VanillaTF2

CUBE — ETF2L’s 3rd Season of Highlander comes to a conclusion tonight as  SNSD look to defend their title against  Parrot Gapers. With both rosters pack full of names you’d recognise from the 6v6 world, and a whopping €1,035 for the winners (a measley €630 for the runners up), tonights game is shaping up to be one not to miss!

Tonight’s Lineups:

SNSD
SNSD come into the fixture tonight with their full roster and many would argue that they are the favourites. With their previous two ETF2L Highlander Season victory’s under their belt they certainly look like the team to beat. SNSD finished 1st in the group with an unbeaten record, only dropping one round to  May Contain Nuts on Gravelpit.

Lineup:
Scout:  Droso
Soldier:  Linus
Pyro:  TheSucker
Demoman:  Kaidus
Heavy:  Alx
Engineer:  CUBE
Medic:  Hat
Sniper:  TviQ
Spy:  Hurri

Parrot Gapers
Parrot Gapers arrive at the fixture from 3rd in the table, beating  May Contain Nuts in a best of 3 match in the playoff’s last week. With an ETF2L roster full of 6v6 experience and coming through the playoffs on a high, Parrot Gapers certainly do look like contenders to knock SNSD off the top spot.

Lineup:
Scout:  Kiler4fun
Soldier:  Old_Grandma
Pyro:  Quad
Demoman:  Spary
Heavy:  Cookye
Engineer:  Worms
Medic:  si^
Sniper:  Gubbins
Spy:  Evokje

VanillaTV will be casting tonight, not 100% on who but I’ve been assured it’s going to happen! The game starts at 21:15 CET so be sure to tune in from 21 CET on the VanillaTV Twitch Channel

Map Picks, Statements and Previous Encounters after the jump…

Previous Encounter

SNSD and Parrot Gapers have previously met this season on koth_lakeside and cp_granary. The first map was koth_lakeside, a large and mostly open King of the Hill map which is commonly played in the Highlander Scene. Although a 3-0 win for SNSD looks like it may have been easy, the match was incredibly close with both teams getting lots of time on the clock.

Next map was cp_granary, one which Parrot Gapers felt more comfortable on. With mid fights lasting longer and plenty of potential for hero mid plays from the utility classes, granary was a very close affair with SNSD just taking it 2-1.

Links: ETF2L match page. Lakeside Logs. Granary Logs.

Map Picks:

With tonight’s game having the potential for a best of 3, ETF2L left the teams to do the map elimination. The map pool: pl_badwater, cp_steel, pl_upward, cp_granary, koth_lakeside_final and cp_gravelpit. The teams were to eliminate one map each and then choose a map each with SNSD also allowed to choose the decider map since they came from 1st place in the tables. Here’s how it went down:

PG eliminate: cp_steel
SNSD eliminate: cp_gravelpit
PG pick: cp_granary
SNSD pick: pl_badwater
SNSD pick: koth_lakeside

So the maps tonight are Granary, Badwater and then Lakeside as a decider!

Leader Statements:

I caught up with the leader of SNSD Linus to ask him about tonight’s grand final:

CUBE: How do you feel going into the Grand Final?

Linus: I feel fairly confident, we’ve been practicing the last couple of days with great success. Of course, that doesn’t mean the game won’t be close, we already faced PG once and it was a tense game, I am sure they will be more prepared facing us this time around.

CUBE: Talk me through your decisions in the map picks.

Linus: Our last week map in the regular season was gravelpit. We were already guaranteed a spot in the playoffs before even playing it, and I recall kaidus not being available at all either, so we barely practiced it. So it was a rather obvious choice. As for badwater, I think it’s basically the badlands of highlander…. it’s the most fun, most balanced map out there – it wasn’t as much of a “tactical” choice as it was simply a choice for the sake of fun. Lakeside is a tough one. We already defeated the gapers 3-0 on it, but it was incredibly close, with only a few seconds left on the clock for them each round. It’s a great map to just, say, no more joking around with the cart, let’s see who has better deathmatching ability!

CUBE: What do you think will be the key for you to succeed tonight?

Linus: Keeping calm. Our team has some very “intense” players that tend to panic during finals, which can be highly counterproductive. I also think that focusing some of the key players of PG will be important… we were really impressed by Spary and Kiler4fun during our last encounter.

CUBE: Great, cheers for your time chaps. Any shoutouts?

Linus: Shoutout to Belial, a dear friend of many of us who’s been in hospital for the past 3 months. Also shoutout to Mr. X who’s donated the prize money and made this season of highlander the most intense yet.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone from PG online before I published this to give their statements, I did manage to find Old_Grandma’s statement on tonights map page:

Old_Grandma: GAPERS GONNA GAPE, A message to you Mr KaidusDorito:  http://i.imgur.com/QvJeR.jpg

See you tonight!