But which teams will make it to the EU LCS?
League of Legends team Schalke04 of the EU LCS have a definitive advantage going into 2018, with their spot in the Spring Promotion series locked in along with other challenger team GIANTS! Gaming. With laners like SmittyJ on their team, there is little surprise that they conquered Team Red Bulls in the Summer Playoffs. But what does this mean for these two teams?
The EUCS stands for European Union Challenger Series, where aspiring teams face off on the Rift to get a spot in the true competitive scene, the LCS. The two top CS teams face the bottom two LCS teams in a double elimination bracket, with seeding in said bracket decided by best of 5 matches, so the bracket looks like this with the losers from round 1 falling into the bottom game in round 2:
The bracket format for the Promotion Tournament.
The current two bottom teams for the EU LCS groups are Ninjas in Pyjamas, a team better known for their CS:GO but with a lot of well-known players on their League team, and Mysterious Monkeys. These teams have a 5-22 game and 5-21 game win/loss ratio over the current split alone, with a match ratio of 1-11 and 2-10 respectively.
Another interesting thing to note is that this is the first split NiP and MM are playing in the LCS after acquiring two Academy spots from other teams. NiP’s spot was purchased from Fnatic Academy, who won the promotional tournament in the spring but had to sell the spot due to Fnatic’s main team already holding an LCS spot. Mysterious Monkeys obtained their spot through the disbanding of team Misfits Academy, the challenger team for Misfits. This upcoming promotional tournament will be an exciting one, so tune in for more news surrounding that event.
