Valorant: Competitive power rankings, EU, June 2020

37 min readJun 30, 2020

Context

tl;dr: this is pretty much just a list of notable beta/post-beta tournaments. Absolutely skip this if you’re already familiar.

I’m conscious here that a lot of people who are potentially going to read a piece like this actually haven’t seen all or maybe any of the tournaments that have been going on in EU over the course of the last month (perhaps even earlier than that); it’s bad enough that I’ve seen the suggestion that EU has only really been doing streamer mixes, which…while I’ve been critical of Twitch Rivals and particularly G2 Ignition, that’s not really the case.

Yes: everyone is still orgless (and that’s an issue long-term), but we’ve had plenty of good tournaments and we have plenty of developed and developing lineups. I wouldn’t be wasting my time with this piece if we didn’t, after all. So, for the sake of that, let me go over the major events pre- and post-beta in EU, just so when I start talking about said events in the team sections, those people won’t be entirely lost.

Closed beta

COOLER Cup: 25th April. $2000 prize pool, 16 teams (12 invites, 4 OQ). This was essentially the first ‘real’ tournament in beta, and while there were hence a lot of teams that were never seen from again, a number of the lineups that are still around today first showed up here. fish123 1st, NiP 2nd.
Fnatic Proving Grounds: 8th May. No prize pool, 32 teams (16 invites, 16 open signup). Arguably the first tournament that got some decent exposure, and while there were some mismatches (and the Bo1 format meant that some teams probably didn’t show as well as they might otherwise had), field again looks fairly good in retrospect. Prodigy 1st, 2G4L 2nd.
Mandatory Cup: 9th-10th May. €10,000 prize pool, 256 teams (all OQ). The first really big tournament from French community site mandatory.gg, attracted a large field, and put some of the top teams — particularly finalists fish123 and HyPHyPHyP — on the map. fish123 1st, HyPHyPHyP 2nd.
Absolute Masters: 14th May-2nd July. €3,000 prize pool, 32 teams (24 invites, 8 OQ). Intended as the first league-type format for EU Valorant, 8 groups doing the CS-style thing of winners/losers/deciders Bo3s spread across several weeks. Has found itself in a little bit of an odd place at times thanks to the difficulty of handing out invites so early into beta and the roster changes that almost every team has undertook at one point or another, but has given us some interesting Bo3s, and is now gearing up for playoffs.
Solary Cup: 12th-17th May. €5000 prize pool, 16 teams (8 invites, 8 OQ). Group stages followed by playoffs. You may have heard of this one, because of the dafran controversy, if not, don’t worry about it. Field here ended up being more than a little French-biased (Solary are a huge name in French esports) but produced a good level of play overall. fish123 1st, Prodigy 2nd.
Epulze Valorant Prodigies: 23rd May-28th June. $3000 prize pool. 16 teams (14 invites, 2 OQ). A collaboration between European TO Epulze and the Prodigy Agency, this has pretty much featured all the top teams. Was mostly played after the end of beta, but the first two groups were played during its last week.
Take The Throne #1 through #4: 4th May onwards. The brainchild of Swiss org Team BDS, these are essentially a series of king-of-the-hill-type Bo3 contests between two invited teams — the first edition was Prodigy vs HyPHyPHyP, winner gets €2000 and stays on, new challenger every week. As it’s happened, there have been very few weak invites, so it’s turned into a respectable series. Prodigy won #1 and #2, fish123 won #3 and #4.

Post-beta

Twitch Rivals EU #1 and Twitch Rivals EU #2: 5th-7th May. $98,000 prize pool. 32 teams. Why is this on here when the other Twitch/G2 events aren’t? While flawed, this did end up becoming a reasonably competitive event, because the captains system meant that about half of the teams had somewhere between 2 and 5 players that were already playing together in the aforementioned events as a team (and the other half were hence out before we got to the bracket stage). Hence, it’s at least worth mentioning for a number of these teams. #1: Team Mixwell 1st, Team ONSCREEN (fish123) 2nd. #2: Team Duno (Worst Players) 1st, Team wtcN 2nd.
G2 Esports Invitational (‘G2 Ignition’): 19th May-21st May. This, on the other hand, was not, but I’m mentioning it for completeness’s sake, and so there’s an easy link to it.
Wave Esports Invitational Cup Season 1: 23rd-24th June. €4000 prize pool. 16 teams (12 invites, 4 OQ). Organised by Austrian org Wave, who also organised a number of other events in beta that I didn’t mention because the fields were mediocre. This one, however, ended up bringing in all but a tiny handful of top teams, and was a pretty great event top-to-bottom — Bo1s all the way from quarters, some very good matchups, all centrally streamed. PartyParrots 1st, FABRIKEN 2nd.
Epulze Valorant Prodigies: 23rd May-28th June. Groups C and D played on 13th-14th June, playoffs 27th-28th June. PartyParrots 1st, Prodigy 2nd.
Rise of Titans: 29th June-1st July. $2000 prize pool. 32 teams (16 invites, 16 OQ). Being coordinated between German TO TaKeTV and the Angry Titans org (from Overwatch), the marketing around this has been to pitch it as a ‘scouting tournament’, similar to Fnatic Proving Grounds — large bracket, a 256-team OQ, etc. Most of the good beta teams were invited and accepted, though one or two did end up pulling out (notably fish123). At the time of writing, this is still ongoing, with the final likely tomorrow/today at the time you’re reading this (FABRIKEN vs. StartedFromCS)
Absolute Masters: Still ongoing, playoffs start on July 2nd.
Trovo Challenge: July 3rd-5th. $10,000 prize pool. 8 teams (all OQ). Suppose I have to mention it — it’s a big money tournament (from GLL, who do a lot of work in EU PUBG), and a lot of teams tried to qualify, including HyPHyPHyP and PartyParrots. A billion Bo1 upsets later, we have two top-10 teams (2G4L and Worst Players) and a couple of other good teams from the first qualifier, and four teams that I have at best barely heard of from the second qualifier. Unfortunate, but nobody said 256-team OQ was perfect.
Take The Throne #5 through #7: From TTT #5, they added a third team each week, with a Bo1 ‘challenger match’ where the winner went on to the final. Invites have still mostly been decent. #8 was due to happen this week, but has been pushed back to 6th June. fish123 won #5, HyPHyPHyP won #6 and #7.

