On July 27th 2024, Minecraft teamed up with the Noxcrew to host the MCC Ender Cup! After recently announcing the switch from numbers to names, this marks the fourth tournament in that format, and it’s safe to say that they certainly haven’t disappointed.

So wherever it be the case that you don’t have time to watch a VOD, you’re not sure who to watch or maybe you want to read about it instead. You’re in the perfect place as today we’ll be covering my thoughts and views on the MCC Ender Cup!

‘Reafy’? Let’s get started…

_{^{As this is a longer blog, if you’re reading via email, it has been clipped. If you scroll to the bottom of the email and click on ‘View entire message’ then after click ‘Display images below’ at the top of the screen, you’ll be able to see the full post!}}

THE LOBBY

This MCC underwent an entire theme change! As opposed to the normal ‘cannon’ and in most cases ‘non cannon’ events, it wasn’t a mild lobby change, some extra additions or a few new maps. This event saw an entire new theme being around the End! Surely this is a hint to something right? RIGHT!?

With teams having the ability to build their own intros before the tournament began, and with the ability of using custom blocks. This change was instantly noticeable, assuming you hadn’t seen any prior images.

Despite there being a 20 minute delay, the event finally began! After a loud noise and some thunder, all of the 40 contestants and their 10 builds were risen into the air with lasers and sucked into our Ender Cup, in the process ‘lending their souls’.

The main lobby was stunning and I couldn’t give any more props to the builders if I tried! To start we’ll talk about the 8 End spikes (pillars) that were lit up with enchanted text after each game throughout the event. I’m not fully aware on what each meant but it’s safe to assume they represented the updates throughout the years.

Alongside this, the buildings in themselves were stand out, the decision dome was spectacular, the little features of enderman statues, one wearing a hat, and the little end like islands that surrounded the main one!

GAME 1: SKY BATTLE

As voted by the contestants, the first game we got to watch of the night was Sky Battle! A ‘sky wars’ like gamemode which featured all 10 teams on their own starting islands battling for loot, chests, crafts and to be the ultimate winner with the border closing them all into the center of the map!

It’s hard to talk about this gamemode without mentioning the name fruitberries. After a very dominant performance throughout including that of 12 kills and going all 3 rounds as the only person alive, it’s safe to say that he was our best player.

Sky Battle was a strong start to the tournament despite the coin differential between 1st and 10th being that of 1004, the gamemode itself felt quite balanced! With loyalty tridents to start and the ability to craft swords, it lead to people having to think of priorities and what they felt best at.

I noticed that a few teams didn’t realize they could or simply didn’t think to craft swords for themselves and their teammates. A lot of the teams did a good job of getting full armor however again, a lot of the time, contestants missed the mark on not smelting the iron due to time constraints or the worry of being pushed.

Some notable moments I gathered from the POVs I had a chance of viewing included fruitberries getting a trident ace, Seapeekay getting a 3k with tnt, the Purpled & Mayaoshi linkup, HBomb94 spleefing the entirety of Purple with 0 kill credit and fruitberries winning all 3 rounds.

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 2: SURVIVAL GAMES

We then go into our second game being the famous Survival Games! A gamemode that we don’t see much throughout MCC anymore however when we do, we for the most part have a dominant team (please refer to MCC Rising)

Survival Games is a gamemode in which all of the 10 teams are spawned into a world and forced to gather loot including food and healing and battle it out to the death against the 9 other teams. With a border slowly moving in, players are eventually forced to fight at middle and confront their enemies and even friends.

With this being the 2nd game, it meant the players would no longer have a melee pvp gamemode following this. Survival Games saw Lime Llamas have another rough showing with placing in 10th, 1998 points behind 1st place, an even bigger gap than game one!

Red played this game very smart, slowly taunting teams and eventually making it to the end with all 4 contestants ready for that final battle. Right as a fight broke out between we saw our Red team go in for easy pickings with them getting just under 10 kills from the final border fight alone.

I don’t have much feedback for this game, the map was amazing and I feel it perfectly represented what Minecraft is. Anything you want it to be!

Some notable mentions I gathered from the POVs I saw included Seapeekay’s failed attempt at a tnt cannon and HBomb94 getting 5 kills at the end to take Red 600 points above second place!

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 3: PARKOUR WARRIOR

Our third game of the night finally sees a movement game be played, and for those parkour enjoyers you’re in for a treat as we see the third variation of the parkour games we’ve seen throughout MCC history be played. Parkour Warrior!

