UK esports organisation Verdant have planted 206 trees – one per each round win at Epic 42 – after their Counter-Strike team were crowned champions at the LAN event.
The org made the pledge ahead of the tournament, and their team delivered.
They beat Invictum in the final, ahead of third-place Get BDog’d and fourth-place The Last Resort (TLR).
The Verdant CS2 roster at Epic 42 consisted of:
- Tom ‘arTisT’ Clarke (Ireland)
- Callum ‘Girafffe’ Jones (England)
- Mason ‘Vacancy’ Haines (English)
- Rémi ‘Diviiii’ Alexandre (France)
- Matas ‘Extinct’ Strumila (Ireland)
- Ciaran ‘biscu’ King (Ireland) – Coach
There were 30 teams taking part in the CS2 tournament, with £3,500 up for grabs (and Verdant taking home £1,750 for first place).
Verdant player Diviiii was also named MVP at the event.
Verdant are known for being eco-conscious. Back in early 2022, Verdant and now-closed org Lucent Esports planted trees based on their teams’ in-game performances in Division 2 of the Northern League of Legends Championship (NLC), the EMEA Regional League (ERL) for the UK, Ireland and Nordics.
Overall, they have funded 2,177 trees to date, as shown on the Verdant Ecologi page.
Epic.LAN historian and league ops manager, Tom ‘Gumpster’ Gumbleton, told Esports News UK that arTisT, Giraffe and Extinct have now become some of the best players to date, in terms of titles won at Epic.LAN.
arTisT and Giraffe have five titles apiece, and Extinct is the event’s most successful team player with eight titles to his name.
There are stats from the event, courtesy of Finn, here:
Verdant’s journey at Epic 42
Verdant founder Sam ‘Sami’ Cunningham shared more details with Esports News UK on the org’s CS2 roster.
“Less than three weeks before the event we decided to drop Mohamad ‘Ducky’ Nourelden and return Matas ‘Extinct’ Strumila to Verdant’s starting roster,” Sami said.
“As well as this, when Remi joined he took up the AWPer role from arTisT and arTisT moved into a rifling role, whilst continuing to IGL.
“We went undefeated (7-0) in the group stage but faced technical issues with our rental PCs (needed due to several players travelling from abroad). This led to some games being far closer than expected on day one, such as winning 13-11 to Get BDog’d where we narrowly avoided overtime, thanks to Vacancy winning a 3v1 in the last round.”
Verdant reverse swept Belfast Storm 2-1 in the upper bracket quarter finals, then on day two, they swapped out the rental PCs but were still facing some issues with performance. Despite this, they beat TLR 2-1 in the upper semis.
From here, the games were on HLTV and Verdant used other players’ PCs, beating Invictum in the upper bracket final and again on the Sunday, after a 2-0 grand final result.
The win has moved Verdant up six places to 80th in the official Valve Rankings.
Oasis Verde deny Exo Clan a third straight title in Valorant
Newcomers to Epic.LAN, Oasis Verde, managed to beat everyone during the Valorant tournament at Epic 42.
Their team, consisting of MVP Corsa, Mally, Jackal, skeleton69 and avey, denied Exo Clan a third straight title between the core players (Lew6th, Lukey and rudiVAL). Exo’s roster also featured young and W1LL.
Oasis took home £1,350, while Exo received £650.
‘3.0 Hog EQ’ finished third and ‘Elo and Muscle’ were fourth.
Thanks again to Gumpster for the info.
There are more stats on Epic 42 Valorant on TheSpike website here.
Munich Esports Infrared win Overwatch 2 tournament at Epic 42
Munich Esports Infrared’s roster of Orpheus, G4sich, luauOW, Luk49er and Charlton won Epic 42, taking home £750. The German team had most of their players fly in to compete.
Second-place Big Stick Gaming – featuring Iicx, Natnnif, AngyOtter, Kimina and Fqlse – won £300.
“Whilst we cobbled together four teams, it was eventually the German team of Munich Esports Infrared who took the title, they were solid all weekend and didn’t really look like losing at any point,” said Epic.LAN’s Gumpster.
“The two teams we did cobble together to fight the two big teams did relatively well and enjoyed themselves, despite never really playing competitive OW2 before!”
Zynyata and Adam’s Calippo finished third and fourth respectively.
RiSky continues Epic.LAN SC2 dominance with a record 13 titles
In StarCraft II, RiSky has extended his title lead, with a record extending 13th title this event, Gumpster told us.
The final went the distance between the challenger (Iba) and RiSky, but the old guard of RiSky laid down the marker and remains an undisputed UK great.
Aicy was named tournament MVP.
There’s more info on UK StarCraft 2 and Epic.LAN stories in our history piece on the game here, and SC2 Epic 42 results and participants on Liquipedia.
Epic.LAN also had an escape room experience and ‘The Dark Room’ show at Epic 42.
Organisers also mentioned how popular the summer LAN was:
You can also see all the talent listed at the event in this Twitter thread:
See the full list of Epic 42 esports teams and rosters on the Epic.LAN website and grab tickets to Epic 43 here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
