Disguised just won the Grand Finals of the LTA North / LCS Promotion Tournament against Luminosity Gaming. As such, they will keep their spot in the LCS in 2026. But, more importantly… Let’s have a look at how this tournament was an absolute fiesta!
Conviction and Estral Esports competed in the play-in match to the Promotion tournament. But for unknown reasons, KatEvolved, their mid laner, was not with Conviction for that match. As a result, they brought in their substitute player Cody Sun.
Except that Cody Sun is an ADC player, so their marksman V1per went mid lane instead. Or, mostly. Cody Sun, V1per, and TFBlade took turns playing mid, and V1per played games as bot, mid, and top laner during that series.
This is the first case of such autofill in a professional series! And to this day, it’s still unknown why KatEvolved was not playing with the team.
The first and the second matches of this tournament had a couple of pauses each. Not much, but still enough to be disturbing when one single game has three separate pauses.
The third series, however… Estral vs Disguised was a match that set records. And really not in a good way.
Image Source: LTA North
This series was played while Riot’s servers were under DDoS attacks. And it was played online, meaning that all ten players had to bear the full weight of heavy server issues. Players temporarily lost control, disconnected during fights, couldn’t re-join the game… The works.
So they paused the game when things were getting too bad. Except that, things did not stop being bad. So this series was paused for more than 3 hours.
I said that things did not stop being bad. The servers were the problem, and they were not being fixed anytime soon. So halfway through the series, after game 3, Riot announced that the series would stop here for the day, and resume on the next. By then, the broadcast had already gone on for 6 and a half hours for just 3 games.
So the match was continued on the next day, all of it to finish after one single game, and a stomp at that.
This delay meant that every following game in the tournament had to be pushed back by one day, until the finals which remained on the 12th.
During the hours of pauses, Summit, Estral’s top laner, was caught looking at the VoD of their very match. He was as such banned from the remainder of the tournament, and Estral had to go on with a substitute (including to finish the series).
The finals took place in Mexico, flying Disguised and Luminosity in for that match. But… strangely, Riot Games decided to make that match be without an audience. Furthermore, it was played in the Riot Games office. The teams weren’t even playing in the same room! So, they made them fly in just to give them the same experience as for their online games.
Image Source: LTA North
All in all, Disguised won in a not-so-convincing 3-1. Luminosity took a lead in every single game, before throwing it away all 3 times in the mid game. They took better fights, especially around Atakhan, always comfortably setting themselves in a winning position.
But Disguised was the best team at the tournament for playing with the minion waves and generally playing after 25 minutes, and they claimed 3 games back thanks to that. Convincingly or not, Disguised will now be back in the LCS to play again in 2026!
Featured Image Source: LTA North
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