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Tours is over, and it hasn’t revealed much new information. This was Mousesports first tournament win, over a lackluster field, and it all shook out like you might have expected. Still, it reinforced my positive feelings about Valiance, and was another fine showing of G2’s lack of cohesion and team play.
Mousesports
Mousesports have won their first tournament with their revamped lineup, and they did so in dominating fashion. They dropped one map to Valiance before stomping Windigo, Avangar, and Valiance all 2-0, all in a row. Mousesports had three of the top four players at the event, with ropz topping the leaderboard. He went 52-29 in the grand finals, absolutely tearing through Valiance and leading Mouz to a comfortable victory.
Funnily enough, this win isn’t all that impressive for mousesports. They have the pedigree of a championship level team, what with their talent level and their IGL. The expectations we may be placing on a team this young might be unfair, but it was assumed that they would take this tournament. If they hadn’t, it would have been both disappointing and worrying.
G2
Things are looking grim for the “French Superteam”. They were the second team that some might have had penciled into the grand finals alongside Mousesports, which makes sense when you consider the caliber of player on the team. If you were to go back and check out my preview, however, I wasn’t not nearly as in on them. Not to brag or anything, just saying.
Shox was the only player on G2 in the top 10 players at the event, which is symptomatic of the problems this team has been facing for the last three years. Building around Shox is a mistake. I don’t know how much clearer that needs to be before the organization understands and makes moves to fix their team.
Perhaps the saddest part of G2’s mediocrity is that kennyS continues to flounder. Sure, he isn’t the same guy he was when he had his MVP caliber years, but he’s almost certainly better than how he looks on G2 now.
G2 dropped maps to Ghost and FrenchFrogs. Can you even name a member of FrenchFrogs? Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Valiance
I was high on these guys coming into this tournament and I wasn’t disappointed. HuNter had a particularly good tournament, which is Valiance’s win condition. He was able to propel them to a grand finals appearance where they were dispatched with relative ease by Mousesports.
That should be neither a surprise nor a disappointment to Valiance, or the viewer. Mouz is in a whole other tier than Valiance, which was obvious before the tournament even started. What’s impressive is, Valiance managed to take a map off of Mouz in the group stage and were able to handle G2 in the playoffs. Hopefully Valiance continue to get chances to participate in international LANs, as they have serious potential to become a solid upper-mid tier team, somewhere in the neighborhood of North.
FrenchFrogs
Somehow ex-3DMAX is still kicking, having kept their roster together after being dropped from their org earlier this year. They’re now the third best team in France, and I don’t see a realistic road for them to overtake G2 in the near future. I would, however, keep an eye on this roster potentially getting cannibalized by Ex6TenZ’s team, GamerLegion. They were a hyped project earlier this year and have accomplished nothing. FrenchFrogs was getting some hype late last year, and the roster has a couple of young players that are intriguing to some degree. I wouldn’t be surprised if a player or two was poached to join Ex6TenZ and ScreaM.
Ghost
For all intents and purposes, Ghost is a farm team for NA. At least, they should be. Led by a veteran IGL Steel, with a hard cap on how good they can be by virtue of their inability to attend Majors, means that Ghost should be producing young talent that has been molded by Steel into worthwhile players, ready to compete in tier one.
Instead, Ghost added Freakazoid, the epitome of washed up, to pair with NA rejects koosta and wardell. This team is going nowhere fast, and for the last year or so has been a low tier upset candidate at best. It’s unfortunate, as you’d think more great young players would have passed through this system. A look through the Ghost alums, however, reveals a long list of nobodies.
These small DreamHack tournaments are always a good time, and tours was no exception. Getting to watch mousesports fire on all cylinders is always a good time, and it gets me excited for the road ahead for the international powerhouse.
