Here is a small recap for those of you who weren't participating in/ watching the tournament!

We had nine participants who bravely fought to get the grand prize! After about two and a half hours of fierce competition, @Fal stood victorious.

Thank you everyone for participating, we hope that you had fun because we did!

And here is the grand prize; a special designed Hearthstone card for Fal! Congratulations! :D

The points that the participants earned will be posted in the Whitestar Contest Leaderboard (Season 2) thread: http://www.anook.com/topic/5073

And while we're on it, we would like to congratulate @Agagor, @Alakina and @Neny for being the final three at last season's leaderboard!

Check out your prizes here: http://www.anook.com/topic/3554/

Back to the Hearthstone Tournament...

@Nehr was streaming bits of the tournament on his hitbox and you can view the final matches between @Internet, @FlamingTomato, @Ramagh and @Fal here.

It's now five years that Whitestar had been created. Every week (or so), I'll share a Chapter of our Story. I hope our newest members will find amusing and interesting to learn how everything started.In the last blog post, we discovered one of the most creative roleplay project of Whitestar: Whitestar Magazine.

CHAP IV: CATACLYSMIC RAIDING

The goal of Whitestar was to offer two or three days of progressing raiding with a tigh-knit group of friends. Our hope was to mix casual with progress, a relaxed but serious attitude, and most problem that would be eliminated by the trust we carried for all our members. We wanted to achieve this by building a stable team of ten players that knew each others very well and could work great in team because of this. We didn't wanted to have to bench anyone, so our raiding group was almost just 10 members, with the possibility to replace a missing raider by one of our few social and roleplay members. At least this is how we had planed things...

Presentation of Whitestar
Whitestar is a social guild with a core of players who have played WoW together for a long time. We have chosen to stay a small guild, where people know each other very well and where our members can feel a sincere, international friendship. Our organisation is made to fit casual and active players. We are playing on the server DefiasBrotherhood EU

Our goal for Cataclysm

• We want a serious, regular raid team that's close to a class run to raid and progress two evenings a week
• We'd like to see a lot of activity where social raids, PvP and RP events take place within our guild for all our members to enjoy
• We want Whitestar to be a place you want to call home!

We started the expansion by delving into Dungeons and Heroics together, always in group of five, we only used the relatively new Dungeon Finder to teleport in the dungeon, but we almost never "pugged". Cataclysm heroics weren't as easy as they were in Wrath of the Lych King, or later in Pandaria or even Warlords of Draenor. This difficulty was nice to train as a group, as a team, and to get to know the game style of each others.
From the members that are still active today in Whitestar, we had @Sharlena playing as a restoration druid, @Alakina as herself, well I mean... a shadow priest, @Internet as a worgen arm warrior, and myself as restoration shaman.

While we achieved to gather a nice group of commited and friendly players, we got struck by misfortune. For example @Sharlena had severe internet connection issues and I had a weird problem of FPS during fights using a lot of fire effect. Considering we were trying to progress in Blackwing Descent and that the first boss was Magmaw...it was bad. Very bad. This caused us serious issue to keep our motivations going, as we were spending so much time wiping on fights we knew for technical reasons. Our raiding group was also so tight that once someone was missing, we had no one to replace him or her.

We tried to open up our recruitment a bit, and we met some great persons.One of those person was @Chakra. But we also lost several players that weren't interested by World of Warcraft anymore or were called by real life issues.
We managed to progress in the third raiding instance until the last bosses. We worked a lot on Chogall, and we almost killed it. We worked on AlaKir, and we almost killed it aswell. I don't remember if we ever attempted Nefarian. Our raiding team stoped there, and with our raid events abandonned, most of our members stopped to play World of Warcraft. Whitestar, once more, was put in hibernation...

That's when I decided it was time to move on to other games, and made the first attempt into transforming Whitestar in a multigaming community. For the very first time in six years, I decided to stop my subscription.

The night dressed the sky of Stros M'Kai with her most eleguant gown, a dark blue silk sparkling of thousands stars. The two moons were shining like two queens. The breeze was fresh, and the flowers arround the foutain spread their heavy, bewitching perfume. The water murmur was soothing. It was ...a perfect night.

Five fine ladies were gathered: two had a skin darker than the native of the island, the color of the ashes of Morrowind. One was dressed with a heavy dress, probably too warm for this latitude, while the other one, white haired, wear blue and purple pants and jerkin. The three others visibly came from the northern kingdoms, fair skin and eyes, tender lips, a blond, a redhead, and a mahogany...The ladies chatter was suddendly interupted by the apparition of Lady Eldariel, a propably high born Altmer. The mer give her most formal salutations before leaving the gathering in a burst of magical blue light.

