This week-end, the 30th and 31st of March we got our first Predecessor Nation Cup, thanks to the amazing work put on by Lilleby (TO) and the crew of ForTheCore (which also organize Fangbooth tournaments). We are going to cover a little bit this event sharing the brackets, some data and also some POV analysis of the Grand Final will join later but first I have to say “Cocorico” the french Nation manages to win this first edition.
For this first edition, we got 16 nations participating, you can find the full bracket below. If you want to get access to a lot of details, like the match Ids, team rosters, and also per player and hero in depth stats, the crew of omeda.city have started to build an amazing tournaments page so go follow this link if you are interested : https://omeda.city/tournaments/6
Overall, it was a fierce battle, with all matches played in BO3 and the Final in BO5. Personally if you want to watch some of those games, I would recommend the following one :
- Norway vs Sweden and USA vs Germany in the round of 16
- Italy vs USA in the Quarters
- And the Grand Final between France and UK, this was a banger of a series that I will cover in details this week on my twitch and once the video are available on my youtube, they will be added later in this post
A bit of data
This Graph represents the picks and ban of all 35 matches played in the 1st Nation cup and already one thing wonderful is every single of the 34 champions available for this tourney has been represented. Of course not all of them with the same success rate as we will see with the win rate graph later on.
First thing to notice is 29 bans for Argus, I guess despite the nerf teams still consider him to be too oppressive and he was the number 1 target ban for this tourney. We also see that similar to the previous tourney, we still have a huge emphasize at securing tanks with Rampage, Riktor, Kwang, Steel all thrusting the top 5 place of the most appearance and they where heavily contested early in the drafts.
In terms of midlane, we still have the usual Mage with LtBelica, Gideon, Howitzer and Gadget as the main picks. Morigesh and Fey despite their buff in the recent patch are still not really present even though they finally made some appearance. On the carry side Drongo and Twinblast dominated the debate here.
Last thing to mention is that assassin seems to struggle a bit at making appearance in comps, sure we got to see some Shinbi, a bit of Feng Mao, a couple of Kallari and a bit of Serath and Countess but they are all on the right side of the graph which might indicate that the META is more in favor of bruiser and tank.
Following up with the win rate graph, keep in mind that the less a character has been picked, the less reliable this data become. For instance Countess has 100% winrate but she got picked a single time so not much can be extracted from this value.
As we see Argus, Rampage, Riktor, Kwang, Belica are all above 60% winrate which is a lot and that justify why they are such high prio pick. During the tourney I was surprised to see Steel with such an insane pick rate he actually is the number one picked hero of the tourney and many teams have taken him early in the draft. However we see that it was a trap, Steel is a good character in the right circumstance but he is nowhere a prio pick as his 18% win rate shows. Is steel really that bad, I don’t think so, but when you first pick steel and offer Rampage, Kwang, or Rampage, Belica as an answer suddenly your draft already feels super weak.
Other interesting mentions is to see that Gadget is still struggling in tournament settings, only a small 31% winrate. In terms of carry Drongo number 1 prio pick but only 50% so probably more a comfort pick than anything else. And Shinbi reach 67% winrate but I will attribute that to Bondrewd from the UK team who is an absolute monster on the pick, giving me the chance to also say to take those value with a grain of salt since individual player performance have a huge impact on those.
Match Analysis
I have reviewed all 5 games of the grand final focusing on the POV of a single player. Enjoy the analysis 🙂