VCT community losing their minds over MIBR loss to Envy is the biggest self report of knowing nothing about Valorant.
The state of Valorant is extremely variance based, more than ever before. There is no theoretical gameplan that is capable of consistently out performing players who are making good intuitive plays. You guys need to understand that since 2023 the game has slowly been shifting towards individual skill being more and more reliable than theory. Even the best "theory" teams on planet earth are struggling right now to maintain any level of consistency. NRG, G2, FNC etc.
What exactly does this mean though? It means that players have improved as individuals far more than teams have improved the theory and it is not even close. When this happens the skill gap shrinks more and more. We have meta changes every couple of months that basically soft reset every team and map, we have a ranked system that gives no value to teamplay so upcoming players are all disproportionally better at fighting than game understanding. Combine all of this with the main "strategy" and "utility" being all on the duelist (Neon & Waylay) and of course, individualism will shine. To kill a stunned player, you used to have to find them with a sova dart, stun off audio & then jett dash on them. Now you can monkey into the bombsite and find them yourself, stun them yourself and kill them yourself. There is no teamplay designed into this meta at all so do not be surprised when these super teams struggle to consistently beat scrappy teams like Envy.
Just think about how stupid the mechanics are from yoru, waylay & neon. Waylay and neon can get caught off in the most terrible position and just 1:1 counter stun any punishment, on what planet does that belong in an FPS game? What is the point in having the game designed in a way that initiators support the duelist when the duelists have better utility than every agent in the entire game including agents designed to have only supportive utility like breach. Genuinely think about that for a second, breach is awful in terms of self sufficiency so you would imagine the stun would be insane, the flash would be insane for the team etc. Since you cannot use it yourself. But nope, phoenix and yoru both have better flashes, neon and waylay both had INSTA cast better stuns, and yoru / waylay somehow has a better site disrupting ult than breach bro. The games design was always leading in this direction and if you cannot see that you are blind. Once the design team landed on "hey lets give duelists better site exec ults than initiators" you already know the game is completely fried. What in the world is the identity of this game anymore LOL the roles are so fake it is insane.
Teams like MIBR will win in the long run once they really figure out maps, theory, how they wanna adapt to different play styles on each map etc. But as far as random losses like this you are an idiot to be surprised that they got ran down by Keznit, Demon 1 Egg+Poppin (Who literally went on the best t2 run in the history of the game in the best t2 region) and Rossy who is also a primed up shooter when running it down.
TLDR:
individual meta
game design is for individualism
meta changes = higher variance in matchups
matches all have variance so consistently winning is impossible, you will always see upsets especially in an unsolved newer meta