The Canadian Nationals announced earlier in the year is a twice-annual tournament to crown the best team in Canada with a $15k prize pool on the line. A series of online qualifiers were played to determine which teams would join the winners of the Canadian Circuit in this tournament before the online portion took place over the following four weekends.
Team Canada went in as the clear favourites, however, during the one game in which their captain, FoxA, was away at the DreamHack Valencia tournament, they suffered a huge 6-1 defeat to Grizzlys setting up a tense final playday in which four separate teams; Team Potatoes, Team Canada, Northern Alpacas and Grizzlys, were all in the running for a spot in the Grand Final.
Eventually both Northern Alpacas and Team Canada pulled off clear 6-0 victories on the final playday to book their place at the LAN Final in Montreal with both teams effectively drawing in the leaderboard
The final standings at the end of the Canadian Nationals Season 1 Online Season via Liquipedia
This set up a final between the two favourites going into the season:
Team Canada: FoxA, Whiskerzz, EhhDannn, P3NG and EvLWaffle
The Team Canada lineup for the Canadian Nationals final
This team is made up of a number of well-known names including FoxA, a pro player for Cloud9 and the 4th highest rated player so far in NA Pro League, and his ex-teammate, EvlWaffle, who was also briefly a pro player for SK this season. The team brings an overwhelming amount of fragging power directed by FoxA which makes them a real force in the Canadian scene.
Northern Alpacas: PrinceOwly, joeeee, Jimzzz, Snugglin and Krusher
The Northern Alpacas lineup for the Canadian Nationals final
Previously known as SetToDestroyX the core of this team lost in straight maps to Team Canada during the Canadian Circuit LAN Finals last February to finish in 2nd place. The team has since lost their only ex-Pro player of Kuush, who made the Season 1 LAN semi-Finals with Team Orbit alongside KiXSTAr, Yung and Kanine in what is a huge blow to the team, however, seeing Team Canada fall so easily to Grizzlys would have given them hope that they can take the title this time around.
Map 1 on Villa was always a toss-up going in as, while Team Canada is the more experienced players, it is unlikely that they would’ve practised that much as a team on Villa which gives the underdogs of Northern Alpacas a huge opportunity to shock the crowd and take an initial lead.
Team Canada managed to do as expected winning the first two rounds with almost no opposition before a power cut on Team Canada’s side caused a 10-minute delay allowing Northern Alpacas to regroup and replan their attack and bring it back to 2-2 after four rounds thanks to two near flawless games. The rest of the map effectively came down to whether FoxA managed to frag out with FoxA almost single-handedly winning 3 rounds including 2 separate 4ks. A number of close 1v1s gave the Alpacas a few rounds before FoxA finally closed it out 6-4
Map 2 seemed much more confident for Team Canada, or at least for FoxA once again, as he pulled out the best singular performance we have seen in the entirety of the Canadian leagues so far and proved exactly why he is a pro player. He managed to, in just 8 rounds to get a total of 17 kills to take the map 6-2 and the final 2-0.
FoxA was the undisputed best player of this match getting an overall series k/d of 29/8, which was more than double the kills of P3NG, the next highest fragger, and also included a double kill on Tachanka. Furthermore, as the lead player of the number 1 team in Canada, is clearly the Canadian Nationals Season 1 MVP!
FoxA playing Tachanka on the penultimate round of the finals
The next season of the Canadian Nationals kicks off in September to find two teams to join the top 6 this season with the online season taking place from October 6th to the 28th on the Official northernarena Twitch account