Week 1 EU/NA LCS thoughts: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Surprises!!

EU and NA week 1 are in the books with super weeks on both sides. Each team played a total of 4 games over 3 days and we get to see some initial results of where each team and each region is, we get to see what the meta looks like at the end of 4.7 and we get to see what teams are going to need to work on and how they will adapt for 4.8. While I normally like to keep my articles about one topic in particular I have a feeling I would be doing a severe injustice if I didn't cover the gigantic breadth of 30 games that we had in the week, so I will use that classic cliché of "The good, the bad, and the ugly”.

Note: This is going to be a long one, so I apologize in advance.

Let us start with the good as we all want to know who came out on top and who did not. In both cases here there are some pretty well defined winners in Alliance for the EU side, LMQ for the NA side, and ADCs for the champion pool.

Alliance started 3-1 in their super week only falling to Supa Hot Crew who seemed to have their number since joining the LCS. It could, in fact, be argued that Alliance really only lost on a fluke game as Selfie get fed on Yasuo while Wikid did nothing in the top lane as Iraelia. It seems that Alliance was a bit lost still on how to rotate properly and play the slow-push game as in this game (as opposed to their wins) they were taken completely off guard by the sheer aggressiveness of SHC. In their wins, however, Alliance played very controlled games, moving around the map well, coordinating for objectives and really starving their opponents from taking any advantage before closing out each game. Much of this credit is to Tabzz who seems to have really stepped up his game and is showing the fire to re-claim his #1 EU AD Carry spot.

In NA the winner was LMQ who took flawless record over their week 1 matchups. LMQ showed a wonderful display of good mechanics as well as a great propensity to setup 2v1 and 3v2 situations to just out-aggress their opponent. While it is arguable that LMQ had a bit of a soft schedule with their only winning opponent being CLG who finished 3^rd place in the previous split and week 1 with a record of 2-2, LMQ did end the week 4-0 which is nothing to overlook. If LMQ can keep themselves out of situations where their aggressiveness is baited and forces them into bad situations, or as the LCS casters would say “predictably aggressive” then they will make a huge impact in NA bringing the level of competition higher than it has ever been.

The other real winner was the NA ADCs as in opposition of their EU counterparts who seemed to have struggled to come up with a suitable counter to Lucian, when Twitch was banned. Other than Graves, the NA ADCs were able to cover a range of champions to various successes playing: Miss Fortune, Caitlyn, Corki, Vayne, Jinx, Draven, and even Kog’Maw. While I don’t think that this shows us that NA ADCs are in any way superior to their EU counterparts, I do think it is interesting that NA is more willing to explore various ADC options and are willing to trust their carry players to play what they are more comfortable with in the role. While ultimately I believe this list will be shortened it is interesting to see the variety as teams are adjusting their matchups and being better ready to handle bans towards the rat.

Next we will explore the other side of this coin and look at teams of deferred success in Gambit, EG, and Iraelia picks.

Gambit has had a bunch of roster changes, namely, losing their star mid-laner and “face-of-the-organization” in AlexIch. However, Gambit still came into this season with a load of talent being led by All-Star DiamondProx and a superior support player in EDward who was able to lead the mixed team of “Gambit in Pajamas” to some mid-spring season victories. Their major problem was with a new mid laner in NiQ who was named as the “temporary replacement” and, after week 1, we can all see why. NiQ offered almost nothing in 3 of the 4 games Gambit played essentially getting his lane pushed in or giving away early kills and basically putting his team really far behind from minute 5. Despite good pressure from the jungle and bottom lane making superior plays, Gambit as a whole seemed to have no mid lane presence and no AP damage during team fights. The lack of a solid wave clear or fierce assassin from the mid lane simply, crippled the team in their 1-3 bouts in the first week. We will see how the team does in the upcoming weeks as Fomko has been named as the new mid-laner, hopefully, bringing the team a fresh start. Despite this, Gambit is still going to have a number of communication, pick, and team synergy issues to deal with and it may end up being an extremely rocky season for them.

On the NA side, the struggles continue for EG who started the week 0-4 even behind the new-to-the-LCS Complexity.Lol. Again, we see this stem off of team turmoil as EG needed to replace their ADC in YellowPete and were not entirely ready to do the swap on day 1 which might have been part of the reason for their horrible loss on day 1. Day 2 we were able to see the swap complete as Krepo took to the bottom lane with replacement Altec who, despite a rather good performances on Kog’Maw, Twitch and Corki, was still not able to close out games against TSM, Dignitas, or CLG. EG seemed to have no other strategy than to give their top lanner Innox, a carry top laner forcing Lee-Sin and Kha’zix picks. This gave their opponents an easy path to victory focusing rotations around the top lane and not allowing EG to gain the early advantage they needed to win the game. If EG are able to clean up their picks/bans and show more than one strategy they will be able to climb out of their hole and maybe not be relegated again this season. Their star-mid-laner Pobelter no longer has to attend school between matches so hopefully the team will use this as an opportunity to really gain some synergy and clean up their communication for their upcoming matches.

