Volamel
2017-04-16 05:10:52
To the pleasure of some but, to the dismay of others, CONBOX Spirit remains in OGN’s APEX Overwatch League as its perennial dark horse team. After repeat performances that left much to be desired, in both Season 1 and Season 2, CONBOX retains their grit and defies all expectations to advance convincingly out from the Super Week Promotion tournament. This gives CONBOX a Season 3 birth, not as favorites to create any upsets, but as an unshakeable staple of the Korean Overwatch scene that refuses to fall. Being one of eight teams to have been accepted into every season of the most prestigious tournament in Overwatch, will this be CONBOX’s time to shine?
Does CONBOX have the spirit to trace the path that Runner and RunAway laid after being faced with the same dilemma, or will they remain, just as they always have, middle to bottom of the pack? Context is important here with CONBOX. To accurately judge and predict their outcome, we have to take a brief look back at their players and their history as a team.
At it’s most purest form, “spirit” by definition is the nonphysical portion of someone, where emotions and their characteristics lie — the soul. CONBOX has a plethora of soul, most of which comes from their leader, Noh "Gamsu" Yeong Jin.
Formerly of Samsung Blue, Fnatic and Dignitas fame, this top talent threw caution to the wind and fully transitioned to Overwatch late in the summer of 2016. Taking his prior experience with tanky frontline heroes, Gamsu is known for his Winston and is fantastic on Reinhardt. With such tenure and first-hand exposure to esports, Gamsu leads with a confident, but cautious foot forward for the CONBOX roster. In an interview with Inven Global [1] Gamsu commented on their convincing win in APEX Season 2 over Mighty Storm: “Mighty Storm was reported to be far weaker than their sister team, Mighty AOD, which we had already defeated in the final offline qualifier on our road to APEX. I was hesitant to buy into such complacency, but all six of us did clearly outclass our counterparts today.” Not only did CONBOX have a relatively easy time in the promotion tournament, they approached it with some very creative play.
In their first match of the tournament they played against MVP Space; more importantly, they drew Oasis as their control map. This allowed CONBOX to showcase a fantastic version of a very aggressive, Sombra focused dive composition piloted by Lee "Twilight" Joo Seok. Many questions encircle Twilight during his past season's performances, especially on Ana. But, rest assured — his Sombra play on each Control map was intelligent, impactful and downright impressive.
Twilight’s Sombra play is something that teams will have to take seriously take note of if they face off against CONBOX during APEX Season 3. But, can his Ana play be brought up to the same level as his Sombra or will they devalue Ana in favor of more Sombra focused compositions? His hero pool is quite “wide” in terms of how many heroes Twilight can play — this includes: Sombra, Reaper, Ana and Zenyatta. Throughout the promotion tournament, we’ve seen him flex to any one of those heroes, given the correct circumstance. Twilight’s Ana is still up for debate, however. We didn’t see much Ana from Twilight in the promotion tournament, rather we saw more Zenyatta on Payload and second point Hybrid maps and Sombra on Control and Assault maps. These newly developed and creative strategies also come to a head with a parody to their newest recruits.
Park “Architect” Min Ho is the newest star Genji player to dash onto the scene. Separating himself from his peers, we’ve seen Architect play a good amount of Pharah to a mixed degree of success while most of his dominant performances in the Super Week Promotion tournament came with Genji. Not only has CONBOX drafted one great DPS player, they’ve also snatched up Choi “Asher” Joon Seong, a star Tracer player. These two coupled together could become the new “dynamic duo” on the APEX block. Architect held a fantastic 1.2 kill/death ratio throughout their games in the promotion tournament.
While the sample size is quite small, hopefully, Architect will continue to perform up to the standard he did during Super Week. Asher, on the other hand, performed just as fantastic, finding perfect flanks and landing multiple double and triple kills as Tracer with Pulse Bomb, specifically in their match versus Rhinos Gaming Wings. We have not seen much out of this duo, so it is very difficult to value them with such little data points. This raises another question for CONBOX to answer: coming into season 3 of APEX, can the new DPS duo of Asher and Architect continue to grow as players over the break? Time will most certainly tell, but two players who we should be familiar with at this point remain on the CONBOX roster.
Along with Gamsu and Twilight, Lee “Sleepybear” Geum Yong returns as the star Roadhog player from Season 2 and remains a solid anchor (no pun intended) on the CONBOX squad. However, Super Week was not kind to Roadhog’s pick rate and Sleepybear found himself playing more D.va then anything else. Not to say that Roadhog wasn’t played, just that D.va — by an overwhelming margin was played more.