This is FAR from an exhaustive list, especially for beta, but should at least have you caught up, so: onto the action.

#1 PartyParrots (+6)

I wrote a longer bit on their essential ‘backstory’ in the previous power rankings, so I’m going to try to avoid waxing too lyrical on here, but here’s the short person: the name that matters the most here is the one that CS fans will be familiar with, ANGE1. The former Hellraisers IGL took to Valorant with aplomb, playing and competing in both CIS and EU tournaments from very early indeed in beta.

His early efforts did not come to much (probably the most notable case was being hammered 2–13 in the Ro32 at Mandatory Cup by another CIS stack that’s failed to impress again even in CIS-only tournaments), but after a couple of losses, he strung together the current PartyParrots roster from a trio of the early CIS stacks (himself and dinkzj from Reserv, 7ssk7 and Art1st from Peace Duck, Shao from PogChamp), and they’ve been playing every qualifier, playing every tournament, and quickly building up an impressive track record for themselves since.

By the end of closed beta, Party Parrots were on the radar as a top-10 team, but not in the top tier discussion; as mentioned, neither they nor any other CIS team had done too well at the major closed beta tournaments (Fnatic PG, Mandatory, Solary), and while they had began showing decently (most notably at the two EU Valhalla Invitationals), they hadn’t yet proved themselves.

It’s fair to say that they have now proven themselves, winning two of the three major team tournaments over the last couple of weeks, and with ANGE1 and Shao both showing up very well indeed at G2 Ignition to boot. We should make no mistakes here: this is not a fish123 situation where we have a team that just happens to be ahead of the game in one way or another and hence just can’t be beat. They are, in fact, honestly very mortal as a #1 team goes, and have made a habit of shocking map losses even moreso than for most teams, dropping one to Czech side Ferrari Peek in Absolute Masters, dropping from Trovo qualifiers to long-time chaff Purple Cobras, and going out to G.Gang — a French mix that never managed to make a name for itself even when every tournament was half-French teams towards the end of beta — at Rise of Titans.

Maybe a little harsh to those teams, but still. PP are not a juggernaut. They are nonetheless, an absolutely terrifying opponent. The team’s clear star is Shao — a do-it-all Operator and rifler who probably should have gotten MVP at Wave Cup (as much as I love Zyppan), and definitely would have gotten it at Epulze if they’d handed out said award. He doesn’t shine quite as much as a Zyppan or an ardiis in one particular aspect of the game, but he’s central to most things PP do, and his numbers speak for themselves.

Probably the single easiest touchzone for understanding why PP are good is just that they’re a team that plays long ranges fantastically. They’re one of those teams that will never buy a Phantom over a Vandal, will get two Operators and share the second around like it’s a hot potato, and while no single player among their non-Shao players looks like an outright star on a constant basis, they always seem to find a way to get good enough matchups across the board to win out over a long game. (Maybe that’s why they seem to struggle so much in Bo1s, to be fair.)

Apart from Shao and ANGE1, the guy to keep an eye on here in my opinion is their Cypher player, dinkzj (i.e. the one other player to come over from ANGE1’s initial stacks). I put out a Tweet while watching Epulze playoffs a few days ago, that said something to the effect of: there are going to be players in Valorant that will take tough positions, perform way above par in them, never frag out because those positions never let them frag out, and hence never quite get the credit they deserve. I then said that dinkzj was likely to be one of them.

dinkzj then proceeded to make me look very stupid by going 65/47 in the final against Prodigy. Still, though. He’s generally their secondary Operator, and while he doesn’t generally get the 3Ks like some such players do (Meddo, Kryptix when on form), he makes some very tough shots and does as good a job as anyone in manipulating those small areas that inevitably come into play around retake areas in his team’s favour.

#2 FABRIKEN (+4)

Valorant right now is a land of inaccurate team names. HyPHyPHyP only contain but a single HyP, and he’s been the least flashy player on the entire team in terms of his play. Prodigy’s stacks have an average age of about 35. It’s highly probable that nobody on fish123 even has gills.

Thankfully, FABRIKEN are here to redress that balance, because make no mistake: this team is a machine. One of the surprisingly few teams with a really significant ex-Overwatch presence (captain LATEKS, Leodeddz, and coaches/brothers eMIL and d00mbr0s are all most known from tier-2 OW), they were on the rise towards the end of closed beta, but have really come into their own in the last few weeks.

A lot of this has had to do with the addition of Zyppan. The ex-Fortnite pro had done decently, if not spectacularly, in closed beta; he had joined up with NiP very early on (albeit always technically as a stand-in), and had done fairly well as primarily a Breach/Sova main — rarely topping the scoreboard, but putting up decent numbers for a player in what tends to be a relatively supportive role, and enjoying his share of early accolades as part of NiP.

