The past week-end, the 6th and 7th of April we got the Qualification round for the PCC7 which consisted in a phase of Swiss then a Group Stage to determine which top 8 teams is going to move forward. We are going to spoil the result here so if you don’t want to know stop reading.
You have been warned, in the end we know the full 8 teams that will be present for the main event for the 20th adn 21st of April. Those team will compete in a single elimination bracket in BO3 format, except the grand final which will be a BO5. Here is the teams : Professors, Dirty Lake and the Boys, The Chefs, Indecisive, Press Tab, Flow State, What If and The Hive.
If you want to have all the details about the tournaments and match, you can get on the toornament page.
A few thing worth mentioning is Professors absolutely crushed the even with a perfect 7-0 scoreline consolidating their place as a favorite for the main event. I was also super impressed by Flow State showing ending 2nd of the Swiss round, such an impressive progression from a month ago. In regards of DLAB they had to go through a tough Saturday with the power outage in Canada Lauber was not able to play for first 3 match but after Lauber came back they have been undefeated. Will it be the event that DLAB finally get a crown for themselves we will have to see.
A bit of data
We had 71 matches played during the week-end, once again it’s a small sample size in a very specific environment so we always have to look at the data through that prism but it still interesting to see what top player prioritize or not. Here the pick and ban graph.
So we still have the usual culprit at the top of the chart in terms of tanks with Kwang, Riktor, Steel and Rampage but Drongo have soared to get a top position which usually we don’t see that clear prioritization of a carry. It was interesting to see that some teams where even first picking Drongo which was super wild to me before this event.
Other than that the META did not evolve that much compare to previous event, we are still heavily targeting Argus through first ban phase, and LtBelica is still is the top picks due to her flexible nature. Assassins are still under-represented.
There is some experimentation going on though, with some Morigesh, Fey in the midlane, Countess being brought in the Jungle, even Revenant got picked once but the META seems kinda stall and I wonder if Grim patch will manage to shack things up a bit.
On the winrate part a few interesting thing to not. First Argus at 40% only, so is the small mage really that OP. It seems in comp setting he was not and maybe became a bait during the draft phase. I have to make the joke once again I can’t help it, Dekker still not 50% winrate, and it’s not even close at 26%. I still believe she is a comfort pick for many to be safe but in my opinion if you don’t play aggressive with Dekker there is better option since Dekker falls off later when it comes to impact.
On the good winrate side, we see Phase surging at 78% which is the best support win rate and she got played a decent amount of time. Probably an answer to the prioritization towards Riktor since she make Riktor support have a hard time. Also Kallari, 90% winrate, which show that in the hands of top players she is a strong menace that have a huge impact on the games.
On the bottom side, we see that yeah we tried Countess, Morigesh, Fey, Iggy but none of those pick seems to perform at all in the current Meta. It feels like Midlaners are going to remain stuck on Belica, Gideon and Howitzer.