Immortals Wins The NGE Overwatch Winter Premiere

Photo via twitter.com/immortals

From start-to-finish, the Immortals Overwatch squad looked like the best team in the Winter Premiere. After two months of dominating play, Immortals was able to take home the NGE Winter Premiere title at Pax South over Ghost Gaming 3-1.

It wasn’t an easy road to the finals, as Immortals had to fight through four qualifying events just to make it to Pax South. After breezing through the open play, Immortals hit their stride in the group phase, finishing first with a 4-1 record (9-5 game count). The only team that gave them trouble was the team they just defeated in the finals.

Ghost Gaming (formerly Kungarna) transformed from an unsponsored team to one of the most dangerous teams in the entire Winter Premiere. Every game, they seemed to improve and develop more chemistry in terms of positioning and team fights. Unfortunately, Immortals was the one team with enough skill and team synergy to hold off the talented Ghost Gaming squad.

Even without Nomy (David Ramirez), who couldn’t make it due to visa issues according to an Immortals spokesperson, the overall talent was enough to win the event. Immortals had to rely on their former support, Chance (Zac Palmer), to play Reinhardt. Nomy was arguably the best Reinhardt in the entire Winter Premiere. Immortals winning without him shows just how strong the team is.

The play of GrimReality (Christopher Schafer) and Agilities (Brady Girardi) were great throughout the Winter Premiere. In the four tank Overwatch meta, the Roadhog out of Agilities and the Zarya from Grim carried this team. Now, even with the meta moving away from tank heavy compositions, Grim’s McCree and Agilities’ Genji separated them from other teams.

In the finals, GrimReality was unreal. Immortals would place him on high-ground and let him do work. It almost looks like aim bot, but it’s just Grim showing off his ability to turn team fights. Even down a player, he gets instant head shots. He had multiple rounds with four or five kill team fights. It forced Ghost to target him down, leaving everyone susceptible to the strong ultimate play from Immortals.

Immortals ended up 6-1 on LAN, taking out Luminosity Gaming 3-0 in the semifinals. Immortals did a terrific job switching up team compositions, which is especially important considering the 1.7 patch just dropped two days before the event. At times, they’d switch off the classic Ana/Reinhardt and go Zenyatta/Winston. This didn’t work, but showed they were willing to try new things. In the end, getting away from the three tank compositions gave the opposition some issues.

Aythen (Athen Zhu) worked both as a healer and DPS with Ana, allowing Grimreality to get behind the enemy front with Tracer or McCree’s Dead Eye. It was a total team effort. Hyped (George Maganzini) had the most optimal use of his ultimates. He would usually clear out space with his D.Va self-destructs or strong Zarya graviton surges. All six members were crucial for Immortals to get to this spot.

It’s still early in Overwatch’s competitive life-cycle, but Immortals shows that they can compete with anyone. Next step will be seeing if they can handle the top European and Korean teams; but winning the NGE Winter Premiere is a good first step towards world domination.

You can ‘Like’ The Game Haus on Facebook and ‘Follow’ us on Twitter for more sports and esports articles from other great TGH writers along with Blake!