The whole “Deft’s last dance” narrative was my first worlds and it was honestly amazing, had a great time. Of course now that he’s won he’s still playing, but the story was fun regardless- this year I’m hoping to see faker get another worlds victory, they’ve been consistently amazing, but haven’t actually gotten the title for along time now. And its fun to root for the “unkillable demon king”
I wouldn’t really call DRX underdogs. Any Korean or Chinese team is playing at a level where they are perfectly capable of winning Worlds on a good day, because Riot have shown a lot of bias towards these two regions in terms of both investment in esports, fostering a strong competitive environment and even seeds for MSI and Worlds. Teams outside of the two main Asian regions are underdogs if anything because they either play on really bad servers (i.e. anywhere not in close proximity to Korea or China), are playing in a country where PC gaming is really unpopular (i.e. Japan), or are having their tier-2 league infrastructure gutted by Riot (i.e. Europe and North America.)
Latin America is in a fairly unique spot where geography screws them out of learning the metas of Tier 1 regions, but also that LatAM North, LatAM South and Brazil combined have as many if not more players than North America, but they’re treated as a tier-2 region and only get two play-in spot for MSI and Worlds, which is dumb when Japan only has like… a million active players yet LJL gets the same number of spots as CBLOL. If Riot invested a lot more into CBLOL and LLA and gave the region 2 seeds each into MSI/Worlds, I can see Latin America doing well.
Did I also forget to mention that the competitive super-server where you need an account in at least Diamond League on any other region to even join is geographically based in China?
A true underdog story would be PSG Talon, Detonation, GAM, LOUD, Cloud9 or even G2 winning Worlds, and even then I think PSG would be most likely because of the proximity to China and Korea.
I think DRX will be remembered more as the team who stole Faker’s fourth Worlds trophy.