XanRankings Pre-Season

IM Pre-Season Rankings
Formatting to be added later. This will also probably be BY FAR the longest write-up and the rest will mostly be making statements based of results and changes in the season. Expect mostly a summation of the past week, any change in ranking and why and the such.


Champagne and Cocaine (apparently Pizzagon now)
Scizor, EvilMrMuffinz, Deathy, Rekuso, Skye

	Pizzagon is definitively the prohibitive favorites for this season of IM, just on paper itself this team is the best in IM and could probably place 6th in Invite. There are just no major weaknesses for Pizzagon as they seem to have the skill across the board.
	 They currently possess the best scout combo in IM with the invite experienced Scizor and EvilMrMuffinz who managed to shine as an incredible scout on a Muffin Men team where he got scraps for heals. With the fact that Pizzagon is currently running double Gunboats, it will create plenty of room for the Pizzagon scouts to wreak havoc on opposing teams and carve up space. Neither scout suffer from Bitch or Bait syndrome and are both able to spot a situation in which they can take advantage of some deficiency in the other team mid push or even at neutral to create or pounce on openings for their team.

	Not to be even outdone by their scout combo, Pizzagon has what is most likely the best "soldier pair" in IM as well with Deathy on pocket and Rekuso on roamer. Rekuso is like scizor, an invite tested player that will have no issues performing in intermediate as he picks apart teams and finds spaces to exploit. He is definitely in the top percentile of DM for soldiers this season and I fully expect him to prove his position as the best in IM. Deathy on the other hand is far less proven and has far less experience. But what he may lack in game-sense currently he makes up for with DM in spades. At the same time, what may be perceived as Deathy's deficiencies may have partially been the result of the overall skill of his past teams. When you are on a sub-par team, one tends to play in particular ways to make attempts to carry and all it really takes for a player to start to shine and show dramatic improvement is to step up to a better team.

	Jarret just like his team is the pick for pre-season best Demoman in IM. He has the mix of DM and game-sense to prove himself as an exceptional player in any situation. He shows a type of versatility that is fairly rare in IM demos where he is able to play with or without a large share of the heal beam as seen in the contrasting amount of heals and priority he got on the IM Grime compared to the Invite incarnation of the Grime (despite both teams sharing the exact same combo players). He is also the main-caller of his team, a role that he has held in both 6s and HL for some seasons now (although he shared calling in HL heavily with Kresnik and Nursey).

	Skye their medic is someone I don't know very much about, but anyone who survived healing MustardOverlord for an extended time either comes of the situation with dramatic PTSD or with incredible resilience and ability. From what I can tell Skye generally does a fantastic job in surfing damage to safety making her a difficult medic to grab a pick on and has an extremely solid grasp on when to milk vs. when to just pop the uber. Medic is easily the class for which I know the least about as its not a class easy to judge. Medic is the most team-dependent, subjective class in the entire game and can't just make incredible plays to be noticed. It's all game-sense and experience.

	Pizzagon is a team I fully expect to make consistent improvements throughout the season a it goes as they ramp up demo watching and map reviews in order to get a better sense of identity and what to do Any any given point. As it stands they rarely lose scrims to any other team in IM, and they should improve at a marginally more substantial rate than their competition. There are no clear weaknesses on this team; they have the mix of playmaking, calling, DM, and game-sense that generally decides "IM winner".



Chapter 2: Kill Zill
Raytek, Sen, Botmode, Tankman, Hassassin, Ictus



	The top of IM has no weak scout combos, and Kill Zill is definitely no exception. Just the raw DM of the team is impressive on its own level, but where they have incredible DM they have some spaces in their game-sense at times. This describes the scout combo of Raytek and Sen, but also describes the team as a whole. Raytek and Sen has the consistent incredible ability to click on people with extreme prejudice, and while Raytek is a very well rounded scout in his own right he can have some more down moments. Sen on the other hand has DM to match some of the best scouts in the entire division, but there are moments (sometimes far too much of an occurrence) where he just forgets the importance of his life and throws it away going for a pick far too greedily and dying. If Sen can reign in his unnecessary deaths while still exerting his influence in fights I expect that they can contend for the best scout combo in the division. To clarify, I don't mean that Sen simply dies a lot, it is when and where he dies that sometimes hurts his team.

