Hello world!

I’m just going to talk about my thoughts on all of the relegation matches for NA and how I think each of the matches will go. I’ll give each team a power ranking based on their players and their performance so far.

I’m not going to rank Evil Geniuses since I haven’t seen them play. Nothing is known about the teams ability to perform so far, only speculation. I Imagine they aren’t terrible but I’m not going to give them an edge.

Starting off with the Challenger teams I give the #5 rank to The Walking Zed. I think they’re all good players but have come up with disappointing results in the past. They performed well in the Spring Promotion tournament where it actually counted but I don’t think it’s enough to get past the likes of Coast.

The next rank at #4 is COGnitive Gaming. I believe they’re going to put up a fight against Curse and possibly pull it out. Zamphira is a extremely good mid player and is probably the core of the team. He has a huge champion pool to play with and will carry the world on his shoulders. As long as Nothinghere and Cris perform, I could see them pulling out a victory over Curse.

#3 is Determined Gaming. They have a strong roster that will most likely make it into the LCS. In group stage they beat out most of the other challenger teams going 4-1 with Arthelon being a roaming monster for most games. The only thing that can stop them is themselves not performing on the LAN setting.

The #2 slot goes to Team Curse. They had quite a few roster changes and a role swap to make basically a whole new roster which makes them stronger than what they were at Pax. The addition of Quas and Iwilldominate seems to have worked out well so far for them which leads me to believe they will be a serious threat for COG to make it into the LCS. They chose not to play in the recent tournament of NACL so that they wouldn’t reveal their strategies before they needed to, which also hides their strength pretty well.

The final spot goes to Team Coast since they have been destroying the entire Challenger scene since the Summer Split of LCS ended. I do not see them losing their match which is very unfortunate for The Walking Zed. The only way they could lose is if their new ADC WizFujiin chokes extremely hard in the LAN setting since it will be his first time performing at one, but that is unlikely.

Predictions for each matchup:

Crs VS COG 3:1

I think Curse will pull out ahead and stay in the LCS. COG is good and could pull out the match win, but it would be a huge upset. Voting for Curse is the obvious choice.

Coast VS TWZ 3:0

Coast will stomp this matchup. I hate to see TWZ go out like this, but at the same time know that Coast is really strong. If somehow TWZ manages to win the LCS without Coast would be a very different LCS. They’ve been around for a long time and aren’t falling off as players.

EG VS DTG 2:3

If the new EG team is competent they could take the series off of Determined Gaming. Since there’s no evidence of them going to perform extremely well I give the match to Determined. There’s a sense of mystery around the team though. Just like the new Lemondogs roster had. Even if they’re good players individually it doesn’t translate into competitive wins.