Sodah Out Verty In, ESL Venue, Team Brackets

Sodah from Complexity recently found out that he couldn't attend Edmonton after all because of a problem with his final exams. Sodah at first, thought he couldn't go to the event so Reckful and Venruki were going to practice full time after Anaheim with Verty. But then Sodah found out he actually could attend Edmonton so they wouldn't need Verty anymore and have been practicing with Sodah. Now with Sodah for sure being unable to attend, Complexity's RMP is forced to go with Verty with very little practice.

Verty has been in the Arena scene for quite some time and I feel he's one of the most underrated players. Verty plays hunter as a main, which we saw at MLG Anaheim, and a priest. Verty was my priest for a long time and we qualified together for the first arena tournament. He made a priest as an alt and we messed around in 3s one week with my old rogue Hosty and we were soon first in the battlegroup. This led us to try and qualify for the tournament realm together and to our surprise we got 4^th in the second tourney realm. Since then Verty really hasn't had a serious team since after Hosty quit I left Verty to become sponsored by SK with Neilyo and Triks.

Verty played with Complexity in Anaheim in attempt to beat Check Six. That was his second time attending a LAN, his only other LAN was a playing a few matches at ESL LA. LAN experience is a huge factor at tournaments. The only way to fully practice for a LAN is to play at a LAN tournament. The most experienced LAN players are the Korean teams since they have much more tournaments with the GOM TV league. I learned to look at my teammate's monitor when I'm invised on LAN from Orangemarmalade, clearly a strategy he learned from the number of tournaments he's done. I feel that Verty will be a great replacement for Sodah, but one simply can't replace the amount of LAN experience that Sodah brings to his team. 

If Complexity gets their first 1st place with Verty will they replace Sodah with Verty full time?  Or will this give Sodah an excuse to quit the game?  BEREIVE IT!

“I can't wait to freeze my ass off, drink some beers, and own noobs.”

-Verty

ESL Venue

The ESL Edmonton tournament is in one of the most exciting locations a tournament has ever been held at. It is in the West Edmonton Mall which is the largest shopping mall in North America and the fifth largest shopping mall in the world. The mall has a theme park, a water park, a sea life zoo, an Ice skating rink, a miniature golf course, multiple movie theaters, and many other attractions. Players will surely have a lot of free time to explore the venue since the format of the tournament limits the actual number of games played that teams have to play. I'm personally excited to try Tim Horton's Coffee place since I always hear how much better it is than Starbucks. If it's not good I can just go to one of the nine Starbucks that are in the mall. Azael said the mall has more submarines than the Canadian navy does, I guess you can go exploring underwater in submarines..

I'm glad my hotel is actually in the mall so I don't have to walk in the -30 weather or whatever it's supposed to be. I expect all of us to kind of just basically live in the mall the entire time since no one will want to walk outside.

ESL Brackets

Group A
CheckSix Gaming - Beast Cleave
SK.US - RLS
Loaded - RMP
TBD

Group B
compLexity - RMP
fnatic - RLS
Evil Geniuses - Voldemort Cleave
TBD

The two “TBD” teams are going to either be Lafu's TSG or Vidra's RMP but I've heard multiple times that Lafu's TSG isn't going and that Vidra's sponsor isn't going to send them. If neither of these teams can go then there are going to be two local teams that will play in the event. The quality of players and the comps these local teams will be running is unknown. It's quite sad that 8 actual teams from North America couldn't be scrounged up.

Let's look at the groups

Group A has Check Six, Realz's new RLS team with Glick and Kollektiv, “Loaded” with Lipstick, Rgostic and Ayume.

Check Six is going to be running their notorious Beast Cleave setup with Twixz, Flex and Toes. Their comp has not changed one bit in the last patch and I see them being able to beat Loaded and SK.US quite easily. This team should surely do well at this event unless their disappointing 3^rd place at Anaheim brought their spirits down, which I doubt it did.

SK.US is going to be running RLS and although they are not as much of a threat as fnatic seems to be, RLS has recently become a top comp. The will of forsaken nerf directly buffs RLS and the rogue changes put this comp ahead. I can see this team easily beating Loaded's RMP but losing to Check Six. Maybe Dr. Shikimaru Realz will pull something crazy to beat Check Six but after watching Azael's RLS come so close to beating Check Six and losing 2-3 I don't see SK.US being able to replicate that.

Loaded's RMP is quite unknown, Rgostic was Tenderloin's former priest who didn't even show up to the regional finals in Germany when they qualified as Holyplay so who knows if he'll show up to Canada. Ayume was on my old server and we used to duel a bunch I haven't really heard from him since but Sargaz said he's still been playing a lot and is good. No one has really seen this team practicing but they might be playing under different names on Blackrock. Definitely seen as the underdog of this tournament.

Group B

Complexity still will be a challenging team to face even with their last minute roster change. Complexity has been a team that consistently beats RLS but with the recent will of the forsaken change RLS seems to be harder for RMP to beat. I still see Complexity being able to beat fnatic, since they always have.

Fnatic is going to be running a very strong RLS team, anything can really happen with this team. I can see them both losing and beating complexity and the same goes for against my team.

Team EG is going to be running MLS with myself Azael and Tenderloin.  The comp is obviously extremely powerful on live servers but on TR it's much different.  On live servers the main goal of the comp is to basically just spam damage and get a few CCs off which is common for most teams on live.  On TR nothing really happens for us until we get a chain of CCs off since we only have a 20% MS.  Druid teams really give us problems since the hots are usually always ticking and with only a 20% mortal strike debuff it's easy to outheal incoming damage.  RLS  is also a pretty hard matchup that can really go either way, we found that a shaman's earthshield can consistently heal up the target we're on enough for him to survive the shaman being fully CCd.  Lately we've done extremely well against Check Six on live servers but again, in a tournament setting we're not sure what's going to happen.  This is going to be an interesting event for us since I've never seen this comp run at a tournament nor have I played it at a tournament. 

Make sure to watch the stream of the event, I'm sure James “2GD” Harding will be announcing the tournament which is always great. I do wish Matt was still there at ESL but oh well.

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