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Pre-Season Rankings part two

The way I see it is that these next three teams are pretty evenly matched in that they are teams that may threaten the top 3 and take scrims off of them,  maybe even a match, but at full power in a long set the top 3 are just a slight tier above. 4-6 Could really be in any order, the order in which I place them is due to factors which can change over time.


4.  Six Guys Off

Tooth, Phlps, Farnsworth, THE FRAGG, Topshot, Kig
	Starting from the scouts, I believe that Tooth and Phlps are already a strong scout combo that will only improve as the season goes. While Tooth does not have an incredible amount of top playing scout in 6s competitively, he is one of the smartest players out there and definitely one of the smartest players in IM specifically. Already in the pre-season he seems to be able to hold his own DM wise against pretty much any scout in the division , and any possible deficiencies he may have at first can be covered partially by the fact that he is the combo scout. He does not have to hit every meat shot out there, he needs to play intelligently and fill in wherever his combo needs him and I believe Tooth is well-prepped for this kind of role. Phlps, his scout partner is one of the most woefully underrated scouts in the entire division and maybe in greater TF2. The dude is just a tenderizer, he just DMs with blatant disregard for human life. If there is anything else we can say about Mustard, is that he tends to find the most ridiculously skilled lesser known scouts from HL and gives them a chance to shine. He still was somewhat limited, but that seems to be entirely gone with Six Guys Off as Phlps is going 10 2 10.

	Continuing the woeful underrating of Six Guys off, the soldier combo of Farns and Fragg are going to rip some teams apart in this upcoming season. Farnsworth has a wealth of experience on pocket and plays a very moderate pocket, not quite as loose as Deathy’s or KTB’s gunboat pocket but nearly as attached to the heal beam as Mustard or Trip. He is very willing to detach himself from the beam to go make room, while managing to come back for extremely solid ubers. Some of this can definitely be attributed to seasons of experience with Kig as his medic as they work together extraordinarily well and it shows. I would rate Farns as the third best pocket this season. Picking up the roamer role is Fragg, who simply put makes places. In Topshot Boys two seasons ago in IM, whenever they would stall out and need something done Fragg would go get it done. If there is some hole in your flank Fragg chances are Fragg has already used it to get a pick or a force. Players who are this opportunistic would normally get caught out a lot as they probe for plays but Fragg does not seem to fall into that category, whether it be him reigned in by his teammates or he just seems to know  does not matter, either way he manages to be clean with his bombs and keeps his death count free of unnecessary inflation.

	Continuing his stint as demoman for the third straight season is Topshot. He has shown dramatic improvement over his last few seasons as he made his transition from roamer to demoman. He is interesting in that he seems to almost have better pills than stickies, though it’s far from a weakness. He plays a very good demoman and is consistently well coordinated with his team for peaks and pushes putting damage onto the right places and people. He plays a very controlled demoman in that he doesn’t take bad fights and he protects himself more than adequately before making what could potentially be a dangerous peak. I look for him to continue improving as so much of demoman is an experience and gamesense class that takes time to accumulate, and it can take some seasons especially switching from a class that generally sacrifices itself to the blood god. I tend to have him hovering around the 5th best demoman in IM, strangely enough this season has a pretty good amount of skilled demoman in comparison to past seasons which generally had one or two in a league of their own.

	Kig is the third addition to the team coming with Farns from The Grime in invite. He seems to be a highly intelligent medic who plays extremely well with his team not being afraid to potentially put himself in danger to get heals to people in danger without racking up a death count. His seasons of experience with Farnsworth definitely shows in some borderline hivemind-esque moments as Kig has gotten used to what Farns wants to do and when. It is this mix of experience and skill that leads me to award Farns and Kig the best pocket/medic combo in IM. Whereas all of the other competing pockets are switching medics and having to rebuild synergy, Kig and Farns already possess it in spades.

	All in all, Six Guys Off is a team which is surprisingly underrated. They have the DM and Gamesense to hang around with any other team in the division. Their soldiers make more than enough room for Tooth and Phlps to pick teams apart and do not expect them to make dumb calling mistakes. This is a team comprised almost entirely of intelligent players with a large amount of experience in high IM and some Invite. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the season I’m proved wrong and they make a serious run at the top 3.


5. Rocked By the Dragon
Train, Vand, Hellbent, Voll, Sigh, Matt


	I’m actually going to put the general team summary at the beginning this time because I fear that I’m just going to repeat myself ad-naseum. This team has DM to spare across every class. Train and Vand in particular are absolute monsters at scout and this team can and will buzzsaw their way through teams with superior DM and a surprising amount of coordination that they already possess. They are an incredibly aggressive team that seems want to push off of any advantage and opportunity. However despite this wealth of DM I place them just below Six Guys Off because of a general lack of experience. While this team can just DM people into submission, they seem to make a large amount of calling errors and get over-zealous with some pushes. It is their DM and coordination which can bail them out of these situations but making one too many bad pushes and calls will severely cost them against teams that either have better DM overall (Exultance, Kill Zill) or teams with at least even DM but better calling (Six Guys Off and Pizzagon). However, if they can overcome this weakness they can be an incredible danger to the hierarchy of IM.

