NRG's Regional Success Awarded with X Games Gold Medal by RLCS

After The General NRG's impressive, if not-too-surprising win against Spacestation Gaming in the Grand Finals, the team has been awarded with some pretty amazing accolades. This includes the much-coveted X Games Gold Medal, with Spacestation coming in second with the X Games Silver Metal. Now, yes, we are currently writing an article about circular pieces of metal, but we're not going to apologize, and we do have a point.

The General NRG pretty much blasted their way to victory this winter, and it certainly looks like we can expect big things from them in the Majors. They currently sit at the top of the North American Leaderboard, with a total of 351 Circuit Points. Their competitors, Spacestation Gaming, are coming in second with a pretty fabulous (but quite distant) 300 Circuit Points. We'll get into those details later, though...

The General NRG Take Home X Games Gold Medal

NRG has been successful in winning the North American X Games Open Regional Event, bringing home the Gold Medal. The players managed their success via a pretty impressive series of games that successfully avoided a dreaded Bracket Reset in an incredible six-game-long victory. Let's be clear: this is very rare, it is very unlikely that a team would win a Championship like this in only six days.

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Ultimately, though, The General NRG's success was not purely due to their skill but also due to a Winter Split format that made their progression to the top of the leaderboard rather easy. The North American Opens started with four groups of four pushing the victor through to the Upper Brackets of the competition. Thus, with The General NRG beating Oxygen and FaZe Clan, it was an easy route to victory.

This is where the fears of a Bracket Reset came in, as The General NRG came to the Grand Finals basically undefeated. Their competitor in the finals, Spacestation Gaming, had finished second in the aforementioned groups stage, and thus needed to beat a plethora of different high-level teams to make it to the Grand Finals. They succeeded in that, but sadly failed to take home the ticket of Grand Champion. Still, their second-place win was insanely impressive.

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X GAMES GOLD SECURED WE ARE YOUR RLCS REGIONAL 1 CHAMPIONS #NRGFAM @SquishyMuffinz @Its_JSTN @GarrettG @Sizz pic.twitter.com/mmWclBikOh

— NRG (@NRGgg) January 16, 2022

Current RLCS 2021-22 North American Leaderboard

Following is the current North American Leaderboard for RLCS 2021-22's Winter Split. These numbers, which are taken as of mid-January 2022, are liable to change. You can see that The General NRG, Spacestation Gaming, FaZe Clan, Version1 and G2 Esports are currently top five.

Many people are unhappy about the format seen in the Winter Split of RLCS 2021-22, seeing this group-stage seeding as basically guaranteeing wins for certain teams. It also limits the points that certain teams can pick up, meaning that teams like Envy, XSET and Ghost Gaming ended up with abysmally small Circuit-Point counts. We don't mind it, to be honest, as it did make for a very exciting set of games.

Now that The General NRG, made up of Mariano "SquishyMuffinz" Arruda, Justin "jstn." Morales, Garrett "GarrettG" Gordon and coach Emiliano "Sizz" Benny have come out first in this stage of the Winter Split, we can be pretty sure that they will be making their way to the Majors. We can also expect that Spacestation Gaming will likely also be making their way to this coveted event, but only time will tell.

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