As almost my entire prediction team, including guest predictors, are either from Knife or lessthanthree, this week's predictions will deviate from the norm. These will also be the last predictions I do for ENSL -- hopefully someone will step in and do predictions for Season 2 when the time arrives. With that said, let's go YEAHHH:

The two teams facing each other in the ENSL Grand Finals have been the top two undisputed teams in Europe for quite some time now. While Knife has historically been the stronger team, lessthanthree have grown gradually stronger, both by means of recruiting new highly skilled players and by constantly improving the skills of the rest of their team.

Both teams have their fair share of veteran players, with very strong all round rosters. While Knife can be predicted to have stronger Fade play -- although lessthanthree's fades are by no means unskilled -- Bugstah's Lerking aims to make up for that deficiency.

Probable lineup (lessthanthree):
- Bugstah! (Commander/early Lerk)
- BenjamiN (Fade)
- wltrs
- pui (aka. Pizza)
- anderval
- a.A
- Ed|Rush

Probable lineup (Knife):
- Fana (Fade)
- morphz (Fade)
- mu (Fade)
- b1
- Evilness (Commader/Lerk)
- frG
- Swirl

With both teams probably swapping out some players mid round to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of certain players. BenjamiN will for example probably not play on lessthanthree's marine rounds.

To do a bit of history, these teams have faced each other twice in officials, most recently in the GamingOrb semi-finals. Knife won that match 3-1, although lessthanthree were missing certain key players according to themselves. They also played in the first week on ENSL, which resulted in a 2-2 tie. In the ENSL both teams have mirrored each other, matching results in every round, finishing with 12/4 equal scores and one forfeit win each. While these teams have never faced each other officially on ns_veil, they marine tied on ns_lost in the ENSL week 1 match. It can be theorized that this is why lessthanthree picked that map for this match, hoping to capitalize on their apparent strength on it.

As already mentioned, lessthanthree picked ns_lost as their map, while Knife chose ns_veil. Both maps are known to be fairly marine biased, with ns_veil probably being the least marine biased of the two. Bugstah!'s early Lerk will probably be a big asset on both maps, especially on ns_lost.

What might be an issue for lessthanthree is their inexperience with big matches such as this, as they've never actually played in a tournament finals before. Although several of their players have with previous clans, this is their first collective chance to win an ns tournament. Knife on the other hand have been in several, always coming out on top in the end. Knife definitely has the experience advantage here, which could play a role in this match.

As I can't make an unbiased prediction for obvious reasons, I urge you all to add your own predictions to the comments of this news post. It's going to be a huge match, so be sure not to miss it (21:00 CET on Tuesday the 12th of July)!

Finishing off, I'd also like to congratulate Nirgal on his domination of the Predictors charts, finishing with an amazing 19/40 ratio, making 49% of the predictions.