It hence came as a bit of a surprise when he declared free agency on June 4th. The stated rationale at the time was that he was looking for more of an entry-related (Raze/Jett) role on his next team, so it was hardly inexplicable; fellow stand-in Yacine had emerged as NiP’s star player over the previous few weeks, and his entire game revolved around playing entry with said agents, so it was a clash that wasn’t really resolvable. Well, best of luck, Zyppan, and we’ll see what happens.

A few days later, N1KOLA, FABRIKEN’s Sage main, announces that he’s parting ways with the team. The team had shown up decently well as a four (-Leodeddz) at Twitch Rivals, but both sides had decided it was time for a change. Zyppan was swiftly picked up as a replacement.

Now, this did create a very odd situation with agent choice and player roles, and I promise that I will talk about that in a little bit, but let’s stick with Zyppan for a little bit. FABRIKEN’s first tournament with Zyppan as a full-time player was to be Epulze Valorant Prodigies; the team had had to go through the open qualifier to make it in here (before everyone realised that they deserved invites to most things), and hence ended up in one of the hardest groups, forced to fight it out with Prodigy, ROYALS, and 2G4L. How would this all work? How would Zyppan adapt to this new environment?

Zyppan proceeded to drop 33 in his first game. Against a Prodigy lineup of mixwell/ScreaM/pyth/iDex/logaN. He would have two more 30+ kill games in groups, and finished with an obscene 192 kills in 181 rounds — again, it must be emphasised, against a group that contained three other lineups in the top 8 on the closed beta rankings.

He has largely continued that form since, and for my money — and most people’s money, I should point out — he’s been the single best player in Europe over the last month or so. Explosive as an entry rifler on offence, and actually showing off a significant amount of natural game IQ on defence too, which tends to be the weaker part of the equation for a lot of similar players.

The result: a team that was already doing very well by the end of closed beta now feels like a genuine contender for #1. This was a team that has always been up there on both sides of the equation in terms of having both the talent (ShadoW’s star as a primary Operator was rising massively in the last couple of tournaments of beta, and I’ve been really impressed with Meddo’s ability as a rifler as of late) and the infrastructure (especially by the standards of most amateur teams), but it feels like they may genuinely be a level above much of that mid-range of teams in the #3 to #8 spot or so that they weren’t quite able to differentiate themselves from early on.

Speaking of being a level above…we should talk about that thing. The thing that’s probably going to be the thing that turns them from just being a good competitive team to being the talk of the town over the next few weeks. The Sage-less composition.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s really not all that complicated at its base. FABRIKEN are one of the few successful teams anywhere in the world that regularly do not run Sage. As with most great innovations, it was borne of…not necessity, but something close to it.

As we mentioned before, if you just follow the lineage, the roster swap at the end of closed beta was -N1KOLA, +Zyppan. N1KOLA was a Sage main (and still is a Sage main), Zyppan had never played Sage and was very clearly not likely to start now. So, one of the other four players would simply have to move off of their existing role, and play Sage, right?

This was indeed the tack they took at Epulze. Problem was, it was ShadoW — the team’s primary Operator — who they judged to be best suited for that, presumably in part because he was playing what seemed to be the least specialised role as it stood (as mostly a Breach main), and the truth is, it didn’t work that well. Despite Zyppan’s heroics, and despite a generally OK team performance (I should point out that Meddo missed all but the very final map, and his sub Blandfers — another ex-OW guy — was clearly a downgrade), FABRIKEN did NOT qualify for playoffs, losing the decisive series 1–2 to 2G4L.

Having your primary Operator user on Sage is, suffice to say, a very bad idea on a fundamental level, and while there’s nothing in Valorant that blanket can’t be worked around, it’s not what you want. So, what to do going forward? Move someone else onto it? Switch it up by map? Ask Riot to change to 6v6?

How about…just not play it?

Starting from TL Academy W2, FABRIKEN have largely followed a policy of playing without a Sage on every map except Split. ShadoW keeps his Breach, LATEKS keeps his Brimstone/Omen, Leodeddz keeps his Sova, and Zyppan keeps his Raze.

In terms of a longer discussion on this, I made a 20-minute video a few days ago looking at one of the maps in the Epulze series against Party Parrots where they use said composition, but I’ll give you the short version here. In terms of understanding what playing without a Sage means, it’s all about her heal and her rez; her other abilities are of course powerful, but there are closed enough replicas on other champions (yes, even the wall; with the range, it’s mostly being used as a self-boost or a retake seal at this point anyway) that it’s those two things that define her.

Here’s the key thing about the heal and the rez: the heal takes time to work, and it requires you to be in a situation where the Sage can get line-of-sight on the person she wants to heal. The rez pretty much requires either nobody to be anywhere near, or at the least for them to be in positions 30+m away (i.e. blockable) to get off successfully. In other words, for as much as gets made of them, not having heal or rez makes a difference in the equation mostly in cases where you’re probing mid or site long still, aren’t committing to anything, still have time to move around on long rotates, that sort of thing.

In a more contested scenario (think “anything that happens on a site, ever”), the heal and the rez become a lot less reliable than people tend to give it credit for, and you would in general rather just have more hard utility/combat tools at that point.

It’s little wonder, then, that a team like FABRIKEN — one that, while multi-faceted, is at its absolute best in execute scenarios — are not only the ones to try running without Sage, but also the ones to make it work. (From what I understand of the NA scene, there are similarities there with TSM, the one team in NA who are now trying similar tactics, albeit on a more restricted level).

