With the numbers – SiegeGG
Next week, Sex Sweden Major will see the four best teams in each region meet to compete for the global title. The tournament is divided into two parts where the group game takes place from Monday to Wednesday before the two best teams from each group advance to the three-day finals during the weekend.
Starting with group a, let’s take a look at the numbers that will drive the games starting on Monday.
The law
- FaZe clan
- Oxygen Esports
- Chiefs Esports Club
- Villain
The most important factor with Group A is that of the three teams at this event that have not played globally this year, two of them are in this group; Chiefs and Rogue.
However, these teams are not entirely new, as Chiefs Ethan “Ethan” Picard participated in the season 10 finals and SI20 events with Wildcard, while the entire Rogue excluding Kevin “Prano” Pranowitz has appeared on previous global LANs.
This includes Rogue’s lone Briton, Leon “LeonGids” Giddens who is the most successful PC player in the group. He won two R6 Minor events and left both Paris and the Raleigh Majors in the semi-finals while on the UK Team Secret list.
Just behind him is Oxygen’s LaXInG who on PC also won an R6 Minor, went to a Pro League grand final during season 10 and a Six Invitational semifinal 2019.
Head-to-Heads
The most notable meeting between two teams saw the FaZe Clan organization lose to Oxygen’s predecessor, Team Reciprocity, by 1-2 at the Six Invitational 2019. However, this included only four of the current 10 players.
Ethan has also previously met LaXInG, FoxA and VertcL during the 2020 Six Invitational where they managed a single victory between them when Rec beat Wildcard 2-0.
With such a long history, there have been several meetings with individual players. The most notable of these was the 2019 DreamHack Valencia Minor. Here, VertcL’s Rogue beat AceeZ’s Looking For Org in the grand final with LFO who also defeated Astro and cameraman’s FaZe in the semifinals. VertcL had also defeated their future teammates to FoxA and LaXInG in the quarterfinals while LFO and Rogue had met earlier in the tournament also during the group stage.
In addition to being the opening game of the tournament on the main channel, the FaZe Clan vs Oxygen game should be one to watch as both of these teams made a massive comeback to their old heights during this stage. Now it’s time to see who can take this performance globally.
The maps
Since there are no real relevant head-to-heads to look at, let’s look at each team’s strengths during stage 3 of their regional league:
FaZe clan
Due to differences in how the BR6 league counts its points, the FaZe Clan had been locked into an Elite Six Cup spot since week two of the stage. In addition to this, five of their 11 maps under Elite Six were just for seeding in Major. This meant that much of the season meant very little to them, which gave them an excellent opportunity to save some strats and not show everything they had on their best maps.
That means you should take the stats below with a pinch of salt, FaZe is most likely to surprise us with something completely new on the day of all 16 teams present:
This stage, FaZe has played fairly flawlessly and lost only four maps throughout the scene; Coastline against FURIA and Oregon against Santos and one twice. Apart from the fact that this was by far their worst map, they also apparently only pulled it out against opponents with a much lower position or in seeding matches, which means that it is probably a map they had not prepared and went to not show any strats on their other maps.
Oxygen Esports
The NA League format means we only have seven maps with data here, which is further limited as they, like the FaZe Clan, failed to qualify for the final major.
With so few maps played, it’s hard to take anything away from those numbers, but it’s remarkable that neither Villa nor Bank were played. These two are the least played maps in NAL at this stage. OxG previously tried Villa three times at Six Invitational, losing all three times, while Bank only joined the pool at the beginning of this stage.
Chiefs Esports Club
Although we have not seen any Australian teams at an event in 21 months, the APAC South league has been the closest of all tournaments worldwide, with only three points separating five teams on the 2021 top list. This includes just one point between Chiefs and Invictus – a list we’ve seen on both SI21 and Mexico Major – making them a good comparison to Chiefs’ level of domestic play just without the global experience.
The remarkable thing here is the map pool, as 11 maps played during stage 3 did not compete at all at Oregon, Clubhouse or Villa. Villa have played a lot of them in the Oceanic Nationals, where they have won three of four of their professional matches on the map, which shows that it is not a complete dud for them.
Oregon is at the same time their most banned map as they took out of play in 74% of all their APAC South and APAC Playoff matches. The clubhouse is the most common map that is banned against them to 70% after they have won all three matches there in previous steps.
Villain
As the worst seeded team here, Rogue has had the worst in recent months, winning five maps out of the nine played in the EU League.
Once again, Rogue has played five maps and skipped Bank and Oregon with these two as their most common bans. Rogue played Oregon on two occasions last stage but lost to both NAVI and VP.
If you look at the maps they played, the most remarkable thing here is their defensive record. They fought in the defensive half on almost every map. This has become something of an EUL-wide theme during the last stage, as Oregon, Bank, Coastline and Chalet all became attackers favored, while only 51% of the rounds at Villa were won by the defense, a massive fall from the usual record.
The only map that has retained its strong defensive advantage is Kafe, where 68% of the rounds were won by the defense during five games played.
Whether this is due to particularly strong attacks or weak defenses is likely to determine how well all EU lists perform at this event, not just Rogue.
As always, SiegeGG will cover this tournament in its entirety when it starts next weekend. Now be sure to check out our coverage before the event which includes interviews with the participating teams.