For those of you who haven’t played MCC Island, Parkour Warrior is a game in which (well in this case) 40 contestants go head to head against other teams and even their own teammates in order to beat the parkour levels as fast as possible.

As time goes on and levels get beat, when a certain amount of people complete a stage, those who haven’t will begin to take slow damage until eventually at the end there are only a few players remaining to fight it out on that final level.

The graphics for this game were just beautiful, the way we got to see Minecraft change overtime starting with the oddly and purposely bad yet satisfying graphics followed by the progress throughout the stages.

For those of you interested in the stats, here’s a fun one for you! All of the final 4 out of a possible 5 contestants who made it to the final stage, were the only people to finish 1st throughout all 9 stages. In order from stage 1 through 9 (the winning stage) it went:

Hannah, fruit, Purpled, FBM, Purpled, fruit, Purpled, Purpled, Purpled!

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 4: ACE RACE

Following our third game being parkour, we are once again blessed with another movement game being Ace Race! Even more specifically a variant of it which lets you run through the different years and biomes of the beautiful block game!

Ace Race is a gamemode which once again is pretty much summed up by it’s name, a gamemode in which all 40 contestants race against other teams including their own to complete all 3 laps as fast as possible to get as many coins as possible. Alongside this also get bonus coins for being in the top three teams to finish first!

I wanted to start by talking about how beautiful the map was, with the changing sections and even new features such as moving blocks and the fans, it’s impressive that the server was still able to run fine and not lag (at least from the POVs I tuned into). I will say that as much as the fans were a cool concept they did feel a little overwhelming and there definitely didn’t need to be that many.

As per usual we had our stand out players however to be more specific, our top three featured Purpled, fruitberries and hannahxxrose! Following the same idea as Parkour Warrior, Purpled won the second movement game of the night by 7 seconds! Alongside this, everyone finished in the end with Aphmau coming close to not doing so, and both Ph1LzA & Seapeekay finished 6th & 7th!

Alongside this as a fun stat, following the end of this game, both the Pink Parrots & Cyan Coyotes sat on 6601 coins. Which is odd and not just in the number sense but also because it made Cyan 5th and Pink 4th.

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 5: MELTDOWN

This may come as a shock to a lot of people and maybe it’s down to bias as it’s my favourite game to watch but Meltdown was amazing this event! I will say that I wasn’t a major fan of the map. I think the idea was definitely there however with the map being slightly darker and the fog, it made it slightly less enjoyable for me. But a new map was needed and they didn’t disappoint.

To touch a little more on the map, when loading into the game, our contestants were given limited visibility and a lot of times left to shoot quite literally into the dark to see if they could get any freezes. Also with no pause before the first round, it meant a good majority of people played with an enlarged map in the top left, but nevertheless, a new map is the win we take from this!

Meltdown is a gamemode in which the 10 teams go head to head to mine as many coin blocks they can while in the process freezing other players with their bows! Each team is given one pickaxe in which they can claim one by one and one heater per person to unfreeze your team mates! Failure to do so will see you eliminated the people who froze you last to get a kill.

Now let’s take a look at our players, Seapeekay was my main POV for this gamemode and was a good one especially due to getting 23 freezes being the most we saw this event! Alongside this Cyan went on to win rounds 1 and 3!

Some other amazing moments include purples domination in round 2 and Masayoshi’s amazing escape to keep get their team more points.

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 6: HOLE IN THE WALL

Hole In The Wall was the sixth game of the night and as time has gone on, I’d like to say that people have gone on to like it more and more, or maybe I’m just speaking for myself? If that’s the case I’d like to say that I have my ups and downs but in this event I enjoyed it!

Sadly to follow the positive with a negative, as much as I enjoyed the look of the map with it certainly being a much harder one for the players, the center removing was certainly something. Not to say it was good or bad, I just felt it made life even harder.

The gamemode itself went very well though! We saw some amazing plays from the likes of fruitberries & FireBreathMan with FBM winning round 1 and fruit winning rounds 2 & 3.

We also saw some ‘honourable mention’ moments which include TeanaKitten & blowstoise dying on the very first wall, the center of the map disappearing and getting 3 kills in round one, 3 kills in round two and a kill on TommyInnit in round 3. “It’s literally just a game”. As well as PearlescentMoon getting pushed both ways on a returning wall, sadly followed by them dying.

This was also the third time in a row that we saw Cyan Coyotes finish first as a team, and sadly their last.

