By using holography we mimic heavy ion collisions and obtain new qualitative insights possibly relevant for QCD. Our studies are motivated by the extensive experimental efforts devoted to the search of the conjectured critical point of the QCD phase diagram. Holographically, we perform collisions in strongly-coupled gauge theories with thermal phase transitions. We find that near a second order phase transition almost all the energy of the projectiles is deposited into a long-lived quasi-static blob of energy. Moreover, second order hydrodynamics describes this blob if we consider a formulation of hydrodynamics different from Muller-Israel-Stewart’s, broadly used in the numerical codes describing the quark-gluon plasma formed at RHIC and LHC.