By quincy0191
Honorable Mention: Shrek is Love (Ogr), 16 points
Honorable Mention: The Solaire Club (SolC), 24 points
8. Team Disband (DsBn) – 27 points
It’s hard to tell who these guys are. Early on, when the field was wide open and they had just formed, they were taking games and series from top teams, looking like they hadn’t lost a step. The return of former big-name players was going well. Then they faltered a bit, failed to qualify in their first few tries, and don’t seem to have taken things too seriously since then. A few troll series, a forfeit, and now rumors that they might make good on their name. There are enough clouds over the talent to drop them down the list, which is unfortunate, because it’s bright when it shines through.
7. Team Grief (TLOS) – 32 points
Grief actually looks a lot like Disband, except with a slightly more reliable group of players. There’s additional talk that Grief won’t be sticking around much longer, but considering Superkge, Haxxeren, Massera, L4byr1nth, and Chaoly haven’t taken extended breaks in the recent past, it’s a better bet we’ll see them sooner rather than later. Either way, failing to qualify for DreamHack clearly put a damper on the team, and without a major tournament to play within the next month or so, there isn’t much point in hanging around. For now, though, the squad is good enough on paper to earn a top eight spot.
6. Team Who (Who) – 47 points
Looking more and more like a team about to break through, Team Who probably scared Bad Monkey Gaming pretty badly for the first ten minutes of their Grand Finals series for the last spot in DreamHack. Ultimately that series wrapped pretty quickly, but you could see the re-addition of sertas to Who’s lineup makes a significant difference (who knew getting talented players helped you win? Also yes, pun intentional). The Flux-first draft strategy is interesting, but it saw them in good stead, and with some tweaks here or there it’s not hard to see them as a top five team or higher.
5. Bad Monkey Gaming (BMG) – 61 points
BMG continues to sit in the middle of these rankings, thanks to their failure to qualify until the last possible opportunity. If nothing else, some tune-up games against lower quality teams appears to have gotten them on the same page; `Makke is no longer looking out of place, and BMG is a five-man team once more. That’s not great for the guys above them, because we know they have the talent to do some damage at DHS. If they were playing handicapped for the last couple months and aren’t anymore, they’re going to be underestimated. Remember the last time that happened right before a LAN?
4. Reason Gaming (Rea) – 75 points
It feels weird writing about Reason, partially because they’re so up-and-down. They lost a combined four games against Who and SolC before coming back and taking both series, which sounds like they should be ranked right around where those teams are, in the back half of the top 10. But then there’s the team that beat SynC, technically SynC’s first series loss since Cycle 4 of HTS3. And what are we to make of the consistent roster changes – indicative of continuous improvement, or indecisiveness and internal friction? More questions than you’d normally like to have from a top-tier team, but once again, skill wins out, and Reason have shown they can occasionally be the best team in the scene. They just need that to happen at the right time.
3. Druidz eSports (DRz) – 79 points
Another reason it was weird to write about Rea was the fact that we haven’t seen them much recently. But we haven’t seen Druidz in a month – they won the first qualifier, played two of their three DBL matchups in the first three weeks, then got a forfeit win in their third. They haven’t even been able to flaunt their new sponsorship. It’s hard to know what to make of that – on one hand, they looked great when they were playing, as evidenced by the #1 seed to DH and advance to the brackets in the DBL. On the other, an extended break may not play out well when it comes to shaking off rust. They’ll get some work in this weekend, and it might make a big difference in June.
2. compLexity Gaming (coL) – 86 points
Another “new” sponsor, though coL’s history in HoN is much richer than Druidz, and a match that a lot of people saw coming as the only legitimate team in a formless NA scene was picked up by a NA organization with beefy ties to the game. Now they’re headed to their first LAN, so we’ll see what they’ve got when they don’t have a ping advantage. Winning one Oscar-worthy series against BMG for their tickets was impressive, but doing it again was definitive, especially because they could have been sloths and not cared with a guaranteed trip to the brackets of DBL. Now all we’ll see if they can handle the complexity and craziness of in-person games. Babaganoush.
1. SynC eSports (SynC) – 99 points
Once again, SynC comes out on top, though the sweep is denied. They haven’t been completely dominant recently, and it feels like they could be vulnerable. But I’ve said that a lot, and it generally hasn’t been true, so there’s no real reason to think we’ll see a repeat of the World Finals. That event definitely taught them some humility, and they’re probably much better for it. The smart money right now is on SynC using the DBL bracket to firm up their strategies going into DreamHack (and probably win that event along the way), then go to Sweden and leave with Doombringers.
quincy0191 is a HoN veteran with a focus on the numbers. Fascinated by quantifying and valuing human beings, he shunned the world of finance in favor of sports and competition. When not on Honcast you can find quincy playing games like Civilization and Pokemon, or watching movies, writing, pondering, or catching a game of baseball.
