‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

Going into the playoffs of Korean Contenders the two big favorites of the tournament were Runaway and GC Busan. Runaway had topped their group while GC Busan had come in second. Element Mystic could have been the favorite coming out of group B as they had topped the group in score, but in their final game they lost to Meta.Athena (arguably the worst team in the tournament) 2-3.

So in terms of results, Busan looked to be the more dangerous team coming out of Group B and Wolf pointed out that multiple Korean teams had picked out Busan as the potential favorites to win it all. However they were upset by WGS.Armament in the quarterfinals where they lost 2-3. The game was a typical GOATS vs GOATS meta, but the individual players of WGS shined in this series.

In particular, I’d highlight three players: Karayan, dpi, and Mandu. All three players skill sets seemed to work in tandem in this series as they consistently broke apart Busan’s GOATs. I’ll start off with Mandu as he had a surprising amount of impact as a lucio player outside of using his ult. In the series he was incredibly good at controlling space and positioning. This was most notable on control maps where he constantly forced Ion into bad positions and it seemed like he had studied and countered Ion’s playstyle. He was also pivotal in helping control the rest of the team.

We then move on to dpi’s D.Va. Dpi outperformed Ritz by a massive margin no matter what category you’re looking at. He got off way more Zarya/D.Va bomb combos, got more isolated picks, was able to use D.Va to break apart the formation of Busan, and ruined Edison’s life. The last two were more noticeable in the latter half of the series. On the Anubis defense, dpi kept diving into the GOATs formation that separated the back and front line, at which point the rest of the team would instantly jump on top of them and win the fight. In the case of Edison, dpis just kept blocking his Zarya ults so even though Edison seemed to be charging ult faster, it didn’t amount to much because he kept getting blocked by dpi.

The biggest benefactor of all of this was Karayan. Going into the series, I thought Ion would be the better tank, but Karayan came up huge for the team as he consistently got better ults than Ion and helped swing the match in his team’s favor. Overall I was impressed by WGS for making this upset happen, but I think their road ends here as Runaway look to be the best team in the playoffs.

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