Recommended Video
Even as a young HoK region, the Philippines is making good headway in the international scene.
Malaysia defended their home turf, as they once again came out as Southeast Asia’s top HoK region in the 2025 HoK Nations Clash. This invitational brought together the most powerful and most popular professional HoK teams within Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines to gauge and foster the strength of each region.
Taking place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, teams spent the last three days jockeying for supremacy using the event’s unique format.
Each region has two teams: their regional champion and their in-game vote winner. Day one started with splitting the teams into two groups – group A for the league champs and group B for the vote winners. Both groups pit their teams in a single round-robin, best-of-five matches to determine seeding for the knockout stage.
Knockouts is a single-elimination bracket played in a best-of-seven using Global Ban & Pick and Ultimate Battle rules. The twist is that each region’s representatives are now playing as one, following a relay format. A team can only play two back-to-back matches, and no team can play more than four matches in the series. This adds an extra layer of strategy to the tournament as each region now has to think about which team to send on top of all the other drafting and matchup considerations.
Full Effort
Wonky tournament format aside, the Philippines was still able to distinguish themselves in the 2025 HoK Nations Clash. Blacklist International came in as the Philippine champions, while WETRND Esports entered as the most popular next to Blacklist.
Initially, there was quite a gap between the two teams as Blacklist are the PKL 2025 Fall champs while WETRND finished fifth. Yet WETRND were still able to hold their own and even take games from some of the more veteran teams.
Blacklist definitely impressed, however, and really proved why they are PKL champions. In particular, they really distinguished themselves against Team Indonesia during the knockout semifinals. With a 4-2 score, with three of those wins under Blacklist, Blacklist’s 2025 HoK Nations Clash run highlights how far the Philippines has developed in such a short time.
But the top dogs of Southeast Asia still belong to Malaysia, as proven by their 4-0 win against the Philippines. It was a good effort from our two teams, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Banner photo from Level Infinite.