LOUD was 22/1 at Ascent, playing the comp they mastered a long time, with good executions and setups that made the comp really powerful for a long time and played the same way from a lot of teams throughout the year because it was effective.
This year LOUD tried new things at Ascent like using Viper and Skye. It was obvious that the LOUD playstyle at Ascent was so used and studied that they had to change, people studied even the shampoo Saadhak was using before playing the map (haha).
With the change, they made DRX sweat, winning 13-8 with DRX asking for timeouts to try and adapt this new playstyle but it wasn't enough and they lost.
Here comes FNATIC, they did a great job studying and playing against such a different composition and giving LOUD their second loss on the map. (FNC good).
I like this from the teams, creating new compositions and playstyles, like Vision Strikes, Optic, and LOUD.
This year is promising, I think LOUD will make their comps and play styles even better and more teams will do the same (I see NAVI trying new stuff too, even tho it's not working that well yet but they can get there).
This is one thing I like about Valorant, the different things you can do in the game, it's almost never the same and is not boring at all. Not only the opponent team but the public can be surprised by something new/crazy by some team at any moment.
(btw: I hope Riot puts 1 champion ban for each team so we can have more types of variations and strategies).
Discord