How Flyquest Won the Summer

            After a unprecedented Spring Split, filled with delays due to Covid-19, online playoffs, and the fall of Team Liquid, one team managed to stand above the rest and conquer the league. That team obviously, was Flyquest.

            Now, the observant reader may say “wait, didn’t Cloud 9 hoist the trophy after obliterating Flyquest in the finals? How did Flyquest win Spring?” While, it might be true that Flyquest was 2^nd place in the standings for the split, Powered by their new CEO Tricia Sugita, Flyquest has made the team a stand out success in the eyes of fans and has painted themselves a plan to become one of the most well liked orgs within North American esports.

            For a long time, NA was ruled by 4 big esports orgs. C9, TSM, TL, and CLG (you will be relevant again one day). These orgs are still the only ones to have ever won a domestic title, they have had all the superstars, and they with that, had a vast majority of the fans. Sure, you could find your Renegades die hard here or there, but overall if you were a fan in NA, you were most likely a fan of one of those 4 teams. With franchising came the opportunity for new orgs to enter the league and carve out their own fan bases, and Flyquest….kinda floundered out the gate. Their initial roster in 2017 was filled out with a lot of the old C9 players who brought in fans because there was a certain love of the old Cloud 9 that Flyquest got to carry with them. This however did little to give Flyquest their own brand, and instead lead to them getting nicknamed Cloud 9 white.

With 2018, they can with a rebrand scrapping their old logo and roster in order to build a new team for franchising, and this came with……middling results. They new roster preformed okay, but not great in the LCS, and their brand left something to be desired. 100 Theives came in with really cool merch and the personality of Nadeshot, Golden Guaridans floundered in the standings, but tightly tied themselves to the Golden State Warriors brand and an underdog mentality. Clutch took their Texas feel and titan slayer mentality as they handed TSM their first ever quarterfinal exit. Then, there was Flyquest. Flyquest was just there, another middle of the pack LCS team with some likeable players, but nothing to really bring people in. While, the brand wasn’t making mistakes, they also weren’t making any moves in order to set themselves apart. Here, enters Tricia Sugita.

Tricia Sugita came in to Flyquest at the start of the year with the task of taking a decent LCS team, and making them a great one. Flyquests mission statement was to inspire greatness, and it was time to do just that. For their roster, they kept seasoned veterans Wilderturtle and Santorin, and brought in European power in the form of PowerofEvil (yeah, yeah, been in NA for a lil bit, but still an EU mid) and Ignar. As well as keeping young talent of Viper in top lane (who would be replaced by Solo mid split, but we will get into that later). Overall, this roster was full of players that are generally well liked in the community, have had success but are at this moment, not superstars when it comes to the LCS. Flyquest was by no means a super team, they didn’t make any huge headline making moves this year. Instead, they build a reliable core of solid players and trusted to make success out of it. While the makeup of a roster is not the entirety of a brand, if your roster backs up your brand, it can be a huge bonus. Here there is an understanding that, Flyquest isn’t trying to be a TSM or a Team Liquid. They didn’t make some huge roster moves in the offseason in order to build a super team. They just built a solid foundation and trusted their orgs infulstructure to build a championship team off the back of reliable players, which I feel like works really well with what Flyquest’s message is, to bring the greatness out of players. They didn’t grab players that were already labeled as great, but instead built a roster in order to make them great.

Now, I have managed to go 750 words without brining up the real reason Flyquest has been so successful this year. The “Go Green” project. The idea behind it seems really simple, a promise to become for environmental sustainability to esports. It’s execution however, was done spectacularly. Firstly came “The Greenhouse”, a training facility that was announced not with its price tag or or sponserships, instead this was the statement that was givin by Sugita

“The Greenhouse also allows for daily interaction between the players and the business staff. Players feel more involved with what we’re trying to create together, as they can really see how much we care about what we do. It’s early, but we are already seeing the positive effects on not just the players, but the business staff, too, of truly being united under one vision, one goal. They want to be here, they want to work hard, and they want to win.”

It makes the facility a place of growth not just for the players but the entire organization. This continues the trend of growth within the org, which they would bring to their LCS team in game as well.

            This was accompanied by a promise by Flyquest, to plant a lot of trees during the course of the Spring Split, with kills, wins, and ocean drake all contributing to the number of trees that would be planted. While, these rest of this campaign was perfect setup for the new Flyquest, this is what made that new brand popular. The casters were making jokes about it, the analyst desk brought it up. It was talked about by everyone on Twitter when it was announced, and it caused other teams to eventually team up with Flyquest in order to ride the wave. Treequest made the reddit front page and completely changed the language in which Flyquest was talked about. Flyquest was no longer another middle tier LCS team, they were Treequest, the heros not of NA, but of mother nature.

            Flyquest leaned into this brand, with their jerseys sporting flowers, to compliment the normal Green and White, fully embrancing the growth and sustainability that their braned had taken on. When the regular season split was done, Flyquest had already won, they had turned their entire brand around and made it stand for something unique within the LCS. Then, came the miracle playoff run. Now, to call the playoff run a miracle is sort of an overstatement. While they did have to fight through losers, the LCS this season was one where anyone can beat anyone, and Cloud 9 wins, so it was hardly a shock to see Flyquest find themselves in the finals. The finals may have been a lopsided affair as well, but with the dominance of C9, that is hardly a surprise. Finishing in second place was the best that any org could realistically hope for barring some form of collapse out of Cloud 9. This second place finish though shows a turnaround for the entire brand, a middling LCS team without an identity manages to find itself both on and off the rift in order to contest the top of the league.

            Time will tell exactly how successful the Flyquest rebrand has been and if Flyquest can continue this momentum into a stronger split as they face up against a TL ready for redemption and a reunited TSM as well as the existing juggernauts in the league. What can be said though, is that Flyquest has planted the seeds to become one of the premier organizations in esports, and they deserve all the praise that they can get for that.