Finally the worst part of the entire week had to be the Iraelia picks. EU seemed to have this at the top of their priority list and seemed to be forcing the pick in many situations. While the general strategy of Iraelia top is to get her fed early so that no champion can compete with her in lane; the “power-pick” seemed less than stellar and seemed to be a pain-point for any team who picked her. In addition to drawing constant jungle attention from her team, Iraelia seemed to not really have an impact until about 15 minutes, at which point she would then be behind in the lane and have little to no impact in team fights. This then forced teams into either chancing the Iraelia falling behind in lane or having an under-farmed jungler. Either way, the team was simply losing the game. Despite her poor performance she continued to be picked throughout the week to little success and even was banned in at least one case. I commend EU for trying to find a meta-dominate carry in the top lane, however, it seems like hedging your bets on getting Iraelia going isn’t the way to go about it. While the EU is known for off-the-wall picks and the top lane has seen a much larger variety than their NA counter-parts, this seemed to be one pick that was simply just not working, despite multiple attempts from a variety of teams.

Finally, we end with the teams and champ selections that were just plain ugly, these included Fnatic, C9 and mid-lane picks.

Fnatic has been struggling for some time now and despite winning their 3^rd consecutive EU LCS title, since that time, they have been extremely lack-luster and have seemed to be more fragmented than their 8 game losing streak mid-season in the Spring. In fact, since their EU LCS win they have gone 3-7 in their last 10 games only winning one game at All-Stars and twice in week 1 going 2-2 overall. It seems that the team has learned nothing from the extra-practice of All-Stars and really picked up nothing overall from their matches against SKT, OMG, and C9 all of which exposed their weaknesses and really gave them some good video to review. It also is very obvious that Fnatic is slow to pick up on getting a Coach/Analyst as they just recently posted on social media that they were acquiring these and it is hard to say how quickly these will be able to make an impact. Despite all of the changes, Fnatic still showed struggles in the top lane letting Soaz farm on his island and fall behind and letting their lack-luster vision control haunt them in the mid game. Fnatic were able to show some signs of life in their 2 wins but, it is arguable that these were due to throws by CW and Roccat who also had shaky starts to their season. Fnatic has shown time and time again that they have the talent but it seems they need to adapt to the meta faster and really learn the value of vision and rotations to build their core strategy and not have to rely on completely out-fighting teams to win.

Despite my writing a glowing article on C9 talking about how much they benefited from All-Stars C9 had, arguably, the worst overall start to their season only going 2-2 and dropping some rather surprising losses to Dignitas and Complexity.Lol. While it seems that C9 would be the dominate-force in NA, again, this season it appears that switching back to Hai in the mid lane was more of a problem than anyone expected. While Hai didn’t specifically stick out as doing a poor-job it could be seen that C9’s shot calling was lacking and the players were often times out of position and not coordinating the way they are used to. It also seemed that Hai lost some of his ability to play the “support mid lane” not placing as many wards and disallowing Meteos to run around both jungles and pressure the enemy team. In fact, the striking difference between their wins and losses can be seen in their warding as when they fall behind it seems as if no one on the team is buying wards and the ward control coordination is non-existent. C9 even admitted after their games that they were surprised to even get away going 2-2 saying: “We know we are bad right now” and keeping a positive attitude saying how it was a blessing to not be on top all the time. If C9 can keep this attitude of being the underdog this will definitely motivate them to practice hard to get their 3^rd consecutive NA title and we could be looking at the birth of a C9 team stronger than ever.

Finally we come to the ugliest part of the entire week on both sides of the pond and this was in mid-lane picks for the teams. While we know that there is a ton of viable mid-laners and banning out the mid-lane is, currently, one of the hardest things to do the picks from various teams was still rather poor as teams do not seem to understand the matchups and what can work well against what. We saw many situations over the week where teams would counter-pick themselves into mid-lane matchups and have it ruin their entire game. In EU we saw Gambit’s NiQ pick Syndra into Millennium Kerp’s LeBlanc and simply get stomped by the assassin. It is true that Syndra is a strong pick at the moment but this does require the player to be able to play one of the most skill-intensive champions in League of Legends and be able to control the wave and their opponent. While it could be argued that this game was one of the major reasons for the replacement on Gambit’s roster, even just the pick as a strategy overall is a bad idea. In NA we saw Curse pick Yasuo into a TSM Soraka which, despite some argument from the NA casters, is not a good solution. The Soraka, piloted by Bjergsen, was able to build nothing but armor in the early game completely negating the advantage gained by the AD Carry in Yasuo. Soraka was even able to completely turn a team fight by silencing Yasuo long enough to prevent his ultimate from going off and kill him before his team had time to take advantage of the initiation. Teams need to re-evaluate their mid-lane picks and really learn to force their opponents into a rough decision with their mid-lane pick. It is also arguable that power picks like Lulu, Soraka, and LeBlanc were under-utilized and need to be looked at more often. This and the top-lane picks mentioned earlier are both major pain-points from some teams and will be something to watch how they evolve over the next few weeks.

I want to write a final small section with a few honorable mentions. Millennium was the surprise in EU coming out with a 3-1 record and really showing an understanding of rotations and champion selection. They will be the team to watch in EU to see if they can keep up this consistency. Dignitas is my mention for NA also coming out to an outstanding 3-1 record only falling to Curse. The Baron curse plagued Dignitas again in this game but despite this they looked extremely consistent. We are also all awaiting the addition of Braum to the champion pool and it will be interesting to see if he is ever able to be played based on his raw strength in solo queue at the moment.

While week 1 as a whole did bring us a lot of exciting action and this fan a lot to write about, we can look forward knowing that NA and EU are changing and making it a lot more fun to watch. Based on this upcoming week’s matchups the teams to watch will be Alliance and LMQ as they will both be playing some stronger competition and we will get a real glimpse of what they can do. Keep reading and stick with me as I will do my best to get these articles out every week and, hopefully, before the day of the LCS in the next week. Whoever you root for, root hard, your team needs you.