	There is not much to say about Botmode other than he is the best pocket in the entire division. He has the DM to match any other soldier in the entire division, and doesn't suffer from random idiot disorder nor does he freeze up and just sit on his medic when his team needs him to push. What I feel gives him the slight edge over Trip is the fact that he seems more apt to share his heals with the rest of his team in order to see the rest of his team succeed. He can will defer his heals elsewhere, he did so less last season with Cloudmaker than he will have to do this season with Hassassin who plays a more forward style. Other than that Trip and Botmode could interchangeable for 1 and 2. The Kill Zill roamer, Tankman, is another player this season emancipated from the chains that is demoman. So many seasons a slave, he is finally free to play out roamer for the rest of the season. He made an appearance on the class 2 seasons ago where he played a very sufficient roamer, but being his first time playing the class at that level he was a little rough around the edges. While he generally preformed pretty good bombs and hit very good rockets, he was sometimes a little early jumping in and may be lost prior to some pushes. I fully expect him to improve on this coming into the season.

	Ictus playing medic has a wealth of experience playing a few different classes (but mostly scout) at fairly high levels making two separate dips into invite. He is mechanically a very good player, but I think this is his first season playing medic and so he may have some issues as a first time medic main in terms of uber counting and some of the more situational decision making.

	Overall this team has a lot of potential to challenge Pizzagon for the number one spot in IM andif they can improve as a team can definitely take it. One issue that may be prevalent with this team is the issue of calling, Pizzagon last season made some very questionable calls at times and at other times played such a slow game that they risked resetting the round. As far as I know, there has been no turnover in caller and so they may fall into the same habits that could cost them against a more dynamic team in Pizzagon.



3rd: Exultance TF2
-Sal, dFlame, Trip, Kanon, Safrix, Saam


	First things first with Exultance is that they have the most volatile scout combo in IM. If both Sal and dFlame are hitting their shots and keep a level head, communicating with their team, then they have the DM to be the best scout combo in IM but both players are known to be susceptible to some level of tilting that may cloud their decision making. So on a good day the two can out-DM teams and carry to victory, or they may falter and cost them a game against teams a rank or two below them. Despite this I doubt that Exultance will live and die with their combo as I expect the combo to be able to hold them together. This combination can potentially lead the two to play better than they ever has. dFlame has proven before that playing with the right players that he can trust to not drag him down, he can play extremely cleanly and show up large on the stat screen. -Sal has not quite proven this, but he has played well on some very good teams before. Time will tell if they can shed this "volatility label".

	Moving on, Trip is the closest challenger to the title of "Best Pocket in IM" which Botmode holds coming into the season. He definitely has the right mix of DM and game-sense to put himself in the right place to do damage, and when he gets there could be a destroyer of worlds in IM. However, he tends to play what may be referred to as the "Final Boss" pocket where he grabs the lions share of the heals for his team and may be the last one up to clean everything else up. He does a ton of work for his team, but he takes up resources that may otherwise be used to their advantage. The Final Boss pocket can cost a team if the Pocket can't pull it off, but Trip has proved the last few seasons that he has the ability to actually do it. Kanon the roamer is someone who didn't get a lot of shine nor attention the past few seasons despite ostensibly being the team leader. He tends to play his role and do it exceptionally well, the very definition of a role player. Despite that not sounding like a compliment, no teams win without people willing to defer in some situations and simply do what they are needed to when it is needed. The Mario Chalmers/Norris Cole of Exultance.
	Safrix the sub 25% heal demoman is most likely the 4th best demoman in IM right now. He isn't given a large share of resources to work with, but seems to do more than enough with what he has. (If I had the time and the stats, I could maybe try to put together some sort of stats per heal as stolen from the Gentleman Jon I could prove this point better). But again, on a team that has centerpieces elsewhere he does what he is needed to do. The Chris Bosh of exultance.

	Saam the new medic for this combo is a medic that has a lot of experience staring a one or two butts in particular for the course of a match and he does it well. He gets heals where they need to be and surfs damage to free himself from aggression.Despite Dable's skill, he isn't one to opt into attempting to force widespread changes on a team but if Saam feels that it may be necessary he may be more likely to. Overall the addition of Saam is a good one that could possibly add more versatility to a team that was very Trip focused.

	It seems that Muffin Men may be making a lateral move from their last season of IM. If they come together and hit shots at the right time, they can potentially make a run at the title but barring that they are just underneath the high tier teams. They made very smart pickups in Sal and dFlame who are very much able to play low-eco scouts while still exerting a considerable influence on the course of a game. Depending on how things go internally, they could be an incredible team.