The surprisingly multinational Americas Minor kicks off on Tuesday with eight teams fighting for two spots in the IEM Katowice Major Main Qualifier, and one more team headed to the Minor playoff for one last chance to advance to Main Qualifier. The North American region was allocated six out of the eight qualifying spots, but U.S. and Canada-based teams will find themselves outnumbered here against challengers from the South. There are four teams here with almost entirely Brazilian rosters (19 Brazilian players and one token Argentine, NikoM for TeamOne), and finally one South African squad that is currently playing in Texas. Let's go over a few bold and not-so-bold predictions for the event.
NRG is a top 10 team in the world and is far and away more talented and experienced as a roster than every other squad here. On paper, they should easily advance. However, that was exactly what we said about them last time at the FACEIT Minor back in July, where they failed to advance after losing bo3s to CompLexity and eUnited. This time will be different though, as they've had some great results in the six months since then. They won two international LANS (IEM Shangahi and SuperNova CS:GO Malta), took second at another (cs_summit 3), and placed top four at two others (ESL One New York and StarSeries i-League Season 6). No other team at this event has attended that many international LANs, much less matched those kinds of successful results. Those LAN victories will calm their nerves and give them the confidence and poise to handle the opposition here. NRG should advance comfortably.
eUnited has shuffled through a handful of players in recent months, but I think this current iteration actually makes sense. dazzle is a complete player, so having him back in the starting five is definitely a good thing for the team. He has been a part of this core roster for years, so there should be no issue with roles or comfort zones bringing him back. That being said, it's hard not to feel bad for Relyks. He is also a really likeable and earnest player, and the constant cutting and shuffling eUnited has done isn't going to feel nice for whatever player gets left out. The move to cut Relyks and bring back dazzle makes sense though, in a way that benching dazzle in the first place never did. And going back before that, Cooper- and FNS are both smart pickups, even if the ways they were done was questionable. FNS is the perennial "veteran IGL" who can be added to a roster to guide and help the younger up and coming players grow and reach new heights, and that's exactly what is going to happen here: eUnited is going to advance as the second team to qualify for the Major.
This South African lineup has been around for a while but started turning heads in November when they took second at Dreamhack Open Winter, where they beat G2 and Optic before losing to ENCE in the final. The double elimination format of the playoffs here means that they could still face NRG later in the playoffs even though they are in the same group. But as long as they take care of business against the teams they should beat, Bravado should be able to clinch the third spot at this event to go to the Minor PLayoff.
Karrigan is a great IGL and talent-wise he is a step above the majority of the players in attendance at this LAN. He also has yet to play an official round with any of his teammates on Envy. Even great teams take time to gel together, and a bootcamp isn't the easiest way to add a complete stranger as IGL to a roster. Nifty and JDM are both meteoric talents who can either shine brightly or crash out at any time, sometimes doing both during the same round. But at this point reltuC is literally 30 years old, and everyone knows by now that it spells Cutler backwards, so he doesn't have the element of surprise on his side anymore. He's still fragging decently, but is never going to be the player to carry a team, which is what this team actually needs. Drone feels like a younger, more raw version of Cutler, so that doesn't really help things either. This team needs to make a few moves before it will be ready to take the leap.
INTZ is another team that have made recent roster transitions but will only have a bootcamp to prepare with the new team members. They added Destiny and yeL to replace felps, who went to MIBR, and moved horvy to the bench. Losing someone as skilled as felps is always going to be a tough transition, but Destiny is widely seen as one of the handful of hyper-talented young Brazilian players who could be next to rise from that local scene and make a splash internationally. Meanwhile, yeL is a veteran player who will contribute more than horvy and bring some balance to the lineup. Look for INTZ to catch people off guard and possibly make a deep run if the playoff draw works in their favor.
FURIA and TeamOne are the only two teams with no players with previous Major experience. Contrast that with Envy, who has by far the most Major experience, four different players having attending a combined 25 Majors (karrigan accounts for 12 of those). I think FURIA and TeamOne are both good teams with some talented players, with kscerato on FURIA in particular being someone to watch out for to have a huge impact. While a lack of experience alone isn't a dealbreaker, neither of these teams have enough firepower to advance.
SHOOWTiME and zqkS are both players veteran CS fans should be familiar with, but the rest of the squad is unfortunately unknown to me. And that's not a knock on them - a simple HLTV perusal shows they have good results against other Brazilian CS teams. I simply don't follow Brazilian CS closely enough to comment accurately on this team. I could totally see them make a fool of me by beating INTZ and Bravado in groups, but I'm going to make a conservative prediction and say that they won't advance.