No Phoenix and Team Liquid Valorant as first blood kings: VCT Masters Reykjavík stats

Declan Mclaughlin
The Valorant Masters Iceland stage.

Valorant Champions Tour Stage 1 Masters Reykjavík has ended and has left fans and analysts with troves of information to sift through. The most interesting stats from VCT Masters, however, deal with agent and map pick rates, along with first blood success rate.

VCT Masters Reykjavík was filled with compelling storylines, record breaking performances and ended with OpTic Gaming bringing a trophy back to North America. With the amount of games and interregional competition, there are bound to be statistics that fans and analysts will look through to draw conclusions from.

Some of the more interesting data from VCT Masters deals with players performance statistics, provided by VLR.gg, and who stands out among the crowd along with map and agent pick rates.

For the latter, Phoenix, the hot-shot British Duelist, did not see a single second of play across the entire competition. The agent’s pick rate has been on a downward spiral as more characters have been introduced to the game, but even the likes of Yoru and Reyna have found niche success and made at least one appearance at VCT Masters.

Phoenix splash art from Riot Game's Valorant
The last time Phoenix was played at a major Valorant tournament was VCT Masters Berlin.

Yoru and Reyna only saw a smattering of games, two and one respectively, with a combined record of 1-2. Ninjas in Pyjamas piloted Reyna on Icebox in a 13-4 loss to DRX while Paper Rex ran Yoru on Bind in their two matches on the map and came away 1-1 beating G2 Esports and losing to DRX.

VCT Masters map picks

Valorant only has seven maps at the moment and all are available in for pick and bans in official competitions. Every map saw some kind of play at VCT Masters and the stats from the event show the crossover in map pools across regions and teams.

The two highest picked maps were Ascent and Icebox at 12 games played with Split and Haven coming in as second and third with 10 and nine, respectively.

Valorant's fifth map Icebox
Almost every team at VCT Masters played Icebox.

Overall at the tournament, the defending side won more rounds but just barely at 51 percent across all maps. Acsent, Split and Fracture were the most defensive sided at 54 percent and Breeze was the leader in attacking sided wins at 59 percent across the map’s three appearances at VCT Masters.

Individual players stats

The biggest statistical outliers at VCT Masters belong to Team Liquid and their core players in Nabil ‘Nivera’ Benrlitom, Elias ‘Jamppi’ Olkkonen and Adil ‘ScreaM’ Benrlitom. Despite losing out in the first round of the playoffs, after fighting through the group stage, all three are in the top 15 of players in terms of Kills/Deaths ratio.

ScreaM also topped the event with the highest average combat score at 260.5 and was also fifth in Kill/Assist/Survive and Trade percentage at 75 percent.

The three players also appeared in the top 10 of players with the highest first blood success rate, winning the opening duel for their team more often than not. In a post compiled from using stats from rib.gg, willminder showcased how Nivera and ScreaM topped the list in a crowd full of players who finished in the top four at the event.

NIP’s Alexandre ‘xand’ Zizi also stands out as another outlier considering his team was one of the first to leave the tournament.

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About The Author

Based in Indiana, Declan McLaughlin is an esports reporter for Dexerto Esports covering Valorant, LoL and anything else that pops up. Previously an editor and reporter at Upcomer, Declan is often found reading investigative stories or trying to do investigations himself. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Indiana University. You can contact him at declan.mclaughlin@dexerto.com.