In Valorant, you can’t become a good team without a baseline of a skill; you can’t become a great team without strong comms, coordination, and playbooks; and you can’t become champions unless you add a heroic star performance as the cherry on top.
With Game 5 of Team WE vs. Cloud9 complete, the Quarterfinals stage of the 2017 World Championship is over. The tournament clocks in at 107 games so far, and it’s clear which champion is strongest: Kalista is the only champion picked or banned in every single game thus far, a feat achieved by only one champion in each of the World Championships since 2013. But there are twenty champions in each game – ten picked and ten banned – and correctly choosing the other nineteen goes a long way towards winning a game.
