Minor note on terminology: people love to argue over which teams are T1, T1.5, T2, T3, etc. I don’t want to get into that sort of discussion, so for the purposes of this I’m considering “T2” as teams which aren’t in the DPC top 8, but are regularly seen competing in regional qualifiers for LANs.

First, a note on some disbands and roster swaps:

Wow… what happened there?

Hellraisers and Penta both made it to a minor this season, but now no longer exist. Dropped by their org, Hellraisers went back to their pre-TI7 team name Planet Dog, but then disbanded, player ‘33’ is now making waves in the US with Optic. Penta moved to Going In and then recently disbanded. Mid or Feed and Mousesports also disbanded, with a new EU team ‘Mad Lads’ formed from some of the fallout.

On to the teams that do exist…

OG were struggling to be competitive at recent events and in the end parted ways with mid/carry player Resolut1on, meaning that their DPC points are essentially forfeit, and any TI appearance will be dependent upon going through open qualifiers. Over a month has passed and they have not been quick to announce a new player, with coach 7Mad standing-in as the mid player. This roster has still proved reasonably strong so far, as they’ve continued to steam-roll the European qualifiers for upcoming events. That’s perhaps to be expected from a team which still boasts arguably the best position 3 and 4 players in the world (I said ‘arguably’ — I’ll damn well argue for S4 and JerAx!). Really though we need to see them compete more at lan events to see how they fare against the best teams; results at all 4 of the upcoming majors will be telling.

Kinguin have been the “best of the rest” in Europe this season after the three big teams, attending four minors and one major, however attaining a top 4 placing only once — in the Summit 8. The team has been together for a good long while and they look decent, certainly a contender to get through EU qualifiers for TI, but unlikely to trouble the bigger teams there if recent results are anything to go by.

All-Swedish roster The Final Tribe seem to be overcoming the lack of success they variously found under the Alliance banner last year and are transitioning into a solid looking team. Their only DPC appearance so far has been an underwhelming 5–6th finish (out of 8, being knocked out by Infamous) in GESC: Indonesia, however in the recent bout of qualifiers they have shown themselves a force to be reckoned with. We’ll be seeing them in GESC: Thailand, followed by the China Supermajor. On current form this team can upset the monopoly that Kinguin currently appears to have over the EU TI qualifiers.

Mad Lads combines MoF’s syndereN and KheZu, Mousesports’ Madara and Maybe Next Time with journeyman mid-lane player qojqva. On paper this is a decent team, and they’ve shown some strong performances, however not strong enough to get past TFT in any of the recent qualifiers (though they did go 1:1 with TFT in their supermajor series). If there is time for this team to practice and gel a bit more, not a bad outside shot for a chance of getting through TI qualifiers.

“Alliance is back!”, or so the many fans hoped when their latest roster was announced way back at the end of November. A hand injury to miCKe disrupted their ability to practice consistently and it wasn’t until February that we got our first glimpse of them in qualifier series. Safe to say it hasn’t gone great for them so far. There have been some promising individual performances from their young rising stars, but they really have to push on a lot if they hope to get anywhere near qualifying for this year’s TI. At the moment they aren’t even the best T2 side in Sweden (see TFT), let alone Europe.

Some other potentials, not an exhaustive list!

Below that level there are a few other teams that have regularly made it through open qualifiers to participate in closed qualifiers as of late, but realistically none have been strong enough to make much of an impact on the EU scene. Would be a major upset if any of these teams made it to TI. I’m not even sure LeftOneTV or Swiss Quality Gaming are eligible for invites to TI qualifiers, as their registered rosters appear different to the players recently used by each team.