Mix & Match Finale Reveals iKON's Final Member

The wait is finally over! After nine episodes of building up the hype — with the past week filled to the brim with suspense and tension — all seven members of YG Entertainment’s newest boy group iKON have been revealed. The final member, Donghyuk, was revealed on the finale episode of their reality show Mix & Match.

YG first tried out this style of reality TV with last year’s hit WIN: WHO IS NEXT, where the company’s male trainees formed two groups (Team A and Team B). The teams battled it out over the course of the season for viewer votes, with the victorious team winning the chance to debut as a group. Team A won the right to debut as Winner, with their popular album 2014 S/S achieving a “perfect all-kill” on the South Korean charts.

Meanwhile, the members of Team B found themselves in a new survival show this past year called Mix & Match, individually competing against three newly revealed trainees for a chance at one of seven spots in the future group that Yang Hyun-suk dubbed “iKON“.

Three spots in the group were reserved for Team B members B.I, Bobby ,and Jinhwan, with the rest of the four spots chosen by a complex voting system. 30% of the vote came from YG artists. The remaining 70% was decided by viewer vote and was separated into five categories, the electronic methods being online Facebook votes, LINE Messaging app mobile votes, and text message votes. The fourth category was physical voting locations taken in Korea, China, and Japan. Finally, votes were also taken at the final match’s event location.

The voters reunited all of the Team B members back into iKON, with Chanwoo being the only member to make it into iKON that wasn’t originally in Team B. (Though it was probably expected that Team B, with their presumably larger fanbase from their run on WIN last year, all managed to secure spots in the new group.)

Readers, did you manage to vote for your favorite members? Are you satisfied with the voting results (even if, like this fanboy-writer, your two favourite members were Jinhyung  and Hongsuk, the only two members who didn’t make the cut)? And do you think that iKON can live up to its name as an “Icon of Korea”?

Check out the reveal on Mix and Match‘s finale here:

(YG Life [1] [2] [3] [4], Melon. Images via YG Life, YouTube)