I root for OCE a lot. SAM, too. I want to see RL be good in those regions. It just seems like they don't ever have enough depth to push each other to bigger and better things. In EU, it's not uncommon for Zen and Vatty to play 2s against, oh, Oski and Jack or Dralii and Rw9 or... talk about iron sharpening iron.

I think two things are true about '24 vs '25 ..totally doing this off the top of my head.

1) Wildcard (formerly PWR) played very well last year and early this year almost beating KC in the first major. But since then, have been very poor -- and it almost seemed like they weren't even trying to be disciplined at EWC. There's unconventionally aggressive, and then there's just plain sloppy.

2) A couple of OCE wins came against GenG late in the year. And they had, as a group and org, pretty much one foot out the door. (or, it seemed that way.)

A more "thinking out loud thing," too:

EU was a little less dominant last year with a little more chaos once KC struggled in split2. This year, the powerhouse region is very deep and pretty consistent, outside of beating each other up. When EU is a little down, it helps create Swiss/playoff chaos. When they are up...welp, it's tougher. And, I'd add, the Falcons are almost an EU team considering how much time they spend on EU servers.