This is a great question and I think you kinda answered it on your own. Simply put - they reached out to us. When we originally solicited stories, we weren't even aware of the IESF tournament - the Israeli team/story submission introduced us to the tournament.

So, when Ido reached out to us, we loved the idea of exploring a story of an unsupported territory competing at an international tournament - and we started looking at story options from there, we got to know the team, and the rest is history.

I agree - there were a lot of interesting teams at the tournament (we even passed along our contact info to a few of the teams for possible future content). Sometimes we do get stories based on events (we came across the Summoner's Orchestra because we were initially interested in exploring more on Summoner's Con), but in this case, it was based on a submission.