Name: Harikrishnan Sreekumaran
Location: West Lafayette, IN
Posts: 1336
Since I was mildly jobless and lacked motivation to do anything actually productive, I decided to do a write-up on the upcoming
CTF draft cup. This is primarily intended for the (nonexistent) Europeans and other miscellaneous organisms out there who might be interested in the cup and yet lack the background info.
The teams were picked yesterday and quite unusually for draft cups, the picking went super smooth. So first off kudos to the admin team for having their shit down. Hopefully this goes through to the actual running of the tournament as well.
Overall the teams look incredibly even as you would expect. Picking a winner is going to be a tough one. There are certainly some odd combinations where captains went for picking well known players at the cost perhaps of position play. So it will be very interesting to see what chemistry the teams can develop in the the week they have to prepare for the cup.
Team Breakdown
Captain - sdahaghi - offense - quad gaming
kgb - high d - dfm
staind - high/flag d - 8X
avenged - offense - xUx
doc - ?? - xUx
Solid team with an extremely heavy defense. Kgb as usual will be expected to hold high/mid and rape everyone's face with the shaft. Oddly sean picked staind as his second defensive player. Staind usually plays high d for speechless and is probably one of the top 5 high d players in america, but with kgb on the team I expect staind will take over flag d. This will be an interesting transition to watch out for. The team also has 2 good attackers in sean and avenged.
Captain - mrgreen - flagd/offense - beam
viju - highd/mid/allround superstar - EG
allmental - offense - beam
ziel - flag d/offense - c9
kwong - flag d - xUx
This is a team that is going to be hard to predict. The team has players who are all individually very good. The key thing here will be the positions. Mrgreen usually plays flag d. However ziel, who doesn't have as much experience with ql ctf as he does with ql duel, has so far mostly played flag d for the few games he played with c9. So I expect ziel to play flag d with viju doing his usual thing (this being general mayhem for the opponents) at high/mid/support. Allmental and mrgreen on offense should be a good combination, especially given that the two played on a few teams together for a fair while. Another thing to keep in mind will be allmental's ping disadvantage although one hopes he's used to it by now. The presence of kwong on the team might become important if ziel is absent.
Captain - adrenaline - offense - ILL
brick - high d - quad gaming
effortless - flagd - dfm
wonko - offense - nx.
funeralhat - ?? - xUx
One of the few teams where the captain opted for picking position players at the cost of giving up bigger names, it remains to be seen if this strategy will pay off. Having said that, both brick and effortless have played for some high profile teams and their defensive combination should be a very good one. And the two offensive players, adrenaline and yours truly have also played together quite a bit although not so much in ctf. So you would expect some good chemistry out of this squad.
Captain - samer - flag/high d - ILL
flysher - offense - dfm
swooped - offense - dfm
gwc - flag d - EG
alterik - ?? - km?
Samer made 2 arguably flawless (alright I just couldn't resist) picks in flysher and swooped, since that assured him a top notch offensive pairing who both play for the same clan, namely dfm. However, offsetting this is the fact that his choices for 3rd pick were somewhat restricted. Although gwc plays for EG, I don't think he's in good shape ctf wise. More importantly both samer and gwc are flag d players usually. So it'll be interesting to see how the defensive combo plays out.
Captain - cdogg - flag d/ offense?? - ??
id - offense - EG
jones - high d - c9
zero4 - flag d/offense?? - c9
eisenkreuz (knossos) - offense - ??
Most people will consider this team a favorite to win the tournament. It certainly has the names for it in id who is arguably the best offense player in the continent, jones (and his railgun which makes for half a player in and of itself), zero4 and knossos, not to mention cdogg who himself is no slouch. Everyone on this squad has a wealth of experience from the q3 days. However, there are going to be some positional match up issues for this team in my opinion, mostly revolving around the flag d spot. I expect z4 to play flag on a few maps with cdogg or knossos running offense with id but this is by no means assured.
Captain - cfebns(stunt) - high d - 8X
rapha - flag d/offense? - sk
sparks - flag d/offense? - ??
eminence - offense - 8X
sanity - offense - ??
Once again a team with a wealth of big names, and once again with positions being unclear. I expect stunt to play high/mid d with eminence running offense. It remains to be seen if rapha will play flag d leaving sparks to run o, or if it will be the other way around. Either way the players are all adaptive enough to pull this combo off, so it's essentially going to come down to team play and I certainly expect their team play to be quite good with rapha to count on to stay organized and keep things calm.
Captain - tucker - high d - ??
dahang - offense - EG
clock - offense - c9
blatrix - flag d - 8X
bentley - offense? - ??
This is a team that on paper looks extremely good. Dahang/clock would on paper be a solid offense combo with clock running flag while dahang does tons and tons of damage and timing every thing as usual. On the defensive side blatrix has a wealth of experience on flag d playing for speechless, while tucker almost exclusively plays high d. However, according to (probably untrue) rumors dahang and clock do not get along well. Also in my (completely limited) experience, both blatrix and tucker tend to panic a bit and need lots of support from the offense to keep their slates clean. It will also be interesting to see if the ex-lolz player bentley actually makes an appearance in the games.
Captain - ckz - high d? - xUx
instin - flag d - xUx
icelore - offense - 8X
rapture - offense? - xUx
fiend - flag d - c9?
Possibly an underdog in the tourney, the team has decent players in every position but nobody really stands out with the exception of icelore perhaps. The question for this team really will be, can instin's hax and ckz's shaky connection carry this team through?
Predictions and stuff
Team Evasion wins ez and wonko is the mvp. No really, thats exactly whats going to happen.
Out of the other teams, the best will be team thundercats with staind and kgb raping defence and sean providing the occasional cap. (This however is terrible news for the viewers since all their games will be extremely boring and defensive, and if scotsman is casting the camera will stay on kgb for 90% of the time and we will all be bored to death watching him shaft). Teams Iam and cmd will vie for 3rd - 4th places.
There will be a massive argument between slasher and scotsman as to who gets to cast the tournament, and at the end of this shitfest slasher will challenge scotsman to a duel to demonstrate his quake live experience which scotsman will lose -10 to 50 thereby raging and instantly teleporting (oops) to slasher's computer to pull all of his hair off in revenge. Djwheat will then make an appearance bitchslapping both of them and casting the tournament where he will spend all his time talking about zergrushes and koreans who sell fruit resulting in everyone on ESR calling him a douche (again).
Least I sure hope it goes that way.
Clock is an idiot.
Yea I know that makes no sense. He probably didn't even decide the maps. But since this is ESR what does that matter ay?
![shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann](/files/avatars/2007/51852-shaftwhore.gif "shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann"){kind=small}
superiority
