The Worlds 2019 Journal is an ongoing content series from former Clutch Gaming Head Coach, Brendan “mcscrag” McGee.

Each post will be an in-depth review of one of the North American teams’ games from the 2019 World Championships.

With the coaching change at Clutch, one of the primary differences in draft came with a change in philosophy. For most of 2019, Clutch was the team that valued annoying ranged champions that get a lot of early priority, take turret plates, and snowball from there. However, sometimes these compositions lacked a cohesive team fight, reliable crowd control, engage, or all of the above. The team was often criticized for playing compositions that required far higher execution than they were capable of.

The new staff seems to value the opposite, preferring instead to focus on compositions with plenty of engage and crowd control, but low early lane priority. Of course this is a massive simplification, but generally the trend holds true.

The change was wildly successful and played a large role in their resurgence and qualification for Worlds. In many games they would fall behind early but find that one fight that is required to turn a game around with strong melee flankers like Sylas, Qiyana, and Akali.

UoL were obviously prepared to deal with this play style, and by the end of the draft phase they seemed to have Clutch completely downloaded. Continue reading Worlds 2019 Journal: Clutch Gaming vs Unicorns of Love, Game 1 →