Valorant: Twitch Rivals EU, agent meta breakdown
With Twitch Rivals EU having come and gone, and as we look towards the first team tournaments of 1.0, let’s talk meta. The following is essentially an explanation/primer on the current meta in EU, as represented by all agent selections in the latter stages of the tournament (quarter-finals on, for both Europe #1 and Europe #2).
First off, for reference: these were the teams by their names in said tournament stages, and also, what I’m going to refer to them by for the most part when they come up throughout the body of the piece itself:
For those not in the know, the format of Twitch Rivals is that Twitch names team captains (popular streamers), each captain names four players, and that’s the team. This often produces some very lopsided tournaments, but for EU, it actually worked out pretty well this time; between:
- team captains like Mixwell, bonkar, Duno, and izak who already had closed beta teams
- team captains like ONSCREEN, Lutti, gdolphn, and Exileshow who just went out and recruited entire top teams to play alongside them
- various other top players from beta also mostly finding their way into competitive lineups
…the result was, after a very stompy group stage, we got it down to a field of 16 teams and 80 players that wouldn’t look too far out of place in an absolute top-tier closed beta European tournament. Even for the two blanks up there, Skyyart’s stack has competed in the same or similar form in a few French tournaments, and wtcN’s stack is from Turkey, which to be frank, we don’t really know much about yet scene-wise and strength-wise (few to no local tournaments, few to no Turkish teams competing in European tournaments).
All this, in turn, means two things:
- It’s worth doing this article in the first place.
- It seems better for everyone’s memories going forward to refer to them as such, even if there end up being some awkward situations here and there (such as HyPHyPHyP, the #3 team in beta and semi-finalists in Europe #1, competing without HyP at this event, or #2 Prodigy having #1 fish123’s best player here).
Meta overview
Couple notes here to start out: nothing was a 100% pick rate this tournament, but Sage and Cypher might as well have been. In Sage’s cases, two teams ran a game without her (going 0–2), both in the quarter-finals. The Team nookyyy case is discussed in the Ascent section; the other one was Team Skyyart, who ran without both Sage and Cypher, and went for an insane entry/heavy composition (Sova/Brimstone/Raze/Breach/Phoenix) in an effort to knock off tournament favourites Prodigy. They managed to pull it back to a respectable final scoreline (9–13) after being hammered on D (2–10), but this was clearly a special case.
As for Cypher, similar story for two of his non-picks; one was the aforementioned Skyyart loss, the other was Team Valkia on Haven (who were arguably the absolute weakest team to make it to quarters — sorry, hype and kpiz) running Sage/Brimstone/Raze/Breach/Viper against fish123. They lost 0–13.
There was one team in this tournament who have consistently not ran Cypher (while still competing at a reasonably high level), and that’s Fordon Boars — Patitek, who tends to play most of the role that most Cypher players do on most teams (off-lane and secondary Operator), uses Phoenix on every map instead (which, in all fairness, has worked out for him at least).
Reyna had a decent pick rate overall, although concentrated particularly on Haven (I’ve mostly steered clear of the percentages in this piece, but whatever: 50% pick rate on Haven, 19% on every other map), where her pick-heavy style absolutely gets the most paydirt. Still not sure what to think of her overall so far. No matter how powerful she ends up being though, always going to be a 5th pick/luxury pick type of deal in my view just because of how weak her team utility is.
Every pick was seen at least five times. Some had map-specific uses, but quite a few are in there because a player essentially ‘one-tricked’ them — in other words, they’re one of the only players to use that agent, and they will play that agent on almost every map. Notable examples at this tournament included Team wtCN’s cdeN (6 out of 11 Jett games), HyPHyPHyP’s CREA^ (3 out of 6 Omen games), Fordon Boars’ Patitek (3 out of 5 Phoenix games), and to some extent Prodigy’s Mixwell (3 out of 5 Viper games , but his use was map-specific— see Bind and Ascent sections for more details). Not a knock against them, and I tend to think that at least in a couple of cases they’re actively blazing trails that others will end up following, but something to be aware of.
For the rest, let’s go map-by-map.
Haven (8 games)
Everyone loves Haven, and I grind my teeth consistently at that fact, but hey. Sage/Cypher/Sova feature effectively universally here, but there’s a lot of room beyond that — looking back, this was the map where the very first cracks in the initial setup of Sage/Cypher/Brimstone/Breach started appearing (Brax preferring Phoenix over Brimstone during the T1xNSG Invitational), and it’s hence not really surprising to see both Brimstone and Breach not universally on the table here; the three-site setup and the layout of the map in general just don’t lend themselves well enough to either agent’s kit to make them indispensable.
That said: cutting out the pocket picks, it was still largely two of Brimstone-Breach-Reyna here in those final spots, with all three combinations on show from top teams:
- fish123 (ONSCREEN): Breach/Reyna.
- Prodigy (Mixwell): Brimstone/Reyna
- Worst Players (Duno): Brimstone/Breach.
Four appearances overall from Jett is worth noting. Two were Team wtcN’s cdeN (who plays her on every map), one was Fordon Boars’ NEEX (same), and one was from NiP star rifler/entry Yacine; he top-fragged (16 kills) in an otherwise poor performance (6–13) against fish123. To reiterate, this is probably Jett’s best map overall, and it’s the one where we really first saw her courtesy of ardiis; speaking of ardiis, amusingly enough, stripped of his primary Operator responsibilities, and with pyth’s Cypher taking greater responsibility for A Long, he actually didn’t use her at all in this tournament (instead opting for Brimstone or, on Ascent, Reyna).
