Maryville University and Zeu5 open the LCS Promotion Tournament play-ins
A college roster from North America's second tier met a challenger from Latin America, and Maryville's next listed series is a quarterfinal against Disguised.
LCS
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 95,234 views a day, 11 times a normal first day on this channel (8,946).
LCS Promotion Tournament | MU vs Z5 | Play-Ins | Bo5
The LCS has turned its channel to teams that are not in the league yet. The 2026 Promotion Tournament opened with a play-in between Maryville University, a college program competing in the NACL, North America's second-tier league, and Zeu5 Esports from the LRN, the regional league for northern Latin America. The full best-of-five drew about 95,000 views in its first day. A long broadcast on this channel usually opens at around 9,000.
The stakes explain some of the interest. Five teams are playing a double-elimination bracket for the 2027 LCS guest slot, and Disguised, the team founded by the streamer Disguised Toast, is defending the seat it holds. The description frames the event as the one every Tier-2 team aims for. Every series is a best-of-five with Fearless Draft, which means a champion used in one game is off the table for both teams for the rest of the series. Teams also get First Selection.
The play-in did not draw the crowd on its own. The quarterfinal between Cupid Esports and Fuego, another NACL-LRN pairing, also started well above the channel's usual pace. These uploads followed straight after the summer Championship Final, so the league's audience moved directly from the title series to the teams trying to break in.
The channel has already listed Maryville's next series: a quarterfinal against Disguised, which puts the college team up against the roster whose seat is the prize.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- LCS
- Subscribers
- 266,000 ▲ 2,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 3,109,772
- Channel views, pace per day
- 428,747 (on a normal day: 534,863)
- Video published
- October 6, 2026
- Video views so far
- 95,517 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 4,331
The numbers
For a tier-two play-in, this broadcast opened far ahead of what a long video on the league's channel usually draws.
💡 Test your knowledge
Disguised Toast, whose team is defending its LCS slot, first became known for videos about which card game?
Disguised Toast first built his following with Hearthstone content before he became known as a streamer across many games and later founded the Disguised esports organization.
