really great ranked player, just like KEN. He is better than Gyen but it's his first pro Valorant experience probably will take time to get good like KEN.

Scarz losing both pistol and bonus on map 3 killed them. Absolute astrocious performance from Zepher, he shoud never touch Yoru again

mods, Fancy won 2-0

Pretty good match, Crest should easily qualify back to Challengers after this. Their new roster looks good, Yutaro kinda needs to work on his entrying but aside from that looked decent out there.

he heard you talking shit

Ken isn't fluent, no idea about Jan but he is a pro in the scene for longer, seems like mix comms tho most of it is in Japanese.

Sengoku kinda lacks firepower this season after Jinboong leaving. Their players got outaimed every round and they couldn't deal with the Yoru util, the tps kept confusing them.

He should have been in tier1 ages ago, he is easily the best Filipino player outside of Invy. RRQ, TS and even PRX should be looking to pick him up, I never thought about him going to Zeta or DFM since Zeta never takes non-Japanese players otherwise or DFM since he doesn't fit them role wise. He might be lazy but he is clearly one of the best players in apac, his fluency will be a problem if DFM is the only team wanting to pick him up but I doubt it.

Yoshiii is the least problem of Scarz, they just cannot figure out the roles to play ffs. Yoshiii is by far their most consistent player despite swapping roles every year and was the reason why they made it so far so last split, they need to get someone else instead of Zepher, he is becoming more and more of a liability the longer the season goes on, you cannot qualify to Ascension with a bad tier2 duelist. The language barrier isn't that much of a problem when you watch them play, Yoshiii and LOB are the players to make the least amount of individual mistakes when you watch them play.

Rooting for Crest, I love their new roster. Yutaro is an actual ranked demon, people say Gyen is a ranked demon when he doesn't even have the same good stats as Yutaro has lmao.
Great roster building by the management, roster is only a week old but they have so much firepower, they should be able to beat out Sengoku.

2-1 for Crest

Only Sakurai is a weakness for them but you have four tier1 talents in KEN, Bazz, Jan and Yutaro, it's really great scouting and roster building done by Crest. Also looks like Yutaro is really half Japanese, I did suspect it but I wasn't sure because he only talks in Russian and English in streams, even when he plays with Okinawa he rarely talks in Japanese.

BCS trolled their roster a bit, Neal X is such a bad signing at that point put Flora on duelist instead. KEN getting two extremely good teammates in Jan and Yutaro is crazy, they might becomes absolute favourites for the next split, both are insanely talented players especially Yutaro if he unlocks his potential.

is there any reason why Jade hasn't been poached by the better GC teams yet? feels like she could easily be part of a future EMEA GC super team

Hands actually played for RRX before this week in this split. He is playing with Sakura a ton I expect him to have been poached by BCS, it's the reason why RRX had to replace him with Kapi who is really not great.

EX-FAV players got signed by Delight also, so they didn't play playoffs lmao

RRX has potential since they finally fixed roles. Considering they are swapping comps every match literally they haven't really taken it seriously while winning most matches.

Btw Crest really can just try getting Flora and Malinho. Would be really great pieces for them, in general scouting is so easy with so many players being lft rn.

they are actually replacing the players it seems in premier, they might come back later but it's almost impossible to qualify for split3 since there is only one slot for Advance teams even if they get far.

pick up the pieces of other teams, get Yutaro in. He was subbing in for one week for Satoshi in RRX btw. They have been trolling comps in premier even tho it's the only way to qualify for Challengers in JP.

Okinawa also is super toxic and has allegations of being racist to others. He geniunely bans people for making twitch clips of him insulting ranked players or him showing his awful behaviour on stream. There is tons of reasons why Meiy and other people like Ken had to stop queueing with him in ranked, he is a pure PR disaster for orgs and has shown zero maturity or willingness to grow as a human being. He is 18 and has still time to get past his awful character but he hasn't shown a lot of change as a person and that's all besides his bans in other games or cheating allegations.

yeah XQQ isn't the goat when Junior had been praised a ton for the 2022 run as a Assistant coach and the LCQ run when he was Headcoach of Zeta. It's kinda hilarious how fucking shit the two Japanese VCT teams in trying to get actual good coaches, like the tier2 teams in VCJ just have way better coaches than them, Riddle in Vorz, Murash with ate.
XQQ, Carlao, Melofovia and NorthernLights are all frauds who didn't do shit in years and have been terrrible ever since the start of the VCT partnership.