In general, I will emphasise that this continues to feel like the map where the least rules apply in terms of set positionings or necessary team utility, and the reality is that as much as it might feel like I’m talking about pocket picks here in a slightly dismissive tone (hashtag LoL culture), the reality of this map may very well be that you end up long-term seeing the most variation down the roster in terms of those last two picks.
Bind (7 games)
Bind is pretty set for the most part — Sage, Cypher, Sova, Brimstone, and some flexibility on the fifth slot, but realistically, Raze unless you have a very good reason not to. Very few Breaches anymore — his E and ult just aren’t as useful as it initially seemed with how the extremities of each site work, and his flashes never seem to end up opening too much here. It’s easily the most execute-friendly and execute-heavy of the starting three maps anyway (too early to really say compared to Ascent), so perhaps surprising, not really a shock.
Outside of the main five, mostly pocket picks, but I would highlight in particular Mixwell’s Viper on Bind — he’s ran this for a while, with the main idea being that you use the reuseable smoke on A long, mostly play towards A short, and your acid and particularly your ult are some of the best ways to protect against the apartments/site corner rush that every team loves to do up A short. I genuinely think it’s up there with ardiis’ Haven Jett as one of the best thought-out map pocket picks in competitive so far.
Split (4 games)
Little surprised that the pick rate was so low here, but to be fair, looking at Epulze, Solary, etc., the tide has been shifting a little on this; as a reminder, while NA overwhelmingly shunned Split in its first few tournaments (particularly on 0.48), it saw decent play as map 1 or 2 early on EU (with Bind generally being the ban/map 3 of choice) — Mandatory Cup semis/third-place/finals saw 4 Haven games, 4 Split games, 0 Bind games.
Anyway: this is the map where the ‘meta’ insofar as it exists is probably the most different to anyone else, because very few teams play Sova here (as much as people obsessed over the possibilities early on with trick-shot Es, it turns out that it’s hard to act on the sort of info you can get from them), and both Brimstone and particularly Raze are difficult to dispense with (as much as they’ve opened up the middle, this is still the place where Raze utility will kill you the most often). So: Sage/Cypher/Brimstone/Raze.
For the fifth slot here, generally went to one of Breach, Reyna, or Jett; Breach is probably the default option for most teams, but Reyna is going to do very similar things for most (i.e.: flash). Jett shows up here mainly because it appears to be the only thing that cneD plays, but for the record, we have seen it being used in other tournaments by other teams on Split too (e.g. luckeRRR on VALORANDO), occupying a similar sort of role to Breach/Reyna.
Ascent (2 games)
Only a couple of showings across the playoff rounds on Ascent, which isn’t hugely surprising given the potential stakes of the tournament and given it’s been out for a matter of days — few were willing to risk it.
The two games were:
a) Team nookyyy vs. Fordon Boars. A gamble by gob b et. al. which didn’t pay off — idea seemed largely to be that new VALORANDO recruit pAn would get the upper hand with the Operator as mid (as Raze, don’t ask me why), and nookyyy on Viper (who, it should be noted here, is 34 years old and hasn’t played competitive CS since about 2016) would test the idea that Viper kit may actually also be well suited to play around B tunnel and B site, at least on paper (I still think she’s better on mid overall, and nookyyy doesn’t use the Operator as far as I can tell, which isn’t ideal). In any case, didn’t work, 3–9 on O half, 7–13 loss overall.
Fordon were, as it happens, one of the only teams to get a chance to play a match on Ascent before the tournament (against Worst Players, a.k.a. Team Duno), and I did a writeup of that game here. In terms of agents, only change on Fordon Boars’ side from that game to this one was Reyna being swapped out for Phoenix, which makes sense — it’s Patitek’s main anyway, and while the Reyna blind can be very nice indeed on Ascent, a) Phoenix also has a blind, b) I tend to think that this has the greatest potential of any map so far to pull off some insane plays based around a Phoenix/Viper-type wall.
b) HyPHyPHyP vs Prodigy. Just to be clear here: this was picked by HyPHyPHyP, and specifically over Split. HyPHyPHyP ran Sage/Cypher/Sova/Omen (remember: CREA^)/Raze, Prodigy ran Sage/Cypher/Sova/Reyna/Viper.
They did in the end actually managed to make it an extremely close-run thing against the eventual champions (got to 9–9 before ending 9–13), and might have pulled it off without Raze a) going 3–13 into the half b) just not doing much on account of being Raze on the most open map in the game (to be fair, Lutti — the captain/streamer/designated weak link — was the Raze player here, so at that point, just blame the format). Incidentally, Mixwell got 19 kills on attack using Viper, just playing mid (mostly A-side) with the Operator and running up the score, so his pocket likely just got a bit bigger.
Anyway: not really a story to be written here as of yet. Sage/Cypher aren’t dispensable at all on this map even to my Cypher-sceptic mind, and after playing it a bit more personally, I think I have to agree that you’re always going to want Sova too. So, Sage/Cypher/Sova, same as Haven and Bind.
Past that, would tend to lean towards Brimstone/Omen/Viper/Jett in the other two slots for the most part; I just don’t think you can get away with less than two players having smoke utility with how mid works. Reyna’s left in a bit of a weird spot — in theory, she should have a good run on this map, she certainly feels powerful in pugs…I just don’t know if there’s room for her in organised games. Again, though, we’ll see.
