QLASH Midnight competes in the Mastercard Nexus Tour, almost gets to playoffs
QLASH Midnight has become another of Europe’s top female teams to join an open-gender event. Today they participated in the Mastercard Nexus Tour, which is France’s 3rd tier of competition and a prominent semi-professional tournament in the European competitive scene.
Although QLASH is an Italian org, they compete in the Mastercard Nexus Tour as they meet the residency requirements by having 2 French residents: toplaner Sanah and botlaner Cosmic.
Mastercard Nexus Tour format:
7 tournaments take place on throughout the year. Each tournament starts with a 6-round Best of 1 swiss stage, from which the Top 8 teams qualify to Best of 3 single-elimination playoffs. These teams earn circuit points, and the Top 8 teams after all 7 tournaments enter a final stage to compete for the MNT title and a chance to promote to the Ligue Française de League of Legends 2, France’s professional 2nd tier league.
QLASH Midnight’s results in the Mastercard Nexus Tour 1st stage:
QLASH Midnight started out with 3 straight wins, including a 41-minute epic in the 3rd round. They were then paired with one of the biggest names in the tournament: Elyandra Esports, who last year competed in the LFL 1st division as Mirage Elyandra. After another long game, QLS.M eventually succumbed to defeat. A second defeat followed, and there was theoritically still a small chance of qualifying. After a win in the last game, finishing with 4 wins and 2 losses, they placed 14th amongst 66 teams.
I reached out to QLASH Midnight jungler Shiina for comments:
“It’s what I expected, getting close to qualifying to playoffs. We would have made it if we had a better 4th game, but they played better macro and bled us slowly. Still a good result overall. We’ve been making a lot of progress the last few weeks and we’ll be ready for MNT stage 2 in March.”
Personally, I’m very happy to see more female teams competing against open-gender teams. It shows progress for the female League of Legends scene as a whole and will aid in the development of female players. Hopefully, in next stage we can see QLASH Midnight make it a step further and qualify to the playoffs.
All the games are available to watch on Twitch (Italian commentary)