It’s not entirely without its risks; giving up the ability to contest long sightlines is a functional and informational handicap, and there is the potential to be snowballed on if your Operator isn’t up to the task (not really a common issue for ShadoW, but it’s there), as TSM experienced in its Sageless Ascent games at T1xNSG.

Still: it’s working, and it really does encapsulate a lot of what FABRIKEN are about stylistically. Even if they’re not the best team in Europe right now (and that can always change), they’re probably the team among the really big names that I’m most excited to see continue to develop, and continue to innovate, in the next couple of months.

#3 HyPHyPHyP (NC)

There are absolutely echoes here of NiP at the end of closed beta insofar as this feels like something of a tenuous 3rd. HyPHyPHyP were in Group A at Epulze, and hence didn’t play a game in that tournament on 1.0 or later, didn’t play Wave Invitational, and didn’t play Rise of Titans.

It’s entirely understandable — this is an older team with enough off-server committments that they’ve openly spoken about how little practice time they’ve been getting at points (and their frustrations therein) — but it’s a shame. They have played some small French tournaments, and they have been playing the Take The Throne series — they dispatched ex-NiP and fish123 in #6 and easily beat out Team Turkey in #7. The hope was that they would also get a really good test by the time this article went out in the form of StartedFromCS at Take The Throen #8, but that unfortunately has been delayed. Still, as it stands, I still feel fairly confident that they probably deserve this spot for the time being.

The big knock I’ve tended to hear against them is that there’s not really anyone on this lineup that’s a significant individual standout in the same way as most of the other top teams — that they’re an extremely intelligent team, but one that might find itself lacking as individual talents get accustomed to the game and it becomes harder to mask any overall deficiencies.

I don’t think that’s entirely unfair, but my response with firepower complaints always boil down to “I will believe that they just don’t have the muscle to deal with other teams at the point where they stop matching up well against said teams”. LaAw and PetitSkel continue to form an unsually potent spine in the more supportive roles that makes up for/causes the relative box score deficiencies in the generally higher-fragging roles, and as much as CREA^ might complain that Omen falls off when you play against actually good players, he was pulling off enough nice little tricks against said players at G2 Ignition that I’m not going to cout out him or his Omen just yet.

There absolutely is a risk, like NiP before, and also like fish123 here, that these guys fall off a cliff in a month or two (and we should in all fairness say: they genuinely haven’t played a team with a really good Operator user on 1.0+, and Fearoth’s been fine but rarely eye-catching on their side in that regard). As it stands, though, I’ll believe it when I see it.

#4 fish123 (-3)

If you haven’t been following EU Valorant quite as obsessively I have, I am presuming your reaction here is: fish123? Down in fourth? Que isso?

In truth, I think you could make a case that they could maybe be lower. Certainly, if you put pre-1.0 games out of your mind entirely (which I have not entirely done here despite the fact that I’m not listing them), they would be. They’ve missed two of the three biggest open tournaments so far in the form of Wave Cup Invitational and Rise of Titans. The one that they were at — Epulze — saw them make an extremely disappointing exit in the quarter-finals to Party Parrots, picking up just 10 rounds across two maps.

They did OK as a four at Twitch Rivals although were ultimately blown out badly, and they were unimpressive in both Take The Throne showings — dropping a map and squeaking out a win against a Demise team (that, with all due respect, have been merely making up the numbers at every other tournament they’ve played) at #5, before going down to HyPHyPHyP at #6.

It’s not a great recent resume. Of course, in some ways, that doesn’t matter — their wins at Solary and Mandatory were the shots heard around the world, it’s pretty much inconceivable that major orgs aren’t already in talks with them or have actually signed them, and even if we set aside the most cynical aspects of this conversation, they’re almost certainly going to be in a place to reassemble and recover their form over coming months.

Still, if we’re talking in terms of how we perceive them and how we think they’d do in a tournament tomorrow, it’s a knock. Personally, I do think there’s room for concern with regards to their ceiling going forward. Don’t get me wrong here; I still think L1NK and ec1s in particular are impressive talents in terms of their support/lurker play and IGLing respectively.

However: I think losing ardiis is going to hurt them very, very hard. It was clear by pretty much any metric you could find, and pretty much any eye test wherein said eyes were functional, that his ability and style as an Operator primary was transformative to how fish123 were able to play. It created room on the map for them that no other team was able to hold.

Now he’s gone (and I hope we find out where he’s going soon, because I am the Wolverine meme right now in terms of missing seeing him play). With him, not only have fish123 lost the player that was clearly the best Operator user in closed beta, they now find themselves in a situation where they don’t have anyone who you’d feel all that comfortable with on the Operator.

Indications increasingly seem to point to ScreaM as a potential 5th for them. I have been sceptical on ScreaM in general in the past; I’ve openly said that I think mixwell was more important to the success of the Prodigy stacks, and that I’m not sure how well his style (low on first bloods, low on pressure) will play out as opposing teams as a whole play together better as units. He has still put up impressive numbers, and has shown flashes (literally, he’s shown Reyna’s C) taking a more entry-oriented role with both Prodigy and fish123, so I can’t argue with him in isolation as a talent.

However: here’s a stat for you. All five of that presumptive lineup are ex-CS pros. Go look at their HLTV weapon stats. All five of them have more kills with the CZ-75 than with the AWP. ec1s is the only one with any significant AWP kill count (and even then, it’s 146 kills out of 3747, or 3.9%).

