Coming back to this when Sentinels wins and qual to Champions.
Fuck y'all haters, Sentinels had subs 3 matches, stop judging from what you've seen.
GG
Three things caused that:
Overall: the Guard should've been able to do better in challengers 2, but they're still a very good team, and with time to prepare for LCQ, I expect them to do pretty well and maybe even make it. If they get directly seeded to Istanbul (possible as well), I don't think they'll be an embarrassment to NA at all.
Three things caused that:
Meta shift - they swapped roles and it frankly didn't work. JonahP couldn't do what Sayaplayer could on entry, Trent and Valyn weren't as comfortable on new roles, and the whole team cohesiveness was off.
Trent. His performance and clutchness just fell of a cliff after iceland and only start approching what it was in stage 1 at the end of the group stage (when it was sadly too late). My best guess is that he got a mental block from always using music to focus, and when that was taken away, he played a lot worse. Now he's practicing without music in general, so it won't be an issue in the future, and I'm sure his performance will start to approach what it used to be (he already had some insane clutches against XSET and NRG).
They were never really dominated for a long period of time. They lost a super close game to Optic (the winners of Masters lemme remind you), then got destroyed by Paper Rex. That was all we saw of them at Iceland. Sure it was dissapointing, but they really only lost one match badly. When they came back for stage two, they instantly faced an on fire 100T while having their new roles, and that obviously didn't work out. Then they played Ghost who were on a heater in the groups (while still having the bad new roles), and they still took a map off of them. Those three games were really the only ones they lost badly. Then they had two extremely close games against XSET and NRG, and after they lost, they were out of stage 2 qualification.
Overall: the Guard should've been able to do better in challengers 2, but they're still a very good team, and with time to prepare for LCQ, I expect them to do pretty well and maybe even make it. If they get directly seeded to Istanbul (possible as well), I don't think they'll be an embarrassment to NA at all.
I personally don't have any hate on Sentinels. It just I don't see any good strat or creative plays. It just purely aim duels and that is not enough considering how other NA teams such as Optic, Xset and 100T have their own strats and plays to counter their enemy. And also, they need to have a change roles or agents like put Tenz on chamber and Kanpeki or Shahzam on the duelist role in certain maps. I believe it can work. Thus, I'm hoping they use this times until August to focus on these thing. Then we all can see their improvements and probably see them qualify for Istanbul.