(Banner image: Ubisoft/Kirill B.)
Next week, the Six Sweden Major will see the top four teams in each region meet to compete for the global title.
The tournament is split up into two parts, with the group stage taking place from Monday to Wednesday, before the top two teams from each group progress to the three-day playoffs over the weekend.
Starting with Group A, let’s take a look at the numbers that will drive the games starting on Monday.
The Teams
- FaZe Clan
- Oxygen Esports
- Chiefs Esports Club
- Rogue
The most important factor about Group A is that out of the three teams at this event that haven’t played globally this year, two of them are in this group; Chiefs and Rogue.
These teams aren’t completely new, however, as Chiefs’ Ethan Picard attended the Season 10 Pro League Finals and SI2020 with Wildcard, while the entirety of Rogue excluding Kevin "Prano" Pranowitz has appeared at previous global LANs.
This includes Rogue’s lone Brit, Leon "LeonGids" Giddens, who is the most successful PC player in the group. He won two R6 Minor events and made it to the semi-finals of both the Paris and Raleigh Majors while on the British Team Secret roster.
Just behind him is Oxygen’s Gabriel "LaXInG" Mirelez, who on PC also won an R6 Minor, made it to a Pro League grand-final in Season 5 of the Pro League, and a Six Invitational semi-final in 2019.
Head-to-Heads
The highest-profile meeting between two teams saw the FaZe Clan organization lose to Oxygen’s predecessor, Team Reciprocity, 1-2 at the 2019 Six Invitational. However, this included just four out of the current 10 players.
Ethan also previously met LaXInG, Davide "FoxA" Bucci, and Franklyn "VertcL" Cordero during the 2020 Six Invitational, where Reciprocity beat Wildcard 2-0.
With such long histories, there have been multiple meetings of individual players. The most notable of these was at the 2019 DreamHack Valencia Minor. Here, VertcL’s Rogue beat AceeZ’s Looking For Org in the grand-final, with LFO having also beaten Leonardo "Astro" Luis and Gabriel "cameram4n" Hespanhol’s FaZe in the semi-final.
VertcL had also beaten his future teammates of FoxA and LaXInG in the quarter-final, while LFO and Rogue had met earlier in the tournament during the group stage as well.
As well as 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 which one can take this performance global.
The Maps
As 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 the way the BR6 League counts their points, FaZe Clan had been locked into an Elite Six Cup spot since week two of the stage. As well as this, five out of their 11 maps during the Elite Six were just for seeding in the Major.
This meant that much of the season meant very little to them, giving them an excellent opportunity to save some strats and not show everything they had on their best maps.
As such, you should take the stats below with a pinch of salt, as FaZe are the most likely to surprise us with something completely new on the day out of all 16 teams in attendance.
This stage, FaZe has played pretty flawlessly, losing just four maps; Coastline against FURIA and Oregon against Santos and oNe twice. As well as this being by far their worst map, they also only seemingly pulled it out against much lower tied opponents or in seeding matches, meaning that it is likely a map they hadn’t prepared and went to in order to not show any viable strats on the other maps.
Oxygen Esports
The NA League format means we only have seven maps worth of data here, which is restricted further as they, like FaZe Clan, failed to qualify for the last Major.
With so few maps played, it’s hard to take anything away from these numbers. However, it’s notable that neither Villa nor Bank were played. These two are the least played maps in the NAL this stage.
OxG previously attempted Villa three times at the Six Invitational, losing all three times, while Bank only joined the pool at the beginning of this stage.
Chiefs Esports Club
While we haven’t seen any Australian teams at an event for 21 months, the APAC South league has been the closest of any tournament worldwide, with just three points separating five teams in the 2021 Season leaderboard.
This includes just one point between Chiefs and Invictus -- a roster we’ve seen at both SI21 and the Mexico Major -- making them a good comparison to the Chiefs' level of domestic play, just without the global experience.
The notable thing here is the map pool, as across there 11 maps played during Stage 3, they didn’t compete on Oregon, Clubhouse, or Villa at all. Villa has been played by them extensively in the Oceanic Nationals, as they won three out of four of their pro-tier matchups on the map.
Oregon, meanwhile, is their most banned map, and they took it out of play in 74% of all their APAC South and APAC Playoff matches. Clubhouse is the most common map banned against them at 70% after they won all three games there in prior stages.
Rogue
As the lowest-seeded team here, Rogue had the worst past few months, winning five maps out of the nine played in the EU League.
Once again, Rogue has played five maps, skipping out on Bank and Oregon, with these two being their most common bans. Rogue did play Oregon on two occasions last stage, but lost both against NAVI and Virtus.pro.
Looking at the maps which they did play, the most notable thing here is their defensive record -- it's not good.
This has become somewhat of a EUL-wide theme over the last stage, as Oregon, Bank, Coastline, and Chalet all became attacker favoured, while only 51% of rounds on Villa were won by the defence; a massive fall from it’s usual record.
The lone map which has retained its strong defensive advantage is Kafe, where 68% of rounds were won by the defence across five games played.
Whether this is due to particularly strong attacks or weak defences is likely to determine how well all of the EU rosters fare at this event, and not just Rogue.
As ever, SiegeGG will be covering this tournament in full when it starts next week. For now be sure to check out our pre-event coverage which includes interviews with the participating teams.