Three teams remain in the battle for the LCS Summer 2020 title. On Saturday, TSM and Team Liquid will play for a spot in the Final against FlyQuest on Sunday.
Since the schedule is so tight for the last two matches, I’m going to do something a little different with this preview and cover everything in one piece. First I’ll break down my expectations for TSM vs. TL, and then I’ll spend some time discussing FlyQuest and how they’ll need to prepare and play against either opponent.
The TSM vs. TL preview starts immediately below, but you can also jump straight to the FlyQuest section if that’s what you’re most interested in.
TSM vs. Team Liquid
Win Conditions
TSM
- Keep playing a strong top side
- Get Bjergsen moving
Team Liquid
- Win the bottom lane
- Clean up dragon fight setups
Prediction
TL 3-2
If both teams play to their peak, I might lean to a TL 3-1, but I just can’t write off Bjergsen and co. to that level, especially after they played their best games of the season against Cloud9. Head-to-head, TL just line up better, and they have some time to identify and correct the macro errors that cost them against FlyQuest. Bjergsen has to steal another series. It might happen, but I’m not counting on it.
TSM Key Player and Path to Victory
It would be silly to select anyone else as TSM’s most important player for a series. I mean, the team has played four Bo5s in these playoffs so far, and Bjergsen has been series MVP in all three of their wins. If you stood far enough back and squinted a little, you might wonder how a team with Doublelift and Broken Blade would rely so much on their Mid laner to carry them. That’s Bjergsen for you.
TSM showed the best side of themselves in their win over Cloud9 last week. Bjergsen achieved more on the map than Nisqy—that is almost worthy of a full article in itself, but for what it’s worth I would praise Bjergsen on that point far more than I would criticize Nisqy, because Nisqy actually played the series quite well and was let down by his teammates—and Doublelift put in some viable utility performances, picking up his first career win on Senna and contributing well. Because of Doublelift stepping back into more of a supporting role, TSM were able to give Broken Blade some lane dominance with two Lucians and a Jayce, and they unleashed Spica on two Evelynns and a Graves. I’ve been calling for TSM to play a strong top side for quite a while, and they did it!
The mid-game macro and setups were also much cleaner from TSM than they typically have been, with much less desyncing in their map movements and better timing for arriving at objectives. There were individual mistakes and fumbles, sure, but the gameplay was cleaner on the whole.
All in all, I was more pleased with TSM last series than I probably have been all year.
That doesn’t mean they’re on a clear path to the Finals. They face a stiff opponent in Team Liquid, a team with far less inherent volatility than C9.
Playing a strong top side will yet again be a good path to victory for TSM. That’s both because it is good for TSM—Broken Blade thrives when he can apply pressure, and Doublelift’s lane has had trouble serving well as a strong side, and not only against FBI and huhi—and because it is a vulnerability for Team Liquid. Impact can be pressed, and can be made to give up map control during the laning phase. As I said in last week’s Team Liquid vs. FlyQuest preview, though, you shouldn’t play to snowball against Impact because he can play so well with so few resources; you should try to handcuff him to his tower and then rotate around the map to control neutral objectives and influence the other lanes.
I also want to see Bjergsen get his feet moving, so to speak. He can enable the strong top side, or gank the bot lane, and generally be active on the map. I expect Team Liquid to either ban Twisted Fate every game or blind pick it themselves, but if they don’t, or if Bjergsen can bring out some other champions with similar roaming ability, then we should see Bjergsen spending as little time as possible going toe-to-toe with Jensen in the mid lane. That will be for the best, because matching Jensen in a 1-to-1 control mage battle and playing for team fights is unlikely to be a recipe for success; Jensen can outperform Bjergsen in those scenarios. TSM’s only loss to C9 came with Bjergsen on Azir, while their wins came when he played Twisted Fate twice and Zilean once. Besides, TSM simply isn’t as good at mid-game team fighting as FlyQuest; if they try to replicate the FlyQuest formula of beating Team Liquid at bot side 5v5s, they’re unlikely to replicate FlyQuest’s results.
After last week, it would be foolish to write off TSM. If they sustain their current level of play, I believe they’re capable of beating both TL and FLY. But I’m not quite ready to call them a favourite in either matchup.
Team Liquid Key Player and Path to Victory
The Mid lane matchup will be a focal point of the series, partly just because it features Bjergsen, but also because I expect to see Jensen step up much more than he was able to against FlyQuest. The reasons for that are a bit of a long walk, so come on a journey with me.
The biggest hole in Team Liquid’s play against FlyQuest was their preparedness for dragon fights. More than once, they gave up priority on the minion wave just before the dragon was going to spawn, which forced Tactical to catch the farm and be unable to recall, spend his gold, and make it back in time for the fight. That either meant Team Liquid was fighting with gold in their pockets and with a vision disadvantage, or that they were trying to force a fight in effectively a 4v5 while they tried to buy time for a final teammate to arrive. Execution within the team fights was also an issue, but it’s far harder to execute when the lead-up to the fight has been mismanaged. And to cap it off, Team Liquid was unable to realize when they had botched the lead-ups, and instead of cutting their losses and giving up the objective, they still attempted to force every fight, which turned a small loss into a big one on several occasions. I noticed these pre-fight mistakes from Tactical the most, individually, but it was an overall team communication issue, not something that can be pinned on one player.
