The MPL Philippines Regular Season Has Begun

 Boy did we call these games wrong

This article was written by Chise Alcantara.

As you probably know by now, the first week of the MPL Philippines regular season has started and things are developing faster than we expected. And with so many interesting things happening this past weekend, we made sure that you guys are up to speed by showcasing some highlights from Day 1 and Day 2 of the first week of MPL PH Regular Season.

Like we mentioned in our previous article entitled “What to Expect from the MPL PH Regular Season” , an unforeseen development regarding some members of Nimbus Gaming not being eligible to compete in this tournament resulted in White Rascals qualifying for the regular season games. With that, almost everyone thought that they were on the back end of things and were treated as the underdogs of the tournament, which made their great performance on the first day all the more surprising, ending with a score of 2-0 in the White Rascals vs Invictus Godz series and a respectable score of 1-1 against one of the most promising teams this season, OBS Raven on Sunday.

Another team that everyone was keeping close watch over was OBS Gaming, but because of completely different reasons. OBS Gaming was considered to be the frontrunner of this competition, not only because of their all-star lineup including OG Z4pnu and OG Pakbet but also because of their clean victories against all their competitors in the qualifying matches and even their first day in the regular season. But on the second day of the competition, their dominance would be challenged by none other than another leading contender in the league, Aether Main, which completely outplayed OBS Gaming using their superior rotations and farming leading to a score of 2-0 in favor of Aether Main.

Other than their impressive win against OBS Gaming, Aether Main also swept their best-of-two series against Vicious&Delicious on the first day so no one really expected that all of this was just to set up something even greater for the second day, which was bringing out the immobile marksman, Hanabi as the main carry.

Even though AE Coco’s Hanabi didn’t have much impact during the first day because of AE Yujiii’s stellar performance on his Guison stealing the spotlight, Coco came back with a vengeance on the second day decimating OBS Gaming’s entire team as well as all the objectives on the map. The impact of the Hanabi pick was so great that it forced the OBS Gaming team to pick a marksman of their own, Roger, for the second game, just to have a chance in bringing things back if things got sour during the early game. Unfortunately for them, the second game just seemed like a replay of the events of the first amtch, where they couldn’t stop the rampaging damage of AE Coco’s Hanabi.

We don’t want to say we told you so but we already predicted that Hanabi will shake up the MPL tournament.. Will this trigger a start of a meta change in the MPL PH scene? We can only watch how things unfold in next week’s matches.