Majors 2016–2018: Brazil takes over, then Denmark takes everything

One roster, two organisations

The most common trap in this era is that Luminosity Gaming and SK Gaming were the same five players. FalleN, coldzera, fer, TACO and fnx won Columbus under one banner in March 2016 and Cologne under another in July. Later the same core, with rotations, became MIBR. A line-up round from 2016 is therefore about reading the year and the logo together, not the names.

Gambit and the value of an underdog

Gambit's win in Kraków is the era's great outlier: a roster nobody had as a contender, led by Zeus a few months after he left Natus Vincere. It is the kind of result our difficulty grading is designed to capture — several of those players have exactly one elite title, which makes them high-value answers.

The Astralis blueprint

Astralis arrived twice. The Atlanta win in January 2017 was the breakthrough with Kjaerbye; London in September 2018 was the start of the dominant version, with Magisk in that seat. Everything else — device, dupreeh, Xyp9x, gla1ve — stayed the same, which is why the Kjaerbye-versus-Magisk detail is the single most useful piece of Astralis trivia there is.

Cloud9's Boston win sits in between and remains the only Major won by a North American roster. That uniqueness makes it the most guessed and most quizzed North American line-up in the game.

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