Welcome to Dawnbringer, your daily recap of the 2021 League of Legends World Championship.
Every day of Worlds competition, I’ll post a brief rundown of each game, along with some larger takeaways about the team and player performances we’re seeing and what it might mean for the rest of the tournament.
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Game Recaps
GAME 1: GEN win
GEN Kennen Xin Zhao Aatrox Aphelios Lulu
C9 Jarvan IV Lee Sin Yasuo Ziggs Nautilus
Ruler Life 2v2 FB. Fudge solo Ks Rascal. C9 botch Herald approach, GEN 4-1. C9 create ace->Baron. Dragon dance, Perkz ints, C9 soul / GEN Baron, macro it from there.
GAME 2: GEN win
C9 Malphite Poppy Sylas Miss Fortune Leona
GEN Graves Lee Sin Syndra Jhin Rakan
Bdd destroys Perkz in lane, sets up Clid ganks for kills, creates TP adv. to go top for dives. C9 way too far behind for their comeback fights to have any hope of working.
GAME 3: GEN win
C9 Graves Jarvan IV Syndra Miss Fortune Leona
GEN Renekton Lee Sin Zoe Jhin Rakan
Blaber starts enemy red, ganks to FB Bdd. Bot skirmishes go both ways. GEN accept 4v5, C9 4-1 them. GEN stack drakes. Bdd snipes Zven, GEN mtn soul, close from there.
Takeaways
I didn’t think I’d be too disappointed if Cloud9 lost to Gen.G today. It was the most likely outcome, and I’m pretty good at managing my expectations. But man, I have to admit this stings a little.
It’s not even the 0-3 result. You can lose a series 0-3 and still feel like you gave it your best shot and had a chance but got some “bad bounces” or whatever. The MAD Lions went 0-3 against DWG KIA and that’s how I felt about their loss.
But C9 were in a very strong position in game 3 and had brought the game back to even in game 1, so it’s not like they got outright stomped in all three games. Game 2 was the only one where C9 were never really “in it” at any point. So it’s not really that.
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – OCTOBER 25: Cloud9’s Ibrahim “Fudge” Allami (L) and Philippe “Vulcan” Laflamme
walk off stage at the League of Legends World Championship Quarterfinals Stage on October 25, 2021 in
Reykjavik, Iceland. (Photo by Lance Skundrich/Riot Games)
It’s partly the ways C9 lost some in-game scenarios. Their Rift Herald approach in game 1, for example, gave me flashbacks to the worst aspects of the team’s year, when they would have incredible desyncs between their top lane wave management and their activity in the river. (Blaber’s famous death at the scuttle grab at MSI is the most notable example of this, but the lost fight at Herald here was effectively the same thing.) Perkz inting to try to create a big, unnecessary outplay was like that, too, something we saw way too much this year. Then we had Zven getting caught out in crucial moments when he positioned too aggressively.
This series, in effect, was a highlight reel of the worst attributes of 2021 Cloud9. And there were just enough actual highlights and positive moments to raise some hope now and then, like a player building up a gold bounty just in time to get shut down again.
I’m happy C9 made it to the Quarterfinals. Ask me in a day or two, and that will take over a bit more strongly again. But for now, I just feel disappointed.
Better Mid/Jungle Win
The stars for Gen.G today were clearly Bdd and Clid. Based on the group stage, that’s not too surprising, but if you take a step back and remember who’s in the team’s bot lane, it makes it interesting to consider that Ruler is not really the one carrying this team.
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – OCTOBER 25: Gen.G’s Gwak “Bdd” Bo-seong (L) and Kim “Clid” Tae-min backstage at
the League of Legends World Championship Quarterfinals Stage on October 25, 2021 in Reykjavik, Iceland.
(Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games)
The paddle star and bubble Bdd landed on Zven to secure mountain soul in Game 3 was, ironically, soul-crushing.
The ganks Clid delivered to capitalize on Bdd’s laning setups, the dives he and Bdd helped execute, and the key picks at crucial moments were all the right ingredients to accelerate GEN way ahead of C9 today.
What Will MAD Lions 2022 Look Like?
I may have commented along these lines already, but I’m very curious what the MAD Lions roster will look like next year, especially given the Twitter drama yesterday with a shareholder in the org publicly calling out Carzzy in such a disrespectful and inappropriate way.
Will MAD change two players? Three? Do they sell high on Humanoid and shop him to the LCS teams for a big buyout? Do they promote internally or use their status as one of the LEC’s best teams for the past two years to attract a couple of big free agents?
Given the team’s history as a slow-burn developmental project, it would feel very strange to move away from a Humanoid, Carzzy, Kaiser core plus rookies and replace them with a Rekkles-style signing. But maybe the time is right for MAD to take that kind of turn.