Week 2

Challenger continues to be a roiling mess of activity, but after two weeks 12 players are 2-0. Keep an eye on incnone, who’s not only undefeated, but scored a shutout this week and is now 14-3 in two matches.

In Iron, mrrgs followed a victory by forfeit last week with a narrow 7-5 win over ml726 to improve to 2-0. League favorite jecat completed his week 1 matchup against strobo, falling behind 0-2 before finding that certain jecat ne sais quoi and roaring back to win 7 of the final 9.

In Copper, we finally saw our first match of the year after all three failed to take place in week 1, with baldrick winning 7-3 over gmantsang, and steph took a win via forfeit over bittersweet93.

In Bronze catnip and sgnurf tied 6-6 despite four of the sets being swept. arturiax and nanthelas followed suit with a tie of their own in a roller coaster of a match, with arturiax winning the first four games on nanthelas’ doubled map pick, and nanthelas immediately returning the favor. This match was casted on Sunday.

In Silver, wodar broke the curse against longtime rival teetery, winning 7-5 and splitting every map except Courtyard. checker has yet to play his week 1 match against turnout8, but the latter made his reentry into the SCL with a 7-3 loss to james1221 after falling behind 0-4 on Courtyard to start the match and splitting the rest of the way.

In Gold, sharper seems determined to show us that This Time It’s Different, tying pwndnoob 6-6. sharper, who started 0-3 in each of the previous seasons, has hit the ground running this year at 1-0-1. elvisnake fell behind 3-1 in his (casted) match against scallions but came back with two strong spy wins on Library before sweeping Veranda to win 7-5.

In Platinum, scheduling problems in week 1 resulted in the highly-anticipated slappydavis–pires match being delayed until both had played their week 2 matches. slappydavis won 7-3 against drawnonward (the featured match in the NA cast), and pires scored a 7-0 victory over cameraman. It was only the third shutout of the year, and the first higher than Bronze. The two victors played their week 1 match shortly after, with pires winning a close 7-5 battle.

The unrelenting brutality of Diamond continued this week. magician1099 pushed krazycaley to the limit, but narrowly lost 7-5. The former falls to 0-3, while the latter opens up his latest title defense at 2-0. warningtrack eked out a win against bloom to improve to 2-0. bloom is 0-2 but has lost both his matches by the narrowest of margins, 7-5. Finally, canadianbacon jumped out to a 4-0 lead on kcmmmmm and held off a late comeback to win 7-4. The skill gap in Diamond might be minimal, but there are clear points tiers early on, with four of the six players either winless or lossless.

The higher divisions made up a lot of ground this week, with only royalflush–falconhit in Gold yet to be completed among the 18 scheduled matches in the top three tiers. Expect a shakeup by this time next week, however, as the stipulation about three pending and forfeits can begin to take effect. Also note that the week-over-week deadline has been shifted to Monday, to allow people to complete each week’s matches over the weekend.

Make sure to check out the VOD of the EU Week 2 cast, and the VOD of the NA Week 2 cast.

For full standings and replays, visit the SCL Manager.