This isn’t the be-all and end-all; ardiis himself only started AWPing very late on in CS:GO (79 out of 1467, 5.4%, albeit VERY concentrated into a couple of big events). But the broader point is: there isn’t really a natural Operator user on this team. From what I saw at Epulze, ec1s is trying to step up into that role (with Kryptix as a secondary generally). We’ll see how that goes; it seems to me like a very big ask for an IGL in particular to take up said role effectively. In any case, though, I would be surprised if he suddenly reached the heights that ardiis did.

Even asides from the Operator issue, the Epulze series in particular did give the feeling that fish123 might be struggling to get back ahead of the curve. I don’t really want to single him out, but Kryptix’s play in particular tended to be a bit of an encapsulation of this — he was repeatedly brutalised on some of his best spots by Shao’s Raze, especially on Split B (the Kryptix Korner has been thoroughly repossessed).

It’s a concern. There can be a bit of an idea in esports that a team that wins by what is politely known as being ahead of the meta, and impolitely known as ‘cheese’ or something similar, are doomed once they lose that advantage. I’ve never thought that true as a blanket statement, for the simple reason that innovation IS a skill, and there always have been and always will be players and teams that do it over and over (Diamondprox in LoL is an old-school example that immediately comes to mind).

However…there are teams that get onto a couple of things, flash brilliance, and then can’t do it again once the meta moves on from them. That’s the nagging worry now with fish123. I made the comparison back in the previous power rankings of the very early rivalry in EU Overwatch between IDDQD and REUNITED — IDDQD would end up becoming EnVyUs and shaping the face of early Overwatch on both an individual and team level, whereas REUNITED…in large part faded away (apologies to Kruise etc.). Let’s see what road fish123 now end up taking.

#5 StartedFromCS (NEW)

While these are technically new on the list, I have to hold my hands up here — I’ve had something of a blindspot with them and they probably should have been at least ranked towards the tail-end of the closed beta list. As much as they didn’t really show up at Mandatory Cup, they were still top-8 at Fnatic Proving Grounds and top-4 at Solary Cup, with decent wins and some credible losses (particularly the Fnatic PG loss against Prodigy and at least one of the TL Academy losses against FABRIKEN).

They weren’t the second-best team in beta or anything like that as some rankings had them at (e.g. Prodigy Ranking), but, still: they had decent results, they should have been ranked at least, mea culpa. They have in any case had a good couple of little runs lately, albeit both at the same tournament — a 3–0 in groups at Epulze that saw them take down Party Parrots in a Bo3, and a very credible playoff run that saw them beat the Patitek/NEEX Fordon Boars lineup before very narrowly losing to luckeRRR and rhyme’s stack in semis. At the time of writing, they’re in the final for Rise of Titans too.

Anyway. What’s so great about SFCS? It’s actually, in a way, to do with the reason that I personally overlooked them. SFCS’s initial core was not one, not two, but three ex-tier 1 CS:GO pros — Happy, Ex6TenZ, Maniac.

The key one here is Happy. The funny thing about Happy is this: he’s both a veteran CS guy, and a Sage player. Both of these, as a group, overperformed in beta, and by any reasonable expectation, would seem to be prime candidates to start falling off as we get further into Valorant’s lifespan as a competitive game (and the stats do back up the Sage side of that to some extent — Sage players have been noticeably less potent on average post-beta).

In Happy’s case, however…it’s gone the other way. He was very mediocre in beta even though he played from the very start (Liquipedia informs me of a 3-kill Sage game against NiP in COOLER Cup which I honestly don’t even remember), but has been getting better as time goes on; I had him in (my personal) ‘team of the week’ for both stages he played in at Epulze, which is notable when you consider just how strong the field was for similar players during playoffs particularly (chiwawa, L1NK, davidp, synde all come to mind).

I should say at this point: I don’t 100% know that Happy is IGLing this team, it’s possible that it’s Ex6TenZ, it’s possible (albeit unlikely) that it’s someone else. However, even if it’s someone else, it feels like SFCS are following all of the classic Happy IGL stereotypes from early to mid CS:GO history — extremely tight, extremely aggressive, Happy playing a very explicit lurking role (as many, though not all, of the better Sages do), and making whoever’s going in second to the site each time look like a god (frequently Ex6TenZ).

Of course, the refrain will come back: “but Happy IGL is basically a meme!” The answer to that is: it sure as hell wasn’t a meme for the first few years of CS, and while there might be a time where such an aggressive approach to IGLing stops working as a rule, it’s not going to happen any time soon. In any case, right now, it’s working, and it’s working against even teams that I would expect to have decent matchups stylistically against it; again, a Bo3 win over Party Parrots is no joke. While I’d still like greater clarity on the roster going forward (Happy and Ex6TenZ look like they’re committing to Valorant, but Maniac…less so, and he’s been subbing on-and-off with sixth man MateliaN), this is much like Party Parrots in terms of seeming to be a project there that goes beyond today’s roster. As it stands, said project? Showing a lot of promise.

#6 NiP (NEW)

NiP? New? What? I’ll talk more about it in the ex-NiP (#10) section, but the short version is: NiP had been struggling, it sure looked like the roster had hit a wall, and management pulled the emergency brake and started over, only retaining rhyme from the old team, and adding luckeRRR, the star Operator main who had been the driving force on a VALORANDO lineup that had shone very early and burned out just as quickly.

