SK Gaming are the new champions of the Warcraft 3 Champions League after defeating Meet Your Makers in last weekend’s LAN finals in Cologne. SK have waited ten long seasons for this victory.
It is surprising that despite having had superstars like Fredrik “MaDFroG” Johansson or Yoan “ToD” Merlo on the roster, SK hadn’t won a WC3L LAN finals before. The team won the second season of the competition, but it took place online entirely.
History was against SK, along with the fact that the twelfth season of the WC3L was arguably the toughest so far. But it was also one of the strongest lineups SK has ever seen and clearly the strongest one this season.
The good fortune of SK’s WC3 squad comes from the fact that the Counter-Strike team has been a disappointment for over six months. The team needed success and the management was willing to pay a high price for it. A squad of some of the best European Warcraft 3 players was strengthened with three Koreans that took World Elite to the title in Season XI.
In a competition where four or more different players players on one team often take part in a match, the depth of the squad is the key. It is the lack of it that took down Four Kings, despite them having ToD and Manuel “Grubby” Schenkuizen. It was not enough depth in World Elite and Meet Your Makers in this season’s WC3L that did not allow them to stop SK Gaming.
When WE and MYM gave SK their best shot and were already out of ammo, SK would still have super strong players up their sleeve. This is what happened in the upper bracket semi final against World Elite and in the upper bracket final against Meet Your Makers. Both matches ended 3:2.
Fighting for second place was all Meet Your Makers and World Elite could do at the finals. MYM beat the Chinese team with as much as 4:1, with only XiaoFeng “Sky” Li winning a match against MYM’s FoCuS. In the final, MYM lost to SK with a 3:1 score.
The outsiders of the competition were the Koreans from the Beijing eSports team. They would be called extremely strong compared to most teams in the world, but not SK, WE and MYM. BeT only managed to win one sub-match against MYM in the lower bracket.
WC3L Season XII final standings:
1) SK Gaming - €5,000
2) Meet Your Makers - €3,000
3) World Elite (title defenders) - €1,500
4) Beijing eSports Team - €500
