The League of Legends Mid Season Invitational (MSI) will return in May after last year’s tournament was cancelled. Riot Games have revealed the group draw and more information on the winner’s prize.
The Spring champions from every competitive LoL region will travel to Reykjavík, Iceland to compete for the MSI trophy in hopes of increasing their region’s chances at the World Championships later this year.
Riot has revealed that once again, the team that wins MSI this year will earn an additional Worlds qualification slot for their region. In addition to that, the highest-ranked region following the conclusion of MSI will also receive an additional qualification slot.
If the highest-ranked region also won the MSI title, that slot will instead be given to the next-highest ranked region. Not much is known on how exactly Riot calculates these rankings.
MSI will have a slightly different format this year as the international event will begin with the Group Stages rather than a Play-In tournament which would typically decide the final seeds. Instead, every wildcard region will have a chance to compete in the full tournament.
Riot has used results from the last two years of international competition to decide each region’s seeding before Tom Martell, global director of operations at Riot Games, used software to randomly draw three groups of four teams.
Group A will feature representatives from China’s LoL Pro League (LPL), the Vietnam Championship Series (VCS), Russia and surrounding countries’ LoL Continental League (LCL), and the LoL Circuit Oceania (LCO).
Group B will be made up of representatives from the LoL European Championship (LEC) – who currently hold the MSI title – as well as Southeast Asia’s Pacific Championship Series (PCS), the Turkish Championship League (TCL), and Campeonato Brasileiro de League of Legends (CBLoL).
That leaves Group C topped by LoL Champions Korea – which produced last year’s World Champions – alongside representatives from North America’s LoL Championship Series, the Latin America League (LLA), and the LoL Japan League.
Each team will play a best-of-one against every team in their group twice. The top two teams from each group will advance to the next round, which will be a new Rumble stage.
The Rumble will put those six teams into a single group and will feature the same best-of-one, double round robin format as Groups. The top four teams will advance to the Semi-Finals where the tournament will be conducted in a best-of-five, playoff bracket to decide a champion.
The 2021 MSI tournament will begin on May 6 before concluding May 22.
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