TSM ImperialHal falls to glitchy Wraith play in ALGS Scrims
The winners of the Apex Legends Global Series Split 1 Playoffs, TSM, have not been having a very good few weeks. The CEO himself, Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen, had a pretty embarrassing moment on stream during scrims for the ALGS this week. Although the moment wasn’t Hal’s fault, but the fault of the game glitching out.
Playing with Portals
While in Climatizer’s north side, ImperialHal put down a Wraith portal to help his team get to the south side with his teammate informing him the left room was clear. Hal started his Wraith ultimate and jumped into one of the hanging rail cars. The portal just barely made it to the otherside, but got placed on the car itself. When Hal tried to take the portal, it wouldn’t work.
At this point Hal also found out that there were teams on both sides of him, in the right and left rooms. He bails out with his tactical ability and as the railcar moves the Wraith portal is removed. For whatever reason, it seems instead of just leaving the Wraith portal in the air where the rail car was, the game instead removed it all together.
On his way back to his team, ImperialHal stops to pop a Phoenix Kit, but another team gets eyes on him and eliminates him. You can watch the clip here.
Searching for the Dream Team
Since this was just in scrims between ALGS weekends, there wasn’t a whole lot on the line, but Hal was clearly not happy. Over the past two weeks of the ALGS, Hal and TSM have been struggling to find a squad composition that works for them.
In the ALGS Split 1 Playoffs back in February they took first place running Seer, Valkyrie and Horizon. And while Seer and Valkyrie are still considered useful in the meta, Horizon has seen a pretty big fall off following some nerfs to her tactical ability.
Throughout the two first weekends of the ALGS Jordan "Reps" Wolfe (TSM_MNK) stayed exclusively on the Seer, which isn’t a surprise since he has a near universal pick rate at the moment. Meanwhile, we see Evan "Verhulst" Verhulst swapping back and forth between Horizon and Valkyrie based on the map or what the team thinks will be most advantageous.
ImperialHal started out on Day One playing the Bangalore, but swapped over to Catalyst the second day and has remained on her through the second week. Whether or not we’ll see Hal bring Wraith into week 3 remains to be seen. But, so far they’ve struggled to put down consistent results with their current composition.
The Struggle is Real
Fans of TSM have been disappointed to see their performance so far in the ALGS Pro League for Split 2. On the first day they placed in the top 10 only one time at 9th in Game 6. Day 2 fared a bit better with a Top 4 and 5 placement, but the rest were all out before the top 10, save one at 10th place. They had a bye for Day 3, and when they came back on Day 4 it looked like things were finally turning around for them when they took first place in game 1 with 9 kills, an incredible performance. Then they dropped the ball again, going out at 9th in game 2, followed by placing 20th, 16th, 18th and ending with an 11th in game 6.
ImperialHal and TSM are currently sitting in 18th place overall for the North America region. The Pro League is almost at the halfway point, so it’s still possible for TSM to turn things around and work their way into the top 10 to earn an invite to the Split 2 Playoffs, but they need to buckle down and either find a composition that works or figure out what is holding them back and make changes.
You can catch all of the Apex Legends Global Series Split 2 Pro League on the official Apex Legends Twitch and YouTube Channel. Matches are streamed every Saturday and Sunday until May 7th.
