Caster, Caster, on the wall, who’s the strongest of them all?

 

Welcome to our weekly MPL – MY/SG article about the casters, where we extract information from them and gather their insight about the previous week’s matches and upcoming games.

So, to recap last week’s performance briefly:

The seemingly strong Singaporean teams have been rather disappointing, with squads like Bigetron SG and EVOS Esports SG delivering poor performance and flopping hard. Tyrants is the only SG team that seems fine so far. On the Malaysian side, players displayed better gameplay and tactics compared to last season, with the standouts being the Saiyan teams: AirAsia Saiyan and Saiyan Reborn.

Here’s the scoreboard.

Now, let’s see what the casters have to say.

Lack of Preparedness & Poor Performance

One common theme that has emerged when speaking to the casters would be the players’ lack of preparedness for the Regular season, which resulted in them flopping. This is especially apparent with the Singaporean teams (as mentioned above).

KBC Sensei in particular was really disappointed with their performance, especially since he was expecting them to win with ease against the Malaysian teams, because they have top Global players and players with lots of experience from other MOBAs in their lineup. He hopes they’ll practice more and cooperate better, so that they can do well in Week 2 onwards.

He specifically mentioned Bigetron SG, singling them out for their bad plays and questionable decisions like refusing to field L4ly4ly4 vs ICON and drafting Nana (JasonKoh) as a last pick instead of a main tank like Akai or Mino.

 

Ikuto,

Pseudo,

and Edwardo

echo the same sentiment, stating that only a few teams actually did their homework on the current meta, opponents, etc, comparing their performance to teams at the MSC and MSL who did far better, with most teams not living up to expectations at this level of professional play.

Ikuto went on to claim that for both Malaysia and Singapore, our teams are weak in the earlygame compared to other regions and depend heavily on individual heroes to perform solo.

Rising Stars

It’s not all bad, though. KBCSensei really likes the way some Malaysian teams like ICON, Traitors, and Saiyan Reborn have been performing, especially ICON with their 5 points which places them at the top with AirAsia Saiyan.

ICON’s players Syno (a highly-skilled Chou player), ComeToPapa, and Zhen pulled off a very solid victory against Bigetron SG, winning 2-0. Traitors, being a new team, also impressed KBCSensei with their debut match against EVOS Esports SG, with Hangus playing Alice very well, tanking lots of damage and still managing to kill opponents.

Edwardo sees Week 1 as Malaysia’s time to shine, as every single MY vs SG matchup ended in Malaysia’s favour. The Singaporeans still have time to buck up and improve though.

Predictions

Ikuto predicts that AirAsia Saiyan will stay at the top of the list, with Flash Tyrants rising to join them. ICON will probably drop to the middle of the rankings, along with Saiyan Reborn, Mystic Burden, and We Own World.

The bottom of the list probably won’t see much of a change. Borneo Dragon hasn’t shown much promise so far, so they’ll likely stay at the bottom with teams like EVOS Esports SG and Bigetron SG. Surprisingly, he predicts Traitor will drop to the bottom too.