At the time of writing, it’s not clear who will be joining the rest of the roster on a permanent basis. Asides from the showing as NiP with bonkar etc. (again, see ex-NiP), they have played under the Prodigy label at all three major events over the last couple of weeks — Wave Esports Invitational, Epulze Valorant Prodigies, and Rise of Titans — with a succession of very potent mixes.

Their biggest success came at Epulze, where they boasted iDex, JEROME, logaN (in the quarters) and davidp (in the semis and finals), and came within a single round of taking down Party Parrots (13–12 Ascent, 10–13 Split, 12–13 Bind) — a good day’s innings no matter how you spin it.

Despite that uncertainty, and despite how quietly talented those temporary lineups actually have been (iDex and davidp have both been repeatedly impressive in support roles across multiple mixes), I still feel pretty confident in saying that new NiP belong up here just on the strength of the two confirmed members alone. luckeRRR was a significant bright spot on an oft-dysfunctional, now-disbanded VALORANDO lineup, and while rhyme has ironically enough not always found his rhythm, he’s beginning to look a bit more comfortable in a more rifle-oriented role with these NiP mixes (which he has indicated that he’s looking to more pursue than his Operator-heavier play on the old NiP).

So: this placing could easily end up blowing up badly in my face. Maybe they assemble the most dysfunctional possible 5, get someone in from the Helsingborg U12s to coach, and crater. For now, I’m going to say that won’t happen, and hence have them up here (though still not above SFCS despite the Epulze win because, I mean, there’s a little uncertainty, right?)

#7 2G4L (+1)

If you had asked be in May about which teams were likely to potentially move UP in the rankings a month from now, I would probably not have said 2G4L, no matter what sort of margin we were talking about for said move. Yet, here we are. 2G4L are another one of those teams that has been around from very, very early in beta — they played at COOLER Cup on April 25th along with fish123, NiP, Prodigy, need more DM, and the Fearoth/CREA^/PetitSkel core — and, like a couple of those other early teams, they were a transfer from another game — in their case, Fake, replan and synde were a champion core in Battalion 1944 (with Endpoint), and before that had played extensively at a high level in CoD4 Promod (a fourth member, aleksi, also played in both games). They’ve been around so long that they represented H2K in a FPS title.

See previous pieces for more detail on that ([1], [2]), but in any case: while this was an asset to them, it also brings that classic concern of whether said early performances are simply a product of vastly better team chemistry and the like, and whether that would prove sustainable as the game starts to develop. Even during their bigger closed beta runs (2nd at Fnatic Proving Grounds, 4th at Mandatory Cup), they never seemed to pull away from weaker teams, and would just get shelled for the most part by stronger teams.

So, where are we now? There is at least one player who’s producing in notable fashion, in the form of replan — he’s averaging a 1.29 K/D over his last 18 games, including at least 5 with 25+ and an incredible 39-kill showing against DREAMCHASERS that is almost certainly a record in high-level EU play so far. Initially mostly on Breach during closed beta, replan has switched over full-time to Raze since; he’s actually one of the very few Operator primaries to play her, making great use of her satchel to reposition (similar to a pseudo-Jett dash), and also tends to be one of the Operator players who’s most mobile both in terms of opening positions and mid-round movements.

The problem is, he’s generally the only one lighting up the scoreboard, to the point that, in a game where the availability of all the tools that fans tend to use to make narratives (stats, VoDs, analysts, all of that jazz) are still in suffocatingly short supply, I’ve already seen a popular narrative forming around 2G4L — either replan 1v9s, or 2G4L loses.

As tends to be the case with these things, that’s a major oversimplification (and divests responsibility from replan himself in a way that’s not really fair or healthy for anyone involved in my opinion). That being said… it’s pretty factual that either replan drops 30 in a 2G4L win, or he drops 15 (and still top-frags) in a crushing loss. There’s not much in-between. This isn’t intended to be the 2G4L Clinic, so I’m going to try to refrain from digging too deep here; however, it does feel like one of the problems is that opposing teams right now know that if they can cut replan out of the action (most easily done through taking mid control and cutting off rotations on most maps), they feel confident that they can deal with the rest.

Being an all-Finnish lineup (that appears to want to stay an all-Finnish lineup), their options in terms of potentially trying new players are on the limited side; the best free agent by far is JESMUND, who a) mains Raze and b) already parted ways with the team before the end of closed beta. They hence do seem to have little option except to work to get more out of the auxillary players here.

In that regard, the name to watch is absolutely still synde. Of that core three from CoD4 Promod, synde was probably the biggest raw talent, at least by the time that B1944 came around; from what I understand, he was generally a SMG player there (which, unlike in Valorant, tended to be akin to an aggressive/entry role), with replan being the sniper and Fake being more of an IGL.

So far in Valorant…I don’t think it’s far to say that he’s not realised that potential at all. He’s absolutely had some flashes of brilliance, and they’ve done some really intriguing things with setting him up in a pseudo-second-Operator role with Marshal buys on half-buy and eco rounds. It does feel like he’s slowly coming into his own. However, he’s clearly not all the way there yet, and I tend to think that finding ways to maximise his team contribution on the fragging end will be the single biggest challenge with regards to where this roster ends up finding its ceiling over the next couple of months or so.

Let’s still be clear: 2G4L have been doing well. In the same manner as SFCS and PartyParrots, a 2–1 over FABRIKEN is clearly impressive even if it was in less than ideal circumstances (two games with a stand-in Cypher, the third game delayed by four days), and QFs at Wave, SFs at Epulze, and QFs at Rise of Titans stacks up against most teams outside of the very top tier. The fact that they’ve survived, and in a sense improved (however slightly) against the field, is impressive. However, said survival hasn’t done too much to assuage the longer-term concerns here, and I think this is still a case of taking it month-by-month.