CONBOX has always been known for their tank line and Sleepybear provides a solid second line of defense for his supports and to aid Gamsu in engaging team fights. Coming into a possible metagame with the new Lucio changes going live, tanks may be favored again. This provides a small amount of foreshadowing for what the early half of APEX Season 3’s regular season could possibly look like. If Sleepybear stays consistent with his tank play, who knows what could be in store for CONBOX.
The last member to round out the original CONBOX T6 roster from Seasons 1 and 2 is Park “Oparochi” Hyun Joon. He plays twin to Sleepybear’s consistency, but on a more supportive role. As the team’s resident Lucio player, the new changes allow Oparochi and fellow Lucio enthusiasts more of an impact on the game. With 25% more damage, Oparochi not only is a solid communicator and leader on the team, but can add some much-needed frags on the board if he so chooses to. Not only with the damage increase, but the way that his healing work now makes him more capable to; A.) assist with a dive into the enemy team or B.) stick on his tank line and zone people away.
Their Season 2 run was less than stellar given the group CONBOX was placed in. They found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Cloud 9, KongDoo Uncia and Afreeca Freecs Blue. Early on in the regular season, CONBOX was surprisingly close to making it into the second group stage of the tournament. A few games go a different way, even as losses if they were able to take 2 more maps off of any of the teams in the group, they could have easily avoided possible relegation. Fate decided otherwise and CONBOX met an early demise, but not before sending a message to Afreeca Freecs in a huge upset, defeating Arhan and company, 3-2.
From the end of their Season 2 run leading into the Super Week Promotion tournament, we’ve seen CONBOX leaning towards being on an upward trend in overall skill. Like we talked about before, the new Lucio changes could usher a more tank favored metagame back into favor. In an interview I did with Seb “numlocked” Barton [2], he touches on this very notion of going back to the dreaded “death ball” meta. He mentions the recent patched in Lucio changes, stating; “... if Blizzard go through with those changes, we’re going to go back to death ball tank comps which are super anti-fun.” This possibly could be the way that CONBOX finds their first playoffs birth, or at least impacts the regular season standings enough to retain their APEX spot.
Something else that also plays into CONBOX’s favor is the way they choose to play the game. Their overall strategy is something that teams are going to be forced to prepare heavily for. Most teams are shoehorned into one or two specific strategies; whether it be aggressive dive or more passive triple tank play, they tend to not deviate away from their wheelhouse. On the contrary to that note, teams like CONBOX and Meta Athena tend to always have an “ace up their sleeves” at all times, being able to look at the game from a different angle. If teams do not respect the creativity, ingenuity and newfound power in the form of Asher and Architect, then they could fall at the hands of the dark horses of APEX.
The newest DPS duo to break out onto the scene, Asher and Architect have been impressive, to say the least, but we have to remember; CONBOX was playing against fairly lesser opponents. As their freshman showing on the biggest stage of them all, will they crumble under the pressure to perform or will they exceed expectation and impact the APEX bracket with fantastic play? As unknown quantities, Asher and Architect have a lot of pressure on their shoulders as do the staples remaining from the original CONBOX roster. This could play a crucial role in CONBOX and the team developing any other creative strategies coming into APEX Season 3. Is it their time for the CONBOX spirit to shine or will someone steal away the spotlight and the show? APEX Season 3 is the battleground in which that question will be answered.
The theme of creativity and a certain level of mystique are paramount throughout this feature, but do not doubt the spirit of CONBOX, for they are quite capable of standard play. CONBOX has found their team color and is trying to implement their own style to their respective games. They are not propped up by gimmicks and tricks, rather CONBOX is testing the waters, trying to innovate and use every tool at their disposal. Now on a three-game winning streak, CONBOX looks ahead to take Season 3 and possibly to make a splash in the playoffs for their first time. After a narrow win over Afreeca Freecs Blue towards the end of Season 2, the team looked to be on an upwards trend. Most notably, Sleepybear played a pivotal role, coming into his own with amazing Roadhog play. Remember that this win over Afreeca was before they acquired their new DPS players. Had they signed Architect and Asher before the match, the series would have been much more interesting. Yes, there are still some problems that have to be addressed before this team really hits “full bloom”. But, after RunAway’s cinderella story grand finals appearance, CONBOX may surprise a lot of people. Even if it is as simple as making playoffs for the first time, it would be an improvement over the last two seasons. With this new roster, the upward trend of CONBOX could very well continue, if only to get them to the playoffs. A myriad of questions surround the CONBOX as a team, but they have proven one thing over these last few seasons; they have the resilience to remain.
Written by: @Volamel
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment, Team Contents Box and OGN.
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/55/ogn-apex-d2-conbox-t6-gamsu-runaway-runner [1]