He is getting his one-way ticket to being dropped after this match. Insane amount of mistakes, every game he plays.

they need to immediately make moves, kick Governor and Ban and get more players who can shoot back.

it was a really great match to watch. They are super well coached, when hatto and ayuta later join they will be super scary to play against

hatto and ayuta are also coming, they are so back holy

Unironically this match was really high lvl

it sucks that him and ayuta are too young to play, in premier they were both by far their best players. But the coaching of ZETA actually looks good, the kids played so well together

damn the magic he had done with them is crazy. Reject didn't even play that bad and won both pistols

I like their aggression, they are so proactive and play with fundamentals. Also bunny plays so much better when he isn't inting every round, his mechanics are great but he trolls so often

why does the coaching of the Academy look better than their vct team lmao

is he really 15?

wait both of Zeta's best academy players are 15??? There is no fucking way

less of a commitment issue and more of people working on a project they have no technical idea about how it is supposed to be done.

they didn't wait for Ascension, the roster was finished before that. They would have played LOB he was trialing with them and doing good before he got injured and couldn't play for a month properly afterwards.

he is kinda like the og gyen, also at least has academy experience so he would be unironically a better player than him. DFM kinda messed up by not taking LOB because of his injury

Sengoku's macro looks nice, it's kinda cool to see how much Nobita and Misaya improved as players, just way better aimers now.

Since the TO changed, the tech pauses are more frequent than ever. It's as bad as the rest of APAC now which is kinda impressive considering the new TO is Japanese television.

They seem both seem super fluent in it, I am actually surprised how much Saya talks lmao

You little shit I fucking watched VCT since 2020 I fucking know how dogshit every single Japanese team was until NTH's LCQ run in 2021 and ZETA at Master Reykjavik 2022.
I watched this region for over 4years and part of the problem why JP teams were so bad is because they relied on washed players like Zepher who got absolute crushed against X10 and Version1 in 2021. Even in his 2021 days at Crazy Racoon he was absolute astrocious and averaged a 0.95 rating for that qualifier to the first international event. He always struggled on every team he played so far and rarely had great games.
I know my stuff about the Japanese scene because I vodreviewed hundreds of hours of their matches still to this day and will continue to do it afterwards. If you don't scout and always go back to old talent you won't be able to find success, Zepher is no Cned, no Derke or was he ever praised as one of the best players in JP, those were Laz, Meiy, Neth, Dep, Syouta, Popogachi, Anthem and Feez in 2021. There is a reason he didn't have much success since 2021 and wasn't part of a good team until today with Scarz, if Medusa didn't advocate for him he wouldn't be even part of this roster.

I will believe in Zepher for the time being because he played a great qualifiers and had a great match yesterday, if you by stats those were his best matches in his career, he is playing unbelievable rn but I also am realistic and want to have bigger sample size until we can say for sure he is a great player.

it's not that he only got exposed for it, he literally bragged about it and they are still together it's a super weird situation

he owns Murash, also somewhat big Youtuber and streamer

honestly their macro is the one thing impressing me, their mechanics kinda look like the average Radiant player but the coaching seems legit. They know how to take map control, have several good setplays, the coaches timeout had really good reactions and the util is used with purpose.

tomix kinda needs a bigger sample size but just looking at pure stats, he must be a complete mechanical demon that just dominates everyone he plays against. I personally rate slathom higher because he had been one of the highest rated players in APAC for two years now.

I would also add:
xcool3
k1wsy
slathom999
tomix
umaruchans
Xan
Laz
Kadoom
Zeus

you could probably put in Yoshiii also up there. It's kinda hilarious how Secret didn't even try to get him

someone save LOB from this team, my man needs to be in Tier1 already

that would be so bad

he needs to perform this over an entire split, this is way too early to judge

he averaged a 0.92 rating all year in 2024

it's not a lie, their scouting and roster building is not very great and loses out to other regions, which you saw for years in ZETA, CR, DFM previous roster that all played in tier1.

They have been very bad historically in scouting own regional talent, they overrely to this day on players outside of Japan.
Not only that, they often reuse washed players like TENNN, Pablo, Sakurai and many more that aren't top tier talents anymore.
BB has been one of the few orgs that have always found good talent in JP and outside of it they scouted players like Jemkin, Something, Xdll, Kr1stal, Xero and Satwoshi, but they are definitely not the norm of Japanese orgs and do not have the coaching staff to back them up.

BB and NTH take risks to scout good talents unlike the big orgs Zeta and DFM, who have been very conservative in getting good tier2 players until very recently.
Scouting good players is one thing to do, creating a team that can challenge other top tier teams inside and outside your region is just as important.
Both NTH and BB didn't make Challengers despite having one or two very talented players, their overall roster is still badly constructed and lack better coaching to overcome this step to challengers.

Also pls stop blaming players for not getting scouted when Yutaro and others do play with other pros and have been grinding hard for months to make the pro scene, it's still up to the orgs to find those talents and develope them. A good chunk of orgs don't do basic research, ignore stats and use very old application systems instead of going out their way to find talent.

Japanese teams just don't scout, look at dfm's academy team lmao. It is really simple imo.

I mean he is lft and his profile says he can speak Japanese, I do scout a lot of talents and this dude has probabably some of the best mechanics I have seen in recent memory, wouldn't surprise me if given the chance he could become someone like Hyunmin.

Inazawara and gray just aren't even close to his lvl, he would just destroy them lmao. Like you don't understand how ridiculous his mechanics are unless you watch more of his gameplay.