#8 ROYALS (-3)

There’s honestly not too much to say about ROYALS right now, because they’re currently in a significant state of flux. They were 5th in my closed beta ranking — just below NiP, and ahead of both FABRIKEN and PartyParrots — because, on the basis of those final results, it looked like they were in pole position at that time to break into the top tier; they were coming off consecutive perfect 7–0 weeks at the Valhalla Invitationals (with FABRIKEN, PartyParrots and 2G4L among others), and while they were unlucky to be one of the few top teams to see very few members invited to either Twitch Rivals or G2 Ignition, they still had a massive opportunity to prove themselves at Epulze, playing in the second set of group matches against Prodigy, FABRIKEN, and 2G4L.

In the event, they had an acutely disappointing weekend — while rarely uncompetitive, they never really got things going, and ended up 1–6 on maps and 0–3 in the group (picking up a single consolation map against Prodigy having been already effectively eliminated). A few days after, neph — the team’s Raze/Brimstone main who had been with them since the beginning — and leakeN — their Cypher main who joined just before their late beta run up the table — both announced their mutual departure.

The core of DPS, kpiz, and hype does remain, which does give one more confidence in their ability to bounce back with a changed roster than a lot of teams — it’s worth bearing in mind that asides from the odd pop-off by neph, this generally wasn’t a team that was defined by incredible individual performances so much as just very, very solid team play and what you’d probably call CS fundamentals. Still, it does create uncertainty.

As of right now, that uncertainty…still isn’t really fixed. The team have played their last few tournaments (Wave Invitiational Cup, an Absolute Masters group match, and Rise of Titans) with the same couple of standins in the form of a couple of old heads from the UK and Nordic CS scenes, Russ and Kazper, but there’s been no indications so far on whether or not the plan is to stick with them long-term; neither were playing too much Valorant before subbing for ROYALS, and there’s been no statements indicating either way so far.

Should be said, though: they’ve actually not been doing badly. They did lose the Absolute Masters series (to CITRON CHIEN, who are themselves on the cusp of the top 10), but they actually got all the way to semis at Wave, beating Worst Players in Bo1 and 2G4L in a Bo3 (which included a ridiculous 22/8 game from kpiz on the decisive map) before falling to Party Parrots in the semis. At Rise of Titans, they made quarters, albeit in relatively soft fashion (beat two very weak OQ teams); still, not bad, and they did take a map off FABRIKEN in the quarters (albeit: playing with ardiis as a sub instead of Kasper. Yes, that ardiis. No, there wasn’t a spectator. Yes, I am absolutely bloody livid.)

Fundamentals here are solid, and despite the showing at Epulze, still a very solid team; hopefully we get some stronger confirmation going forward, and we can see from there.

#9 Worst Players (NEW)

Worst Players continue to confound me somewhat. There was a brief moment where it looked like they might pull ahead in the battle of the CIS stacks with PartyParrots, after they came out on top of a less well-known, but clearly (especially in retrospect) respectable, field at Twitch Rivals EU #2, taking out nearly-FABRIKEN 2–1 and coming out ahead of a field with substantial showings from PartyParrots, Fordon Boars, DREAMCHASERS, and VALORANDO.

Off the back of that success, they got invited to Take The Throne #7 — all they had to do there in order to secure a Bo3 matchup with HyPHyPHyP was win a single Bo1 against Team Turkey, a decidedly mediocre team whose best results have been qualifying for a couple of smaller tournaments (most notably Rise of Titans), and that as I write this, has just announced it’s disbanding. If you were ranking that far down, I’m not even sure you’d have them in the top 30, let alone the top 10. Very exciting for WP! This is their chance to show the world what they can do!

They proceeded to lose the Bo1, because of course they did. No, Team Turkey did not put up much of a fight.

WP’s record overall record recently has not been at all bad — apart from Rivals, they did get through their group (over HyPHyPHyP) at Epulze pre-beta, and put up a very good fight against Prodigy in playoffs post-beta, coming within one round of pulling off a 2–0 series win (in the end: 13–4 Bind 12–13 Haven 6–13 Split).

However, they feel like a team which either experiences the highest highs or the lowest lows more than any other lineup I can think of. Either everything works, and chiwawa and pipsoN pop off for 25 kills each, or it doesn’t, and it’s just ugly across the board (as was the case in their group stage loss to ROYALS which saw arch on Breach go a miserable 2/15).

I still don’t really know what to think of them overall. There’s clearly some talent here (particularly the aforementioned chiwawa and pipsoN), and dimasick is one of the more interesting players to watch as soon as you realise that he’s constantly playing with a full 100 ping handicap, but…I don’t know. There’s something about this team as an unit that doesn’t feel solid, and I honestly can’t put my finger on it. Always an intriguing watch though.

#10 ex-NiP (-6)

I said in the last power rankings that, moreso than any other team, NiP felt like they were on a knife-edge with regards to their placement:

However, the thing that’s going to be dogging them over at least the next couple of months is going to be that classic question: given the nature of the roster being constructed here, is this a team who peaked on day 1 of the beta? Fingers crossed that we see them against better competition soon (they will at least be playing in Epulze next week, albeit against one of the weaker groups).

