how could a COD team cost 3 VCT teams to run? who the fuck is making money in COD?

Lowkey next year.

7th year of VCT and its the end of current VCT partnership contracts and hopefully an improved system coming with it.

EDG is getting fucking ROLLED by gentle mates

purely hindsight. they played alright against Furia.

their only chance was winning 3-0, now the have to play 2 maps they suck ass on. No way anyone on this team thinks its winnable.

MIBR's Haven looked fine against Furia, G2 was just a team diff.

surely you meant the opposite right? MIBR has bottom 5 Abyss OAT

dont forget Verno's stat buff against NRG

Reykjavik 2021, at least one of SEN and FNC as been at every Masters/Champs since, until now.

This is also the first event without either of the first Masters grand finalists.

Mazino is literally their best player right now.

why would NRG want him over Keiko? Zekken may be a better duelist but NRG already has Mada and Keiko can play more agents better.

hes been playing great this whole tournament, MIBR not qualifying to his home city after this performance is gonna be awful.

95%

dont worry, they aren't going anywhere this year.

FNC is NOT losing to Liquid LMAO

I feel like this MIBR could also be argued then no?

Aspas and Zekken for sure, but Mazino was also Americas MVP in 2024 was he not? surely that counts?

I dont think aspas and marteen are a fair comparison. marteen is playing exclusively Yoru, who Aspas doesn't play at all.

Mazino to Jonah is at best a sidegrade

2023 Furia.

saying they trolled is kind of copium.

and what about both teams matches against NRG? G2 absolutely humiliated them while their match against MIBR could've gone either way.

MIBR at their peak might have a decent chance of beating G2, we just haven't actually seen it yet, where as G2 looked in peak form in their last match.

they struggled on Corrode against Envy, a team who they realistically shouldn't have been dropping more then like 6 rounds against.

I think the Americas top 3 rn are G2 > MIBR > NRG.

NRG and MIBR aren't losing to Furia, and the G2 that faced Furia and NRG are night and day different.

G2 destroyed NRG much more convincingly than MIBR beat them. Other than that MIBR's only other match was against Envy, who they really should've beaten with 0 difficulty.

G2 didn't look great against Furia or C9, but that match against NRG was a statement.

G2 > MIBR tbh.

EDG was also still dominating China in 2024, they aren't even good domestically anymore.

AG goes on a Wolves esque run finishing 2nd. EDG and XLG go 0-2

It also means Cloud9 will be the only one of Americas partnered teams to have not attended an international event.

god that would be so funny.

I prefer the 12 team Masters, but I think the 8 team format made sense. It felt right to differentiate between the 2 tournaments since both of them had completely different qualifiers.

I dont think they look "good", but I don't think they're entirely hopeless, I could see them pulling out a 4th-6th in Stage 1.

Trent > Verno > brawk

Considering it's literally just a qualifier that's not a problem.

why are we still talking about this. get over it.

That's crazy, and how many trophies has each region won in any of those?

Absolutely, Mazino is playing incredibly right now, he's always been heavily underrated.

Crazy how he put up numbers comparable to a guy who was on Astra Map 1 and hasn't played Yoru in like 6 months. I know who my goat is.

To be fair I think Verno could absolutely afford to be the 4th best player on his team currently.

We have no idea if it is or not.

They could add literally 1 more Ascension team to each league and it would still technically mean it's "more open"

Riot hasn't confirmed an open circuit anywhere, just that it would be "more open".

Riot won't financially support 64 teams, it's just to many. The only way that many teams would be possible is if they start pulling in some of CS egregious sponsorships, like calling it the "1xbet Masters", or letting teams plaster a Stake logo on the front of their jerseys.

Teams won't want to compete in an open circuit if they're getting none of the benefits the partnered teams get.

That stipend, team Capsule sales and Champs bundle revenue is the only reason orgs even compete in tier 2 currently.

Riots not gonna go up to 16 teams, Riot pays teams a yearly stipend for being in VCT, they would either have to spend millions paying for more teams, or pay every team across the board less. There's also the actual format, they simply don't have enough time to run 16 team stages while also running LoL.

Assuming they do downsize the number of partners, Americas will probably be

SEN
NRG
G2
100T
MIBR
FURIA/LOUD
LEV
KRU
There really isn't much reason to change anything in Americas, unlike other regions. EG and 1 of the BR teams are easy bloat to cut, and C9 is simply an unfortunate victim of G2 needing to get in.

They'll just drop DRX and 1 JP team.

Japan has been bottom feeding forever and DRX will have no problem re-qualifying, Riot might even keep them on as some sort of "guest team" in 2027 before any Ascension has been held.

because the best players are already in tier 1

alright then, if the entire year was just between these 5 pacific teams you think are at the top would you be happy then?

I agree, I think the entire year should be entirely between the top 2 teams from each region only.

Its not the amount of matches each team plays a week thats the limiting factor, It's how many matches Riot can run each week. EMEA having to share their studio with LEC is a huge problem for scheduling.

Underage players are allowed to play in this years Stage 2 Play-In, the problem is them being in VCT technically meaning they're full time employees, and would violate child-labor laws. If they were only there for a couple weeks it would be mostly fine.

What exactly do you mean by maximum game "theory", the bracket in that video has 47 matches total, thats actually MORE matches then the current Stage 1 format has, which is 44, and 17 more matches then this years Kickoff at 30.

Frankly, if your going up to 16 teams I don't think theres any point to doing an overly complicated bracket when a swiss stage + playoffs would take a similar amount of time and get the same result much simpler.