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 7: TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE

Game seven sees our final individual game be played, TGTTOS. A game in which all 40 contestants go head to head to maneuver their way through six different maps, some including blocks, some speed, all to get to the end and be the first to hit a chicken!

TGTTOS featured some amazing maps, however it’s hard to say that without referencing maps three and five. Incase you’re not sure why I say that, to put it bluntly, both of these two maps were purely RNG based as opposed to skill. I’d like to say that the idea is cool on paper, but in practice seeing some of the top players lose coins and placements due to having to guess the right path (in both rounds) I felt it took bits away from the aspect of the game.

They however did an amazing job making up for it in the other four rounds being more movement based with the sixth map becoming my new favourite!

For those of you interested in the stats, here’s a fun one for you! Purpled doesn’t fall under the top 4 except for map three finishing 4th, 1st, 21st, 2nd, 1st & 2nd.

As well as this, jojosolos doesn’t drop out of the top 9 except for map three again finishing 3rd, 8th, 27th, 9th, 2nd & 6th!

See below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

GAME 8: GRID RUNNERS

We then wrapped up the eighth mini game of the night with a team based game, Grid Runners! To give a brief explanation of how it works, all 10 teams race against each other and have to work together within their individual teams to complete 8 rooms the fastest, with each having their own challenges and quirks, it being this late into the tournament certainly was a game changer.

I sadly don’t have much to talk about in regards to this gamemode other than the fact that Yellow Yaks dominated, beating all eight rooms 13 seconds quicker than the Lime Llamas. As well as this we also saw several teams get stuck on the redstone room with some of them expecting it but also causing a major difference.

To put how much this affected the final standings into perspective, see below the difference in order after game 7 and 8!

Also see below the top 10 teams for this game specifically! And the top 10 players overall!

DODGEBOLT

After an amazing comeback from the Pink Parrots, we saw them go head to head against the Purple Pandas! Dodgebolt is a dodgeball like gamemode in which two teams go head to head in a first to three! In this gamemode, there are two arrows provided throughout and each team have to eliminate the opposing team. With little space, no respawns and some amazing plays, it lead to get a good finale!

The Purple Pandas consisted of: PearlescentMoon, Smajor1995, bekyamon & fWhip.

And the Pink Parrots consisted of: DisguisedToast, ItzMayaoshi, Purpled & TeanaKitten.

Incase some of those names mean nothing to you, it was essentially Minecraft players (Purple) vs Valorant players (Pink) so it was bound to be an amazing final!

The rounds from start to finish genuinely went back to back, with Purple team winning rounds one and three, and Pink winning rounds two and four, it lead us into a 2-2 tiebreaker!

With our final round coming to an end, purple team went 3 players up against Mayaoshi who went on to get two back to back kills, moving it down to a 1 v 1. However after an amazing performance the entire event, Bekyamon went on to get the final kill winning their first every MCC while in the process leading Purpled to lose their 5th Dodgebolt in a row.

Final Thoughts & Honorable Moments

And that sadly brings the end of yet another amazing month of MCC! Some honourable moments I want to specify include Oli’s amazing singing on Joel’s stream of the song ‘MCC, Do You Know The Words?’ as well as the amazing sequence that played right before dodgebolt that showed all of the Minecraft updates throughout the years, with a special Jellie feature!

We also can’t wrap this up without including the fact that both Purpled & fruitberries went on to break Technoblade’s MCC 4 point record! With the previous record being 4307 set on April 18th 2020. We saw Purpled get 4385 and fruit get 4403.

I’d like to imagine that Techno felt it was the right time to pass the crown on to his sensei.

I wanted to take this last segment to thank Minecraft & MCC for changing a lot of lives for the better. Especially helping me stay so motivated with content and to grow within the scene! This was genuinely an amazing event and I can’t wait for the future! So thank you from us all.

Recently myself and AJX were fortunate enough to join the All Things MCC team! To be clear this won’t be an extension of InsideMC but instead two good friends working alongside the amazing Seapeekay on his own project! If you’d like to see our top 10 plays for this season, click the image above!

If you have any feedback regarding this blog on how to improve, or maybe something you’d like to me talk on specifically next time, feel free to join the InsideMC Discord and let me know!

But with that being said, this brings the end of the InsideMC Blog, thank you all for reading, stay safe, don’t eat too much bread, pieces!

_{^{This blog is not in affiliation with MCC or Minecraft, everything wrote about and said today are purely my own thoughts and feelings and aren’t influenced from any third parties.}}