No team has gone as long without playing an official match before Champions as
Team Vikings
Team Vikings
Inactive
Veroneze
Vinícius Ribeiro
Ds
Daniel Silva
swag
João Neto
pollo
Julio Silva
has.
Eight of the 16 teams played at Masters: Berlin. Another four teams qualified through their region's respective Last Chance Qualifier. Three of the remaining four teams have played in at least one additional tournament since their last VCT match.
But Team Vikings are the exception. Their last match was more than three months ago. A 2-1 defeat to Keyd Stars in Brazil's Stage 3 playoffs.
Both of Team Vikings' defeats in that tournament were to teams that winded up representing Brazil in Masters 3. It was the first time all year that Team Vikings failed to take Brazil's title in a VCT stage. Despite the quality of competition they lost to, fourth place was nothing short of disappointing for a Vikings squad that had dominated its region to that point.
And to add to the sting, it delayed their shot at redemption. At Masters: Reykjavik, Team Vikings finished outside the top four after going 1-2 overall. They beat X10 2-0, but failed to take a map off of Sentinels or Team Liquid. It wasn't a terrible performance, but it wasn't the performance fans wanted out of Brazil's best team.
Image credit: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games
“I don't think there was any resentment for that defeat,” Gustavo "gtn" Moura said. “We always want to win, but in this case, it helped alert us to some kinds of problems in the team that we didn't see because we weren't losing before. By then, we had lost three games and gone unnoticed. This defeat helped us grow as a team.”
“From that time to this day, we've evolved a lot. We want to prove ourselves, but without resentment, and make it a good championship.”
After Masters 2, Team Vikings experimented with changes. Their lineup remained the same — Team Vikings have not made any roster moves all year — but the way they played was different. The team's star, Gustavo "Sacy" Rossi, picked up Jett, and more rarely Raze, to play alongside his Sova after Vikings were unable to keep up with North America's and Europe's best Jett players. Leandro "frz" Gomes, the team's former Jett player, focused on initiators, particularly Skye. Gustavo "gtn" Moura worked on getting comfortable with additional agents, such as Sage, after his comfort pick in Raze fell out of the meta at Masters 2.
They were ready to prove they had grown from the lessons they learned at Masters 2 and could prove more formidable at Masters 3. Instead, they remained at home while Keyd Stars and Havan Liberty represented their country in Berlin. And they watched while neither team qualified for the playoffs.
As a result, Team Vikings remained on top of the standings for VCT Brazil and secured a spot at Champions at the end of the year. They were able to skip LCQ despite their disappointing end to Stage 3. And with few tournament opportunities in Brazil between Masters 3 and Champions, Team Vikings just focused on their practice.
“I confess that not playing an official match for three months is hard,” gtnziN said. “We like to compete. It's part of it, we have to know how to deal with it and solve it.”
The way Team Vikings solved it, gtnziN said, was by bootcamping in Spain. He believes the break doesn't affect them too much because of it, and found they were able to correct their mistakes through it. He said they've been learning more about the way the game is played in Europe — a benefit to a team that struggled to adapt to the meta in Masters: Reykjavik.
But that was then, and this is now. Team Vikings isn't the dominant but still green team they once were. They've worked on their weak points, and they now have the experience needed to adapt if new weak points get exposed.
“The greatest lesson we took from Iceland was the experience on LAN,” gtnziN said. “I hadn't had that experience myself. Now we are more mature and more experienced."
Arguments can be made for or against a team playing in tournaments just before the biggest event of the year. Tournaments give a team the opportunity to try things in an official match, to shake off the rust, and to remember how to shift from the mindset of practice to that of competition. But they also give opposing teams footage to scout from so they can identify and attack a team's weaknesses.
Team Vikings will prove to be a test case for the opposite situation. How do three and a half months without playing in a tournament affect a team's ability to play in the biggest event of the year?
Brazil's leaders in circuit points hope the answer benefits them. They hope it will have kept them fresh and well-practiced while other teams scramble to figure out how to play against unknown strategies.
If that's what the downtime does for them, it will have made the long wait for redemption well worth it.
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