The Winter Nexus Cup ended with the finals going all the way to the seventh game, with X6 coming out of it with a victory under its belt after many hardfought seasons in APEX. But to get there, it had to take down KongDoo Panthera after it climbed through the end of the lower bracket. The lower bracket finals ended with KongDoo Panthera's 3-1 victory over Element Mystic.
Despite how well EM played all tournament, KDP would dominate with DDing back on D.Va and the rest of the team finding synergy together as the members dominated a proper BO5 setting. Primed for a rematch against X6-Gaming, KongDoo had a huge hurdle to climb since X6 had a one-map advantage from the winner's bracket.
Map 1: Map Advantage to X6 (Free point awarded for being in the winner's Bracket)
Map 2: Junkertown (Escort)
Map 3: Numbani (Assault/Escort)
Map 4: Hanamura (Assault)
Map 5: Route 66 (Escort)
Map 6: Nepal (Control) Map 7: Eichenwalde (Assault/Escort)
Starting off with a 1-0 map advantage, X6 secured Junkertown with a good defense and offense, bringing the map score to 2-0. However, as a general trend where Junkertown has always been the first map, a victory is no guarantee on who wins the match and this was true again as KongDoo Panthera swept the next three maps while bringing the score to 2-3. Numbani ended in a similar fashion. X6 finished the map on Junkertown and held KDP off of the third point, and it was merely the reverse on Numbani. After that, Hanamura ended with a dominance of timebanks on the end of KDP as Park "Architect" Min-ho's offensive Genji was unable to get any sort of foothold that would allow X6 to take the point.
With X6's offensive line diminishing, it was a cakewalk for KDP to secure the entire map and put up a solid defense with Moon "ChangSik" Chang-Sik, Yang "Luffy" Seong-hyeon and Son "CoMa" Kyeong-woo holding up the backline. CoMa's Mercy in particular was the backbone, and one of the biggest flaws of X6's strategy as it decided to not play Mercy as its main strategy, instead opting in for trying to get Architect to assassinate CoMa's Mercy instead.
Clearly it wasn't effective until the final two maps of Nepal and Eichenwalde where X6 turned things around. With beautiful flanking coordinating between Architect's Genji and Flex player Kim "GodsB" Kyeon-Bo's Tracer, both of them were able to take out the supportline of KDP and run over Eichenwalde for the victory. X6's first tournament victory ends the Nexus Cup on a high point for a lot of the Korean teams while the remaining Chinese teams will have a lot to work on for 2018.