The Question Marks - IEM Cologne Major Preview

These teams are The Question Marks, so named as to accurately label our mixed feelings on them. All of these teams have something to prove, at least to us, and we’re not 100% where they should land - but we’re certainly not high on at least one of them.

We’re breaking up our Major previews into sections, with the stage one teams and one other (no prizes for guessing) being done individually, to give you the fullest overview of the Major we possibly can before things kick off.

The first team with a giant question mark over their head is the headline team of this article, Team Liquid. Are Team Liquid doomed forever? Why are they so awful? Will they ever try to fix it? Why are they here (they finessed the system)?

We’ll try to answer all of those questions as we go along, and maybe a few more. First off, we’ll start with what we like about Team Liquid.

…now, onto what we don’t like.

Only joking! Of course, there’s some redeeming factors. Well, there’s at least a redeeming factor. malbsMd has been an excellent addition to this team, at least as an individual.

He’s having excellent impact in a bit of a mixed role that is sort of star-rifler-ish and sort of support-ish. He’s very aggressive and gets traded a lot, which is typical of some of the best star riflers in the world, on T side, but is a util-throwing anchor on CT side. He comes up as a support in our data, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that. He’s very supportive on CT side and a bit more of a playmaker on T.

That’s fine, but it leads into one of the downsides - the roles don’t really make all that much sense.

Both malbsMd and EliGE are super aggro and want to playmake, where one should really be a more dedicated trade-fragger. When you look at say, Vitality, you have flameZ who is mega aggro and mezii as a trade fragger, ZywOo close by, and ropz who also trades. apEX does the rest of the aggro work.

Liquid’s two best players want to do the same thing, and they don’t have anyone anywhere near as reliable as mezii to trade, ultimate isn’t ZywOo (to put it extremely politely) and siuhy doesn’t entry as much. If malbs or EliGE don’t make a play, there’s nobody to clean it up.

The idea is that NAF and ultimate are the ropz and ZywOo, but there’s no real mezii type. malbs is an aggressive piece and would be wasted there, and you don’t want EliGE out of star roles either really - but if there’s no clean-up crew, you just have a mess.

It’s affecting EliGE, who is looking worse and worse by the day, and ultimate and NAF are just terrible at the moment. NAF has been stinking the place out for a while, and there’s really no excuse any more.

ultimate, as we know, isn’t great. He’s at least gotten a bit better recently, but that’s largely because they’re playing worse opposition.

And losing.

Look at the names around him in our rankings.

He throws next to no utility on the CT side, is uber-passive on the T side, and weirdly aggressive on the CT side. None of these are completely out of line, but you’d expect a lot more output from someone who plays like this. He plays like broky on the T side and molodoy on the CT side, and is still kinda mediocre.

So other than having one and a half good players, no idea how to use them, an underperforming AWPer and a washed lurker with an IGL who looks completely lost on finding a way to make everything work, yeah, they’re great.

And yet, one still harbours some hope. We know NAF has been good before.EliGE is a ridiculously talented player. malbsMd is a workhorse with a flashy skillset and deserves better. siuhy made a Major final with less talent than this. ultimate has shown flashes of being a tier one AWPer (occasionally).

The players themselves aren’t awful on paper, it just doesn’t fit together in the server whatsoever. And seemingly, no version of Liquid in the past five years does.

They’re a question mark because there’s a world where they can be good, it’s just almost certainly not this one.

MIBR are next up, and we have question marks because in the limited data we have, they’re… really good?

At CAC they’ve been beating everyone they come up against, and insani has been a force to be reckoned with. In the previous tournament we have data for, he had an absolutely crazy duel swing, even if the impact wasn’t there to go along with it.

kl1m has also made a name for himself on loan from G2. MIBR raised eyebrows when they too added some European steel to their Brazilian flair, but kl1m has been a hit so far. Again, sample size is small, but there’s plenty to be encouraged about both looking at his numbers and just watching the kid play.

If MIBR are to do well, it’ll be off the back of those two. insani has always been a livewire capable of completely blowing a map open in the first game, and then going missing in the second, but his highs are absolutely extraordinary. He’s one of the two aggro pieces in their team, with kl1m a primary refragger (this isn't reflected properly in the viz right now, so you'll have to trust us) and venomzera even more aggressive than insani. The reason this is better than Liquid is simple - Liquid’s two best players were the aggro ones, whereas kl1m is definitely the second best player on this team and better than ultimate. It’s that easy. If Liquid had a refragger as good as their spacetakers, they’d be an infinitely better team.

MIBR being an excellent Anubis team is both a blessing and a curse - it’s a great map to be good at presuming you can get it, but a lot of teams will happily ban it against you especially in second phase, as MIBR do pick Inferno a lot. If they can get onto Anubis and Inferno they will hurt you, and banning Dust 2 is a great place to start in the modern meta. A lot of teams favour D2 right now.

They might be decent. They might be mediocre. We don’t have enough data.

But we do know that insani/kl1m is a naughty duo who demand to be watched.

The final question mark team is SINNERS, and some of that is because we haven’t seen that much of them, and some of it is because we think they might be decent, but have no real basis for that.

Not loads of data to go off of, but this is encouraging.

beastik looks like a very solid player in very tough roles, and SHOCK too - these two have been on this team since the dawn of time (well, COVID times, which feels like an aeon ago) and are clearly comfortable in what they have to do. This doesn’t look like an outlier performance either - these two can mix it in tough roles.

The stars are doing okay with the resources rather than mindblowing, which gives a sort of ‘PARIVISION-y’ feel to them. Solid foundations with mixed output at the top, with obviously the big elephant in the room being that MoDo isn’t as good as Jame, or anywhere close.

Again, small sample size, but this is kind of just his level against top teams. He’s a bit of a pubstomper in tier two and three, but can’t do it in the upper echelons. Nothing to be ashamed of - he’s not the first, and won’t be the last.

If SINNERS are to go anywhere, they need him to finally make the leap. He was a promising player not too long ago but hasn’t quite connected the dots, but if he can finally do so, they’ll be a huge threat to the middle tiers here.

In fairness, he probably wasn’t helped by the lack of a real pack in these games. There’s two and a half lurkers here, leaving just stressarN and MoDo to roam as a pair sometimes. That’s not going to get you very far when one wants to go forward and one wants to sit still.

Something to watch out for here.

We’ve truly no idea where any of these three teams will land in Cologne, and quite literally only time will tell.

We could not be more excited for this Major. Truly.