Season Two Predictions

Season Two of the Worldwide Discord L5R league is now underway! Following the successful pod experiment of the November pre-season this will follow the same format. Each player should play every other player in their pod over the month. At the end the top two of each pod will go through to a winners league  that will run in sync with the regular season (I do not know if the intention is for players to play in both - It would make more sense (perhaps) for the top 12 of the winners league to perhaps get auto entry to the next winners league with others having to return to the standard pod league to re-earn their places). Currently due to the leagues success a playoff is also envisaged to fill the 16 extra spaces not taken by the top two!

This is also the first league where the majority of participants are carrying a historical ELO rating so in the interests of sportsmanship I want to give a quick look over the current pods to see if we can ascertain any interesting pointers on each. I also intend to give an educated guess as to who will potentially be the winners of certain pods.

Some of the pods cannot be guessed at. Due to excessive 'new' players of unknown strength several pods are uncallable. In this circumstance I would place pods three, four,  seven, nineteen and twenty. With these who knows! Several more pods have single, known, dominant players so we have

Pod Two - Hienzel
Pod Eight - Shiba Inu
Pod Eleven - Togashi Komhl
Pod Thirteen: Kingsley
Pod Fifteen: Stormblessed
Pod Eighteen: Erik (Crane version)
  

For the rest though

Pod One:             A  competent pod. The majority of players are experienced with my guess for the top two being qkieu in first place and Tenchuu or Lonelily fighting it out for second.

Pod Five:              Similar structure to one. I would guess at Shiba Travis and Daidoji Clegane being at the top

Pod Six:                This is the elite 'pod of death' this league round. All bar two players are ranked above 1500 and 4! above 1700. It will be fascinating to see who wins through especially as the top four all have scores within 80 of each other. I would expect any of MindsDesire, Kaza, Anemone or Mirith to make it through.

Pod Nine:            A little more uncertain than the others my suggested winners are Hatomoto Joe from Cincinnati and theGreatWestie a successful Lion player from the pre-season. Though with a large number of unknowns this could be a surprise pod.

Pod Ten:              This has a good mix of players of all ability so all being equal Bayushi Nomen and Stayven 'should' make it through.

Pod Twelve:       Another nicely mixed pod I give the nod to Daidoji_Micah  with Ide 'The Hat' Satiro and Schlorgadorb perhaps fighting it out for second place.

Pod Fourteen - My favourite of the pods mainly because all the players are ranked in the middle of the bell curve. If I had to guess I would say Yageru for the win but rankings are so close this could go in any direction.

Pod Sixteen - The second of the death pods, though Pod Six is more evil… Here any of VinceVelorn, Daidoji Zorzo, GravyK or DarkDistroi could be expected to do well.

Pod Seventeen: Well mixed I would expect the two leaders to be Chutereve and ltmechanicus.

Pod Twenty One:             Almost a death pod as it has 4 players over 1600 it only loses out as it has only one over 1700. That player, Kakita Katai I would expect to win with sruman, shenful, Hida MoZi, Naukas, VoidCircuit all in the mix for the other lead place.

Pod Twenty Two:             A very bell curve balanced pod this should lead to victory for Bill_jt and Erik (the Lion version)

So there are my wild and unsubstantiated predictions for the eventual pod winners. The continual release of packs will continue to break things up and push players of even ability around.