They say that getting to the top is much harder than staying there. Just ask Man City this year (please ignore the past three years for the sake of this).

NAVI might have won the Major in Copenhagen, and they might have been the best team in the world for a while after that, but all reigns eventually end; and NAVI’s ends quicker than anyone would have imagined.

NAVI got absolutely tonked by Spirit to drop to the 1-2 bracket, but quickly reacted to end GamerLegion’s dreams and put themselves in a 2-2 game, but they came up against a HEROIC side who… well, also lost to Spirit, but put up a much better fight.

HEROIC had fallen to both The MongolZ and the aforementioned Spirit, but looked more than competitive in both of those games, and they continued their impressive form in their final Swiss system game to topple the incumbent champs.

This is something of a proof of concept for HEROIC. This team has had a lot of doubters, but when you look at it, it’s… kind of full of really good players.

kyxsan is probably the one you’d be most unsure about, but his calling throughout this event has been sublime. He probably outcalled chopper despite the loss, and he outcalled Aleksib in the final series.

In the meantime, NertZ has proven once more why he was a hot commodity last Christmas. He gave HEROIC his heart, and he’s been brilliant for quite a while now. He was far and away the best player on the server on the deciding map, including a naughty pistol hold on A.

For NAVI, it’s hard to know where to go from here. Nothing seemed obviously wrong in terms of personnel, but their Mirage was absolutely awful, and Aleksi went missing in the biggest games.

It’s way, way too early to talk about changes for the best team in the world.

But… that was not the NAVI we expected. Not making playoffs when all of the other big teams have roster doubts?

Not good enough.