Today is my birthday. I am officially 1,000 years old. I celebrated by watching League of Legends streams all day. Today is the final day of the Battle of the Atlantic as well as North American LCS promotion tournament. By the time I've finished this entry I'll know whether or not Team Curse or newcomers Cognitive Gaming will make it into the NA LCS. As of this paragraph, Curse and COG are tied up at 1-1 in a best of 5 series.
Starting out the day was North America's #1 LCS team, Cloud 9 against Europe's #1 LCS team, Fnatic. They've played each other twice before but C9 lost both matchups in relatively close games. This time it seems Cloud 9 came prepared with an incredibly convincing 2-0 victory with stellar play from all players. Game 1 was put firmly into motion by Meteos's playmaking on Vi. Later on in the game he was easily able to get a triple kill with a Brutalizer + Trinity Force build.
In game 2, mid laner Hai and top laner Balls were instumental in securing victory. By the end of the game Hai was something 10-1 on Kha'Zix, leaping around the battlefield and absolutely annihilating Fnatic's health bars. Balls brought his signature champion Rumble and impressed everyone with incredible placement of his ultimate, The Equalizer, cutting off escapes and comboing with Meteos Fiddlesticks ultimates. This made it incredibly easy for Hai to jump in and collect his free kills.
Unlike just about any other team in NA, Cloud 9 takes leads and absolutely runs with them, applying as much pressure as possible to the map. Where other teams might play it safe, Cloud 9 pushes their advantages to the maximum in an attempt to close out the game as soon as possible. Where most other teams in the current meta are running supertank champions like Mundo, Renekton, and Shyvana and restricting themselves almost entirely to the AD carry trinity of Lucian, Jinx, and Sivir, C9 pulls out picks like Rumble and Kha'Zix while using Draven in both games.
Fnatic's picks were centered around winning lanes and snowballing games from there but C9 picked for team fights because they were confident they could outclass the European team even though they'd been bested twice already. Despite being convincingly beaten in the laning phase both games, C9 absolutely crushed the opposition once team fights broke out. Rekkles was consistently getting a massive CS advantage on Sneaky's Draven but eventually falling behind in gold due to global objectives and Draven picking up kills and gold from his League of Draven passive. I couldn't understand the Draven pick at first because it doesn't seem to be able to contend much with Lucian in lane despite putting out more raw damage, but it definitely seemed to work for them.
I'll probably talk about the results of Curse vs Cognitive tomorrow. It's looking like it's going to be a very long series. Game 2 was honestly very slow paced and a little boring until the base race at the very end--but Voyboy is on Ziggs for Game 3 so we might be seeing a bit more action.
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