Shanghai Masters

[got_quiet]

This weekend was a friendly show tournament among the Chinese OWL teams. It was a good way to get a sense of the new rosters for 2021 while we wait for OWL to start later next year. I was feeling pretty ill and stuffed with brain fog when I watched the vods, so my takeaways are a little half baked. Comps are pretty divey and Tracer/Ball appear to be staples. There was some double shield in the SHD/GZC match but Winston showed up just as often, and got a lot of work done. All the matches were close score wise but in both the KOTH maps were pretty lopsided, which indicates to me more that attack is hard in this meta more than anything that the power levels between teams are wider than the score shows.

Here's the Bilibili page where you can see all the matches: https://live.bilibili.com/81

Some takeaways for the teams (with spoilers):

Guangzhou Charge vs Shanghai Dragons

 

Charge look pretty good. Tankline is the same as last year and still pretty solid but not super explosive. DPS line is looking solid with Eileen still fucking and the new additions in Choisehwan and MYKaylee looks pretty good. The support line is a bit of a question mark. I like Kariv but his decision making sometimes makes me scratch my head. Chara and Shu were a good duo and I don't know if we've gotten an upgrade. Overall the match looked like Charge hasn't gotten worse with the new roster, but it hasn't gotten better either. The team still cannot break past the Dragons, and the match reminded me of that awful month or so when they were just getting farmed by Dragons in the 2020 season. Dragons are looking strong. Fate looked absolutely monstrous on Winston and made me hopeful that in the regular season he will still be around so I can see a lot of monkey play. LeeJaeGon is still crazy. Fleta is still insane. Having both Izayaki and Molly is pretty insane. It seems Shanghai will still be the team to beat in 2021.

Hangzhou Spark vs Chengdu Hunters

It's hard to judge this match because both teams often look competitive between each other but then fail against stronger opponents. Hunters looked like a bit of a mess early in the match and then picked up later on, mainly because Leave was carrying. Kaneki had some massive pulse bomb moments, especially in route 66, but he also just straight inted multiple times so I don't know if he's going to be very reliable. His YOLO energy definitely fits with the Hunters brand at leaset. Ameng didn't get much playtime, even though it's a ball meta, which means there's a good chance he's going to be a bench boy for Ga9a, but it may be a map dependent thing too. But I can't emphasize how much Leave clicked heads in this match enough. Nothing about HZS really stuck out to me, mostly because of the fatigue and stomach discomfort on my part, haha. Architect has got his starting spot locked in it seems, and the team looks solid enough. Like Dragons they almost got reverse swept but in the map 5 KOTH they dominated, even with a pretty egregious c9 on command center. That only ended up costing them a few percentage points in the end.

After watching it's hard to say how the Chinese teams will match up with the rest of the league. Last year made pretty clear that relative positioning in a region doesn't always translate easily to the broader competitive field. I mainly watched to see if the changes in the Charge roster fucked them over too hard, but they look like they will survive the shuffle.

Spark and Dragons will be playing each other "tomorrow" in China time so like a few hours from this post I guess. They were supposed to play last night but cancelled due to technical issues. I think it'll be an enlightening game, and tell me whether or not the controlled chaos of the Spark/Hunters game was an indication of weakness or just how the meta looks right now.