If TL can play their objective setups more cleanly, then we’ll see more from Jensen, who was just a bit too static against FlyQuest. Jensen stretched his champion pool a little too far last series (I don’t really want to see him on Kog’maw again), but he also didn’t get good setups from his team, either to help break him out of his lane with ganks and roams or to set up the right team fight scenarios. Santorin’s control jungling prevented Broxah from helping out Jensen the way he usually likes to, and IgNar made CoreJJ look flatfooted at times, which is really saying something. Spica has been coming into his own more and more, but he isn’t Santorin and doesn’t have quite the jungle prowess to outpath and limit Broxah the way Santorin did. And Biofrost simply isn’t as good as IgNar, especially as a roamer.
So even though Jensen doesn’t have an easier lane opponent for this series, he should have much more help available from both the jungle and the bottom lane. And stylistically, too, TSM aren’t likely to pressure him as much: TSM typically want to get Bjergsen into the side lanes, while FlyQuest are more likely to bring gank and roam pressure into mid. When you wrap it all up with the higher likelihood that CoreJJ and Tactical will be able to manufacture general bot side map control due to being a stronger duo lane than Doublelift and Biofrost, you’ve got a far better environment for Jensen to succeed in this series.
For what it’s worth, TL will also need another good weak side performance from Impact, but he played well against FlyQuest and I’m not too concerned on that front, even though Broken Blade is capable of hammering him harder than Solo did (especially given the way FLY drafted for Solo). I’m putting the over/under on classic “top die” moments in this series at 1.5!
FlyQuest vs. TBD
FlyQuest are in a very enviable position this weekend. They get to watch TSM and TL play on Saturday and study how the winner got the job done, but that’s just the start of it. More importantly, it seems likely that both TSM and TL are coming to FlyQuest for scrims, since they won’t want to scrim each other right before facing off in a best-of-five. Assuming that’s true, FLY are getting a front row seat to both teams’ prep, which will make it very difficult for either opponent to throw them a meaningful curveball.
FlyQuest vs. Team Liquid
If I had to guess, I’d say FLY would rather face TL in the Finals. They just beat TL last week, and even though it went to five games the series felt more like a comfortable 3-1, given the Kalista heroics TL needed from Tactical to even force the game 5 in the first place.
FLY see themselves as simply a better version of TL. I wrote about all of the similarities between the teams in last week’s preview, and TL didn’t do anything to dispel that notion with their unconvincing attempts to alter their profile through Hecarim and Kog’maw drafts.
The biggest fear FLY should have is a Team Liquid that has cleaned up its communication issues around team fight setups and gained more practice time with Hecarim comps. FLY did look relatively comfortable in the TL series, overall, but TL lost themselves the series almost as much as FLY won it, by drafting discomfort, losing the Support roam battles, and failing to arrive with proper tempo and clean item buys to team fights. The onus is on TL to clean up all of those issues, which means FLY can just continue to play their own game and demand that their opponents be better.
IgNar was a key factor in denying Team Liquid’s biggest trump card (CoreJJ), and I’ll be watching him closely once again if the two teams play another series.
If the Finals is a FLY vs. TL rematch, I think it will be closer than the last series (and remember, last week was a 3-2!). I have to predict a winner, so I’ll say FLY 3-2 over TL.
FlyQuest vs. TSM
TSM represent more of an unknown for FLY, which makes them a somewhat scarier Finals opponent. The teams haven’t played a “real” game against one another since week 6 of the regular season, and that game was a bit of a write-off in which FLY beat TSM through a level 1 First Blood on Spica that chained into a second kill at his blue buff. A 4:45 top lane kill on Broken Blade then effectively cemented the game. And all the way back in week 2, FLY beat TSM pretty easily as well, but TSM were just bad that game and FLY were still playing with Mash instead of WildTurtle, so there’s not much worth learning from that game.
FLY might dominate TSM in a best-of-five series, but maybe Broken Blade can pick them apart on the top side of the map. Maybe Doublelift has a download on WildTurtle’s laning. Maybe Bjergsen can flip everything on its head with some unexpected counterpicking. I’m not saying any of these things are likely, per se, but compared to TSM, TL are very much a known commodity.
That being said, we can assume that FLY are getting a week of scrims from TSM to update their read. And Santorin and IgNar, in particular, are very smart players who can use level 1s and jungle pathing to control the way the early game plays out, reducing the potency of any creative game plans TSM might bring to the table.
If FLY do end up facing TSM in the Finals, the deck will be pretty heavily stacked in their favour. They’ll have a lot of valuable intel, a big advantage in the jungle, a massive roaming lead out of the bot lane, and generally stronger team fighting and mid-game macro. They’ll need to avoid any Broken Blade pop-off games, and they should ban Bjergsen’s Twisted Fate and Zilean. Beyond that, they can count on simply outperforming TSM, and using their strong flexibility to react to anything that catches them off-guard.
From today’s vantage point, I’m predicting a FLY vs TSM Finals to come out as FLY 3-1 over TSM.