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The Golden Guardians pulled off the only upset of the first week of LCS Summer Playoffs, dismantling TSM 3-0 on the back of star performances by FBI and huhi. It was a coming-of-age of sorts for that bot lane, who spent the entire season playing the same way and delivering similar results but not really getting credit for it until they did it to Doublelift three games in a row.
The bad news for GG is that they’re coming up against Team Liquid in the next round, a team that not only finished the regular season with the LCS’s best record, but also employs a play style and skill profile that almost perfectly counters the way GG won in the first round.
Win Conditions
Team Liquid
- Control early dragons
- Be patient and play reactively
Golden Guardians
- Get Damonte out of his lane
- Surprise TL with something they haven’t seen before
Prediction
TL 3-1
The Golden Guardians have good enough game planning and enough individual skill that they should be able to create one clean snowball, but Team Liquid just match up too well against them, with exactly the right tools to shut down GG’s strengths. Add the fact that TL were able to study GG’s week 1 series and you have a recipe for a pretty straightforward outcome.
Team Liquid Key Player and Path to Victory
If CoreJJ doesn’t get the LCS regular season MVP award for this split, after nurturing Tactical— a rookie Bot laner—into a second-team All-Pro performance, with the second-best laning metrics among LCS Bot laners, and still having more than enough free time to make roams to Mid lane to help out Jensen, while contrasting all of that to TL’s disastrous Spring in which the team was clearly held back by Doublelift’s dissenting voice and inadequate work ethic, then I’m going to end up writing a lot more than this one enormous sentence about him in order to make my feelings very clear to all of the other voters who somehow twisted their minds into knots to disagree with me. (That was 119 words, by the way. English is fun.)
CoreJJ is the number one reason why Team Liquid match up so well against the Golden Guardians. GG’s strongest point is the 2v2 kill lane provided by FBI and huhi, which very reliably generates pressure through the bottom lane. But CoreJJ is an excellent laner, and enormously experienced. In week 5, CoreJJ and Tactical actually killed FBI in a lane skirmish around 16:00, and way back in week 1, TL resisted bot lane ganks from Closer very cleanly and managed to collapse on a dragon fight to swing the game in their favour, and then Tactical and CoreJJ won a skirmish around 7:30 and blew up huhi for First Blood. In both of those games, FBI and huhi tried to initiate their typical kill lane pressure, but CoreJJ and Tactical played with control and patience and won with good reactive play. CoreJJ and Tactical can brick-wall this 2v2 better than anyone else in the LCS, and that alone might make all the difference.
Even if FBI and huhi find a foothold in the bottom lane, TL have other weapons they can bring to bear. The Mid+Jungle duo is just as much of a pillar for TL to carry through, with Broxah typically playing the “servant Jungler” role this split and Jensen posting a +545 GXD10, by far the best laning stats of any Mid laner in the LCS and second in the entire league at any position behind only Blaber’s monstrous +728.
Golden Guardians Key Player and Path to Victory
Damonte has the unenviable task of not only matching up head-to-head against the LCS’s best Mid, Jensen, but doing well enough to get out of his lane and influence the side lanes. Whether GG design their game plans to attack a potential weakness in Impact’s laning phase, or to shore up their primary win condition with FBI and huhi’s aggressive 2v2 play, Damonte will need to throw himself into the mix to help create those advantages. He won’t be able to rely on a skill mismatch to do that, like he might against a weaker or more passive opponent; he’ll need to draft himself into a favourable scenario, with something like Twisted Fate or Galio that has built-in tools to achieve those goals. Drafting straight-up skill matchups could be disastrous for GG.
Damonte has the right mindset and play style to do what his team needs, and an excellent Jungler backing him up to give him a boost, but again, Jensen is literally the most oppressive 1v1 laner among all LCS Mids right now, so the margins for Damonte to execute within will be very narrow.
Just as Damonte needs to help “unlock” either Hauntzer or FBI + huhi, Closer will need to help unlock Damonte. Jungle difference is the other matchup GG can try to play through. If Closer can attack Broxah’s sacrificial early pathing, with snowbally carry picks like Nidalee or Graves, maybe he can tilt the map in GG’s favour.
One way or another, I want to see the Golden Guardians come at this series with some creativity. The onus is typically on the underdogs to do something unexpected and introduce more variance into a series, so this is the perfect time for some pocket picks. Standard play just isn’t going to be good enough. Consider that GG’s greatest statistical strengths were their bot lane advantages and early dragon control: they took the first dragon all three games against TSM, after posting a 72% first dragon rate in the regular season. But Team Liquid’s 59.5 EGR was the third-best in the LCS, a far cry better than TSM’s 50.9, and TL were the only team with a higher first dragon number than GG, at 78%.
I’m really not kidding when I say that TL are uniquely well suited to deny the Golden Guardians’ favourite win conditions, so it’s time for the coaching staff to flip the script and shock us.