Cedarville Marvel Rivals team wins first game in roaring start to the season 

By Balen Allain

Cedarville’s Marvel Rivals team confidently terminated Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in a 3-0 sweep on Thursday to start the Esports season. 

A game of Marvel Rivals consists of three match types: Domination, Convoy and Convergence. In Domination, the team must capture a point before the enemy does. In Convoy, the team stays near a payload to escort it across the map while the other team stops them. Convergence is Domination and Convoy combined – escort the payload to a point, capture that point, repeat twice. 

The rounds are based on a timer, so victory depends on best completion of the objective. 

There are six players on a team and a roster of characters each player can pick. Teams ban and protect certain characters before a match starts. 

The transition from last year’s team to this year’s was smooth. Everyone was feeling confident, fresh off largely successful practice scrimmages. 

Cooper “Disciple_91” Brackney was a substitute player last year, but he never needed to step in. Despite a bit of a headache, he was looking forward to the game. 

“Integrating in [the team] has been just fine,” he said. “It’s a been a lot more fun to play – a lot more coordination. I think we’re going to do fine this season.” 

Ben “PhysX” Jones, still team captain, was excited to get back into the competition. They’ve been practicing over the summer and the first few weeks of the fall semester. 

“I think we’ve gotten a lot better since last year,” Jones said. “We’re playing more to our pace rather than letting the other team pace us.” 

True to his word, the first match, Domination, started in their favor. They charged in and pushed Alberta off point. After they claimed most of the point, Alberta came back with a vengeance, holding the plate to 70%. The Yellow Jackets reclaimed the point and earned the first round. They didn’t let Alberta gain an arm or a leg in the second round, putting the game 1-0 for Cedarville. 

“I think we could have been a little bit more locked in, but we just did the game plan,” Logan “log_hoffman” Hoffman said. “Our communication was good today, positioning was mostly good – we had one bad pick.” 

On to Convoy, Cedarville took the role of the attacker and played it well. Alberta only brought the payload just under a sixth of the way, 96 meters. Only a minute into defending the payload, they crushed Alberta’s distance and put the game at 2-0. 

Across both rounds, Hoffman playing a tank character – someone who protects the team by taking damage – absorbed a total of 85,000 damage. A typical tank blocks 25-35,000. 

“Basically, he fought their entire team by himself and won,” Jared “Sphinx” Toyer said. 

Hoffman chalked it up to the character he was playing, Devil Dinosaur. 

Convergence, game point, was brutal for Alberta. They couldn’t move the payload at all, and they couldn’t stop the Yellow Jackets from progressing past zero meters for the 3-0 triumph. 

Philip “Lazr boy453” Parker, the other new addition to the team, described the game as a “hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby” situation. 

Logan “H3RSCH” Herschberger wasn’t too enthralled with the game. 

“It’s unfortunate for both of us,” he said. “Good games happen when two good teams play each other.” 

Jones was satisfied with their performance. 

“We played fine, executed what we wanted to do,” he said. “Good win for us for sure.” 

Their next game is tomorrow at 9 p.m. Cedarville Esports normally streams on YouTube and Twitch, at Cedarville Esports Team. Old streams are viewable as VODs. 

Balen Allain is a senior Broadcasting, Digital Media, and Journalism major focusing on Audio and Journalism. He enjoys gaming, writing fiction, and making music, and is working on a book.