I'd been in this position was confidence. I was playing confidently. I was playing the best HotS of my life and I could feel it. My rotations were on-point. I