Well, they’re ex-NiP, so we can draw some inferences from that, I suppose. What happened? Well, first, the team lost Zyppan, their Breach/Sova player right at the end of closed beta. It was never quite clear who precipitated the split there (the only indication I saw was Zyppan saying that he wanted to take a more entry-focused role on his next team), but in any case, as discussed in the FABRIKEN section, Zyppan went from looking decent on NiP to potentially elite on FABRIKEN.

Next up was Twitch Rivals, where they were one of the few teams to get the luxury of playing as something resembling a true five (using melonhead as a stand-in); they did passably, topping a soft group, getting taken to 24 rounds a pubstack that happened to have luckeRRR, and then lost pretty decisively in the semi-finals to fish123+ONSCREEN. Disappointing, but not a disaster.

Then, Epulze. This was their big chance to get back on top — they brought in luckeRRR as a stand-in, they had a group that admittedly now looks significantly stronger in retrospect, but where they still should have been able to make it through (Party Parrots, StartedFromCS, and forZe), and…they went 0–4 against PP and SFCS, and didn’t get to play out the final series against forZe. More to the point, they looked horribly disjointed in a way that you absolutely do not expect from a core (if not a full 5 at that point) that had been playing together competitively from about as early in beta as it was possible to do so. I wrote about this at some length in my Epulze piece if you want to really dig into it, but suffice to say: they looked weak on all the ways that a team explicitly built around bonkar as captain should not be looking weak at.

It’s not clear exactly when the gears started turning here, but after a couple more showings (a decent win over Inetgamers at Absolute Masters, and a poor 6–13 loss to HyPHyPHyP at TTT #6), NiP announced that they were pulling the plug on June 25th, with all the ex-Paladins core (bonkar, Tenner, Bird) released, rhyme retained, and Yacine’s status not clear (despite being the focal point of their offense, he was formally never more than a stand-in)

What happens next? It does seem that bonkar is intent on continuing to compete; appearances are that he, rather than NiP, holds the Absolute Masters playoff spot, and a ‘bonkstack’ with Yacine and a handful of other Swedish players (including melonhead, who was their 5th at Twitch Rivals and Absolute Masters among other tournaments) did compete at Rise of Titans, albeit proceeding to go out in the Ro32 after a single Bo1. Interestingly, Tenner did not play said tournament.

While the success of other Raze players (especially Zyppan) has stolen a little limelight from Yacine, it should be said that whatever they were doing with him as the focal point on attack, it was still largely working. There are definite issues that bonkar has to solve to get a rebuilt lineup back on top again, but it’s not impossible (even if I wouldn’t place money on it). We’ll see if we’re still talking about them in a month I suppose, but I think for now they still edge it in the #10 spot.

#?? G2 Esports

It’s bad enough that I have to rank teams where only two or three players on the roster are set in the first place. I’m not going to rank a team that has yet to play a single game together. Not going to do it! Not going to do it.

That asides, I suppose that I am obliged to at least comment on the roster as it stands. As I said from very early on: everything I saw on the server suggested to me that the consistent success of those Prodigy stacks had a lot to do with mixwell even when his individual performances weren’t the best, and said performances have been picking up dramatically, as he showed off in style with a decent showing at Epulze groups followed by a ridiculous one at G2 Ignition (30 kills in a 13–1 Split demolition on the final map). You can read more about it in my Epulze piece (written before G2 mixwell was announced), but I’m very high on him as your starting point.

paTiTek is just about the perfect second signing for that roster. He’s young (20), clearly talented, but even beyond that, I think if you look at the way that he played on Fordon Boars, it’s hard not to think that he could have massive upside with his willingness to innovative (‘the Phoenix that’s actually a Cypher’) and the way that he and Fordon managed to juggle the challenges of having two reasonably heavy Operator users (him and NEEX) on the same team (though I should say: paTiTek was apparently more rifle/entry oriented in CS, so he’s not necessarily going to be bound to said role). Without trying to lean too heavily on the nationality and org cliche, it does give me faint reminders in a weird way of Jankos in LoL way back when.

I’m a little less high on pyth, and have said as much, but I understand it; he’s an experienced esports player, he’s likely to be very flexible in terms of his willingness to take up supportive roles, it’s fine. I’m not going to speculate on who might end up filling those last two roles in a specific sense, mostly because I don’t care, and I’d rather just let them fill said spots and actually play some games and take it from there.

In any case: it’s hard to argue that what we’ve seen so far doesn’t form the spine of a top-5 team at the very least. So, we’ll see.

EXTRA: Why didn’t I rank…?

need more DM: Love the Hungarian guys, and both the relative longevity and the results at Absolute Masters (beat Exceptis and ROYALS) and Rise of Titans (beat one of the luckeRRR-Rhyme stacks, beat Mattistack, extremely competitive vs. SFCS) are impressive, but just not quite enough to edge out the teams with more big tournament appearances as of yet; absolutely knocking on the door though, and the single biggest reason to be excited about Absolute Masters playoffs right now.
CITRON CHIEN/Exceptis: I’ve talked about how high I am on both iDex and bramz, if we see more tournaments from this as a 5 then things are probably in play next time, but again: need to see more of this 5 (or at least some discernable core) in stronger fields to rank them as a team.
RATVI: Semis at Wave was nice but had the softest possible route to get there, can’t hold the 2G4L loss at RoT against them too hard really but one tournament and some nice Bo1 results (they beat HyPHyPHyP in Trovo Challenge qualifiers) does not quite make a top-10 ranking.
Mattistack: Way too much in flux, even with JESMUND/N1KOLA got edged out by RATVI.