Team Falcons Claims $100,000 at DreamHack Birmingham Warzone Resurgence LAN

Team Falcons took the opening LAN event of the 2026 Call of Duty Warzone Resurgence Series on March 29 at the NEC in Birmingham, England, banking $100,000 and silencing every skeptic who thought their online credentials wouldn't hold up on a live stage. The trio of Soka, Newbz, and Dongy beat out 15 other qualified teams across two days of competition inside the Call of Duty League Challengers Pit at DreamHack Birmingham to claim first place in a format where one wrong endgame costs everything.

The road to Sunday's Finals Stage was itself a test of consistency. COD:WRS Birmingham used online qualifiers running from February through March across North America and Europe, with five rounds of regional competition determining which teams earned direct spots at the LAN. Team Falcons entered as one of the ten pre-qualified teams rather than coming through the Open Stage, a status earned by their qualifier performances. In the March 3 NA online qualifier, Newbz, Dongy, and Soka scored 275.6 points, with Almond, zSmit, and Shifty's Twisted Minds squad finishing second at 230.2. The gap was significant, but online lobbies are a different beast.

The LAN Finals used a Match Point format: once a team accumulated enough points, they had to actually win a match to be declared champions, not just outscore everyone else. That distinction matters enormously for how teams play endgames under pressure. The scoring system rewarded aggression tied directly to placement, with first place carrying a 1.6x kill multiplier, second through fifth at 1.4x, and sixth through tenth at 1.2x. A squad hunting kills while rotating out of the top five was actively sabotaging itself.

In the Finals, Team Falcons accumulated 169.2 total points and 119 kills, with TBE_Newbzz leading all players with 49 eliminations and zDongyy adding 40. Those numbers tell the whole story of the Falcons' approach: Newbz and Dongy were consistently in fights, and the team was consistently finishing those fights inside the top placement brackets where the multiplier paid out. The takeaway for anyone grinding ranked Resurgence is straightforward. Raw kill count is table stakes. Kills inside a top-five finish are worth dramatically more than the same kills after dropping out early, and teams that can maintain that pressure through a full match cycle are the ones who close out Match Point scenarios.

Dongy and Newbz joined Team Falcons on February 9, 2026, making this a trio less than two months old when they walked into Birmingham. Soka already had the pedigree, having previously won the Esports World Cup Warzone title with Biffle and Shifty, racking up 137 eliminations across eight games to secure $200,000. The question going into DreamHack was whether two new teammates could match that level on LAN. They answered it.

The top four teams from Birmingham earned qualification slots for the COD:WRS Championship at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where a $1,000,000 prize pool will be on the line. DreamHack Atlanta serves as the second mid-season LAN before EWC. Team Falcons arrive at both with $100,000 in pocket and something harder to quantify: proof that the new lineup doesn't need time to find its footing.