Lunatic-Hai win Overwatch Apex for the second season in a row

The world’s premier Overwatch tournament has it’s first back to back champion in only its third season.

In what was, without a doubt, the best professional series Overwatch has had in its short history, Lunatic-Hai won season three of South Korea’s Apex tournament in a tense and grueling seven game series against Team KongDoo Panthera.

While the series was technically a best-of-seven, it spanned the course of nine maps thanks to draws on both Temple of Anubis and Volskaya Industries. With the two teams so evenly matched and their strategies mirroring each other so closely, the series went on for a little over four hours with both teams fighting off exhaustion as the series came to a close on Numbani.

Lunatic-Hai, perhaps the most popular Overwatch team in the world, also won the second season of Apex and were eliminated in the second group stage during season one.

The team’s victory comes at an uncertain time for the future of competitive Overwatch as this will likely be the last Apex tournament to occur before the launch of Blizzard official Overwatch League. While we still don’t quite know what the Overwatch League will mean for tournaments like Apex — which was the first premier tournament to gather teams from around the world to play in a season based tournament — things are even more uncertain for teams like Lunatic-Hai who don’t know if they will have a spot in the upcoming league.

One thing we do know about the Overwatch League is that the franchising spot tied to Seoul, South Korea has been purchased by U.S. company Kabam who have not made any kind of announcement about the team that they would be fielding in the region.