MotD can play on my team for sure (he'd be in the same region).
I'm not sure this should be divided by ethnicity or any other non-political boundary. That can become pretty messy IMO. Then it is not really a "nations" cup at all. I don't have a problem with combining nations that would otherwise not be able to field a team though (say Australia/NZ).
My thought would be first get a list of participants so you can estimate who can field a full team or not, then combine nations as needed.
@CAD: The 1v1 games will be most likely on 3 different settings (at least 2) so it should be unlikely that 1 player is the best in all of those settings but i can understand your point there
I would say USA should just be east west (use Mississippi River). We did east/west/central last time and it spread it a bit to thin, plus where do you divide things 3 ways in US? What is Central vs West?
Or you could ignore regions, just keep it at the nation level, but make some sort of limitation on team composition to try and even things out a bit and give other nations a chance. Maybe you have a gold trophy limit per team or something (like maybe 10 total per team allowed). So if a nation has 5 elite players with 3-4 trophies each, they may have to put 3 on a team and 2 on another team.
I like the idea of spreading out the elite players a bit, since last time around we had to seed the teams so that two powerhouses would not meet early and knock 1 out. If things were spread a bit more, and more nations could compete, you could skip trying to do any seeds and just leave it at luck of the draw.
Also, I think maybe a small group can talk about templates or something as well. As mentioned, the 5v5 did not go that well last time around.