	Already highlighted, Train and Vand, are going to actually win the majority of even fights with the best of scouts in this division. As they build up some coordination between just the two of them, they can potentially be the 2nd or 3rd best scout combo in the division. Train doesn’t seem to fall into making as many bad decisions as one may expect, but that could be shrouded by his ability to simply send people to respawn. Vand has more experience overall than most of his team aside from Hellbent and has carried teams on both Pocket and Scout before, he is extremely talented DM wise and will generally be were his team needs him to be. I fully expect these two to be the highlights of Rocked by the Dragon that can repeatedly make wishy-washy decisions into amazing choices.

	The soldiers of this team, Hellbent and Voll, exemplify my summation of the team as a whole. Both of the players have incredibly good rocket aim (despite Hellbent’s sometimes looking like a cracked up Michael J. Fox has taken control of the mouse movement) but both tend to sometimes get into situations that make you wonder what they were planning in the first place. Having terrible gamesense isn’t about making bad decisions, it is making the same kind of wrong decision over and over again. Gamesense is something you build up over time and Voll is fairly new as far as I know. Hellbent is more experienced but hasn’t had a wealth of experience with teams that played a more measured style. As I have said before, it only takes the right group of people sometimes for someone to show that they were always better than once thought.

	Sigh is arguably the 4th best demoman in IM, on a list that has 3 demomen with invite experience in Jarret, Chriz, and
Topshot. Despite being 4th this is still a major compliment in its own way since he is also a much newer player to ESEA as a whole and it is his first season in IM. I watched a couple of Slowbr0 games last season and Sign definitely stood out among his teammates and against any team he played with the consistent ability to even out-DM scouts that made the challenge to him in the game. The only real negative I heard about Sigh is the accusation that he baits as a demoman, but in the same vein that Deathy may have played in a sub-optimal way Sigh may have been pushed in this direction by the realization of the quality of his teammates at the time.

	Matt rounds out the team at Medic and from the few games I watched of Slowbr0’s seems to be a perfectly adequate medic. Doesn’t rack up a ton of deaths and doesn’t pull the “I took 10 damage from a Chip-shot I’m out guys” issue that may plague more passive medics concerned with their own life. Time will tell if he matches up well with his teammates.


6. A Gorillion Dollars
Ex, Blues, MustardOverlord, Liko, Odb, Cookiejake


	IM has no shortage of scout talent and Gorillion Dollars keeps up that image with a very strong scout combo in Ex and Blues. Ex has been on variations of Max Lux Blue and the such for the last few seasons, but is the only continuity from the team that first entered IM with Demoted going off into the sunset again. He is a very talented Scout that has thrived in sub-par teams and played extremely well on last seasons Max Lux Blue with scout partner Slemnish. He tends to fall into the background when people talked about MLB last season but he as every bit as important to that teams success as Mustard and Slemmy. He silently puts up numbers and gets his job done. Blues on the other hand has left Muffin Men as well, but it would seem that he quickly missed Trip’s presence and felt culture shock with the idea of getting a good amount of heals so he goes to the only pocket which may take more heals than Trip in Mustard. It just may be his comfort zone. Either way, Mustard’s ability to somehow attract extremely skilled scouts to his teams continues in Blue’s presence who will maintain his position as one of the better scouts in IM.

	Picking up the soldier class will be Mustard at Pocket and an unknown quality (at least to me) in Liko on roamer. If Mustard continues his steam from last season, he will continue to be hugging the heal beam and doing a ton of damage to make room for his scouts to pick up the kills and space. The main issue is that sometimes his heals may come at the expense of his teammates, normally his demoman, who may be able to make good use of the resources. Despite this complaint and a couple of other small issues, he seems to get an astonishing amount of work done and finds the right ubers to take points and rounds so what he is doing is working to an extent. I honestly know next to nothing about Liko, but he seems to be playing very well. His last ESEA experience under his account dates back to Seasons 10 and 11 where he played very well against competition that would eventually be at the top of IM and some invite players so skill shouldn’t be an issue.

	The young Old Dirty Bastard rounds out the fragging classes on Demoman for Gorillion Dollars. Coming from Great Nights Together with Cheesy (I hope they played it safe) where the team was essentially two threats and throne for almost the entire season where if Cheesy didn’t drop 400 and Odb mid 300s they didn’t win rounds let alone games but Odb regularly rose to the challenge. He has many seasons of Highlander Demoman under his belt where he seems to be fairly underrated. He hits a very strong amount of his shots and generally positions very well, although he has the tendency to jump every second in a fight which could lead to him getting juggled in very inconvenient ways. Either way, he had a standout last season and hopes to continue his rise with his first foray into IM this season.

	Picking up medic is the man, the myth, the legend CookieJake. Nothing much needs to be said, and I don’t say that because I don’t know what to say, that would be a heinous accusation.

	Overall Gorillion Dollars overall should just be a better version of Mad Lux Blue, which was good enough to topple last season’s Pizzagon and Max Lux Gold. They could easily have been the fourth seed, but I don’t know how well Cookiejake and Liko will perform and how his team will gel. So long as Mustard is calling they will continue to be a highly aggressive team no matter the roster though so look for that to being the crux of their identity. Mustard’s way may have its flaws in his pocketing and his general calling, but it works more often than it fails (Mad Lux Blue didn’t blow a lot of pushes or made stupid attempts though) and that is all that is necessary to win games.