RFT's MSI 2026 Power Ranking: Where All Eleven Teams Stand Before Daejeon
MSI 2026 kicks off June 28 in Daejeon. Ahead of the tournament, the RFT.GG editorial team presents its power ranking of the eleven teams set to compete. From the LPL to the LCP, six regions are represented — five of them sending two seeds apiece, with only the CBLOL down to a single entry. Here is our take on how each team's title chances stack up.
One thing to keep in mind: this ranking is more about raw level, not bracket path. A team's seeding or where they start says little here — a side stuck in Play-In that may not even make it out can still rate above teams already locked into the bracket, if the talent says so. Expect movement once games are played, but this is the field as we see it before the first match.
DCG reach their first international event after a long climb out of Tier 2, and they bring pure chaos: one of the most aggressive teams at MSI, fastest average game time in the LCP at 30:54, all skirmishes and blood enabled by Wu "Pop9" Yi-Han. Rookie solo laners Lo "Flauren" Chak Kin — dubbed Hong Kong Zeus — and Guo "HongSuo" Bei-Yi do not play like beginners, giving the team two pillars to overload a side lane. But this is a hands-first side that relies little on macro and is unlikely to stack up individually against the elite. Their early-game chaos can steal a game off a slower team; sustaining it across a series is another matter, and that caps them at the bottom of the field.
Team Liquid share the rung but get there differently. Joel "Josedeodo" Villegas drives an aggressive early game and Lim "Quid" Hyeon-seung is a top-tier but streaky carry who must win his lane for them to threaten a top seed. The macro and early game are textbook, and they can snowball a strong side. The teamfight, though, is a genuine weakness — when games tighten, the discipline falls apart, the Spring final all over again. They are heavy favourites over DCG but a clear tier below the best, and the Play-In likely demands beating T1 or Karmine Corp, two sides built to win the exact phase Team Liquid lose. That ceiling is what leaves them level with FURIA rather than above.
FURIA arrive as arguably the best side the CBLOL has sent abroad in years, an unchanged pack that pushed G2 to five games at MSI 2025. They do not hard dominate the opening exchanges — middling first blood, a negative CS Diff @15 — but they win the map and the teamfights, leading the CBLOL in towers, drakes, heralds and barons as a modest early lead snowballs into a stranglehold by twenty-five minutes. Jungler Pedro "Tatu" Seixas swept both regular season and Finals MVP, and the front-to-back identity built around their botlane, with mid on facilitators, and Guilherme "Guigo" Ruiz soaking pressure up top, is hard to break. The limit is that a rather slow, teamfighting team, relying on lane dominance in early gives the best the time to grow too — but FURIA can trouble any Western team and could even sit above both LCP representatives if they find their footing.
TSW ran the LCP untouched, a perfect 10-0 in series, often playing with their food: first regionally in Gold Diff @15 (+1066) and kills per game (19.2) by a wide margin. The carries are real — regular season and Finals MVP Lê "Hizto" Văn Hoàng Hải dominates nearly every jungle stat, Nguyễn "Pun" Đăng Kho is a draft wildcard who expands his pool by the week, and Hoàng "Eddie" Công Nghĩa posts the LCP's highest DPM. The worry is the killer instinct: this is a team that can run away with games against anyone but also throw away leads against anyone, which makes a BO5 against an elite side hard to trust. Their ceiling might be a CFO-style shock run; their floor is self-destruction, and that volatility lands them here.
LYON own the LCS — Lock-In, Spring Split, a 3-0 sweep of Team Liquid in the final, and a clean playoff run. Everything flows through Kim "Berserker" Min-cheol, the league's clearest first option, with Kang "Saint" Sung-in being a genuine second carry threat and seven-time champion Kacper "Inspired" Słoma dictating the tempo on the map. The problem is whether a team that rules at home can hunt abroad. Their wait-and-punish tempo is exactly what does not travel: against top LCK and LPL sides a flat early can be fatal, and Berserker's international record does not yet reassure. A soft top side in Niship "Dhokla" Doshi and the lack of experience of Jonah "Isles" Rosario add risk. The favourable draw — Main Stage entry, a Pool 3 opponent first — mean they have the recipe to make a good run, but the ceiling looks lower than KC's
KC are the loudest wall in the West, and the best teamfighting team in Europe — they win from neutral or even losing positions and make opponents beat them twice, on the map and then in the fight. Caliste "Caliste" Henry-Hennebert, now First All-Pro, anchors a botlane with Alan "Busio" Cwalina that may be the LEC's most dominant, while Martin "Yike" Sundelin gives a jungle that can anchor the early map or flip into a carry. The cracks are early-game impulsiveness — failed catches, mistimed skirmishes, soft warding. But the adversity they showed in the final against G2 — a side that proved at First Stand it could comprehensively beat the LCK — naturally places them ahead of any non-Asian team here. The LEC simply looks stronger than the LCS right now in terms of rivalry and competitiveness between its top teams, and that is what edges KC above the Western seeds below them.
Two former world champions, two rookies who run hot and cold, and almost no middle ground. Everything runs through Tian — at his best he's the LPL's top jungler, some days the best player alive, but the mental comes and goes. JackeyLove can still carry a series on his own, then hand one back with a careless catch. ZUIAN plays like the main character whether or not the game wants him to, while Creme has quietly become a dependable mid. The catch is the LCK: every recent meeting has ended 0-3, and this one's in Korea. On their day they can be real troublemakers against anyone.
The West's best hope, and this time on merit: keeping the roster intact turned five talents into one machine through the playoffs. LEC Finals MVP Rudy "SkewMond" Semaan drives it, swapping last year's passive scaling for relentless early hunting, with BrokenBlade's bottomless draft pool and a Caps who can still take over behind him. The ceiling is proven — at First Stand they bulldozed Gen.G 3-0 in the semis to reach the final, so the blueprint for shocking an Eastern side already exists. The doubt is whether they can do it twice: BLG solved them in that same final, and even with leads in hand they rarely close like contenders.
Three straight Worlds in the cabinet, yet the MSI keeps slipping away — five-game losses in 2022, 2023, 2024 and last year, and none of this new dynasty has won it except Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok and Kim "Peyz" Su-hwan, who lifted it elsewhere with Gen.G. T1 are the mirror of their rivals: calm and measured, winning through teamfights and objectives behind an unwavering botlane in Peyz and the best support of all time, Ryu "Keria" Min-seok. What keeps them third is a game that's one-dimensional and readable, with MSI botlanes set to test them harder than the LCK does. On paper a notch below the two above — but at internationals, it is always T1.
The most complete roster the region sends, and a genuine contender for the crown. The centre is Knight, arriving as the best player in the world; around him, Bin turns every lead into brutal side pressure, Xun restores the trademark tempo, and ON is the LPL's best support in 2026 — only Viper "underwhelms", slightly below his HLE form. The plan is suffocation, pre-winning fights three minutes early, which produced clean 3-0 playoff stomps. What keeps them at two and not one: they've sometimes had a bad late game that they can't fully coach out, and they have no fallback when the chaos doesn't go their way.
HLE reach their first MSI as an org, but Choi "Zeus" Woo-je and Lee "Gumayusi" Min-hyeong arrive as ex-pillars of the T1 dynasty now missing this trophy — back in new colours to claim it. The case for the top seed runs through a returning prime Zeus and a Zeka now genuinely world-class, both bought into Kanavi's everywhere-at-once tempo — and a title would make Zeus and Zeka the first to complete Riot's three-tournament set. Questions linger around the botlane and Kanavi's international history, but a LCK team that dropped just three of nineteen series across the regular season's first half belongs at the top.