But the five friends didn't formalise by her departure, and started to organise the games. Indeed, they had decided that this night would be an evening of enjoyement of all sorts. They started by the game "Khajiit says". The rules were very simple - the one playing the Khajiit, Elloa – was to give orders for the others to follow, only if the order was preceeded by the words "Khajiit says". The goal was to trick others to do mistakes and to gently mock them about it. After Elloa, Vaetilda became the next Khajiit and exausted the group with jumping, playing dead, and other excercices of the like.
The next game was lead by the woman with long red hair and a fierce glance. She was running every where arround the city and the others had to follow closely, imitating her in every way. After a while she left the lead to her friend, the gorgeous Rannian.
The girls ended the night by playing "One two three Piano" and shared a good laugh with the failures of each others! It was a long time since Stros M'Kai quiet night had been disturbed by so much movement and laughters.

This is just a little summary of our event "Games in Stros M'Kai". @Vaetilda @Nicouche @yorkeyg and @ianwilliams were participating. We played old games of our (my) childhood, and it was actually very fun. As I had originally planed this event to mix up low levels and higher levels, but we were all veteran players, we decided to go in Craglorn to continue our adventures. We had been joined by @Typhoios and later by @Arjun and @Phaith
We rided arround, on our horses, doing some repeatable quests, public dungeon and other world events, before to end the night at four people in a gorgeous Delve. We spend great time together in good mood and a very relaxed atmosphere.

You can watch the videos of our Craglorn adventures on my Hitbox channel if you feel like it. I've tried to cut the most interesting part.

Elihnir Sewerworks
Adventures in Craglorn
The Howling Sepulchers

It's now five years that Whitestar had been created. Every week, I'll share a Chapter of our Story. I hope our newest members will find amusing and interesting to learn how everything started. Last week, we discovered the roleplay background of Whitestar and how the guild went unactive for a time.

CHAP III: WHITESTAR MAGAZINE

It's amusing how an argument can sometimes bring positive events. The reign of the Lych King came to an end. Most guilds had eliminated the vilain, including Luminous Path, but not with the twin priestess. @Internet and I had raided for weeks and our team were close to victory, but the day of the kill we had been replaced. This left us a sour taste, and we didn't had the heart to raid anymore. We mostly played on our alts, and spoke about the Cataclysmic future. I wanted to play with a Goblin Shaman, while Internet wanted a Worgen. Obviously, we had an argument.
So the night of my 31th birthday, I secretly created a Draenei shaman, and started to level her to show my good will to my boyfriend. I choose to pick up my most favourite name to give her importance: Elloa.

As by this act we settled to play on Alliance for the new expansion release, we asked to our old friends if they would be interested to play in Whitestar again, and to prepare our guild for Cataclysm. Our plan was to have a small tight knit 10 man raiding guild, with optional roleplay on the side for those that wanted. Our idea met a serious enthousiasm, even though most of our friends didn't planed to play World of Warcraft before the expansion released.

During the meantime, I started to seriously roleplay my Draenei together with @Alakina. We decided that we would bring back the Whitestar Magazine on a most serious level. Alakina created a blog for us to incarnate the reporters of Defias Brotherhood and bring all news about what was happening on the server!
We had amazing adventures: the discovery of the Furlborg tribes, the exploration and study of the ruins in Ashara with the GAIRDAS Institut, a royal Wedding in the Arathi kingdom, the Theramore Ambassy Gala, or the War ravaging Swamp of Sorrow. And of course the premices to the great Cataclysm that would change the face of Azeroth for ever! We didn't missed a single occasion to write scandalicious articles!

Check out WHITESTAR MAGAZINE
Whitestar Magazine n°1
Whitestar Magazine n°2
Whitestar Magazine n°3

Alakina and I spent several weeks to play and work together, and we really had great time. This are memories that I cherish. We never had play that much together in the past, and we never did it again later. This is a particuliar period of our life as friends where we had the occasion to be more intimate.

Once the expansion hit we continued to publish the Whitestar Magazine. We recruited several reporters that helped us to provide more content in our pages. We also had regular meeting in a house in Stormwind, that we shared with Ere Argus. It was really fun, but also a lot of work! We had to take part of as much event as possible, and Defias Brotherhood was a very active server at that time.

However, as a guild, Whitestar main focus became our PVE progression...How we succeeded in our ten man raids will be a story for next week!

Welcome all to our first in-house Hearthstone tournament! Clear your schedules the 17th of January (a Saturday) because then we'll all duke it out in the Hearthstone arena!

(Link to image: http://i.imgur.com/tCak4Lu.jpg )

Prerequisites & rules:
- You have to be a current or previous member of Whitestar.
- You will need to have won over the Innkeeper.
- You may use any cards or decks you want; expansion or otherwise; premade or your own.
- All wins/losses should be reported to the administrator of the tournament (Nehr) by the winner. (Example: "I won against X.")
- You have to sign up before the 15th of January 2015. (No late signs please!)
- Round-robin means that everyone plays one game against everyone else and the tournament administrators records their win/losses.

Sign up here: http://www.anook.com/event/1325

Hearthstone is a free-to-play game in which you need not spend any money. The easiest way to get in-game-gold is to do the daily quests.

You have two weeks to prepare yourself and your deck! I hope to see a lot of people signed. :)