North wins DreamHack Open Valencia 2018

In the last event before the Summer break, Director of Esports, Jonas Svendsen and Main Team Coach, Alexander Holdt, decided to mix up things and try out an International lineup at DreamHack Open Valencia by adding Óscar "mixwell" Cañellas.

The experienced Spaniard would fill the shoes of Daniel "mertz" Mertz at the event, getting to play in front of his home crowd.

Rocky groupstage
With no practice and only a few hours to get Mixwell up to speed, the team kicked off the event against Giants Gaming in Group A. After a horrible start on Inferno, going down 7-0, the team responded in style and grabbed 16 of the next 17 rounds for a 16-8 win.
In the Winners match, we faced Heroic, and once again our lack of preparation with Mixwell showed. On Mirage we went down 1-10 before taking 9 rounds in a row. In the end we couldn't complete the comeback and lost the match 10-16.

The loss meant that we had to win against AGO in the decider match, in order to progress to the playoffs. We have become quite used to playing the Poles, as this was the 4th BO3 against them since May. In the last two encounters on LAN we've taken them down 2-1 and the story repeated itself this time around. 16-14 on Overpass and 16-12 on Train meant that our 6-16 blunder on Inferno didn't make a difference. The MVP of the series was Mixwell, who averaged 90.5 damage per round and had 71 kills over the BO3.

Flawless derby in the semifinal

Having won Group B in convincing manner, thrashing Virtus Pro 16-1 and beating Luminosity 16-9, Fragsters would be our opponent in the semifinal. Despite their groupstage heroics, the young Danes didn't stand a chance in the playoff game. aizy and valde combined for 56 kills in 23 rounds on Train, as we blasted to a 16-7 victory on the back of a 13-2 T-side.

Going into Nuke, things didn't change to the better for Fragsters, as valde once again showed why he is so deadly. His 25-3-17-performance with 96.8 ADR helped us power through Fragsters 16-10 and 2-0 overall.

Deserved champions

In the Grand Final we were matched up against Luminosity, whom had eliminated Heroic in their semifinal. Curiously enough, the two cores on both teams (valde, aizy, MSL and LUCAS1, HEN1, steel), had already played each other in one DreamHack Open Grand Final, namely the infamous DH Open Montreal 2017-edition. Even though everyone was on the server at the start of the match this time around, it made very little difference, as valde had come to play.

Dropping 30 and 28 frags respectively on Inferno and Mirage, valde deservedly picked up the MVP Award for the tournament, as he powered us through to a 16-7, 16-9 victory in a quick match. 

The team will be on vacation until the beginning of August, at which point they will kick off the preparations to DreamHack Masters and the Faceit Major later this year!