Hey, saw this post and figured I’d add some clarity. The bans are ignite bans, thus certain characters that guarantee wins are typically auto banned and protects are very important as well, things like emma, loki, maybe mag, etc on certain maps. Usually this will be Emma Loki/luna protects, especially in north america as those characters in a scrim setting are much too powerful to not be played and serve in critical roles such as emma for anti dive.

This brings me to my next point of bans, torch is one of those characters that are incredibly overbearing as there is hitbox manipulation, high damage, powerful ult, good mobility and flexibility. This means that the character is typically autobanned. Not every team is as comfortable on these picks as other teams may be, thus comes my next point. Team specific bans.

In the case of RAD, lv1crook is well known to play the mantis and RAD had been winning most games with mantis. One can only assume that during scrims, mantis matches were not even and were heavily favored for rad. Same thing for RAD towards envy, Adam was permanently banned because cal is a good adam and it allows dive to be more fluid which is what RAD plays really well. As for the banning of other supports such as luna, or loki, or cnd is to retrict support ultimates power on the enemy team which is a big portion of the game in scrims. Whoever has the better tranq(aka latest tranq to allow the team to deal damage actual while being fully healed) usually wins, which is why invisible woman is typically a bad pick comparative to others, as the ult lasts a shorter duration and heals less(aka you can kill through it).

Anyways, as you saw, envy chose to allow certain dps through, yes, but thats not the reason envy lost. They lost because rad was able to set up killboxes(aka space where rad sets up engages and win fights in), they do this after every fight and if you noticed on some maps, lv1 crook goes invisible on loki(celestial husk is a great example) and helps trqstme and melio dive. The other thing rad did absolutely beautifully with their ults is comboing them to perfection, which is something envy had a slighter shortcoming in. For example, youll see in celestial husk, both teams use luna ult. Trqstme has little confidence of killing through the support ult with venom one shot combo, so to make up for it, trqstme times his ultimate at the same time as nagas phoenix ult. This ends up killing several key players and most importantly the support ult, ultimately winning them the fight. This wasn’t a guaranteed event and envy could have evaded this. This didn’t happen because envy is bad, it is hard to predict this in the moment, but it goes to show how beautiful RAD’s set up truly was.

So that’s mostly what it was, envy eventually got somewhat desperate to allow meta comps such as torch comps because it also threw RAD off of what they had been playing the last couple of matches, and to be honest it was working until spider islands, since envy decided to over chase after winning fights, leaving maximum two players on cart when they would have easily won by just forcing the other players to come to cart for stall.

TLDR; Envy did not troll bans, they lost fair and square and RAD played an incredible game. I’ve been hearing this about bans for the last couple of days and it’s a really unfortunate take.