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 →

Articles

Plug’s Breakdowns: The Groups

October 1, 2019 John "TheEsportsPlug" George

We’ve now known who is going to Worlds for a few weeks, and all the power rankings have been written. The top 20 lists were compiled. The discussions have begun about who is the favorite to win the World Championship. Is it G2? Are we still in the Chinese Era? Is SKT coming back to reclaim the throne? All those questions fly around the esportsiverse and then it happens: the groups are drawn. Now comes time for the real heroes like me to pontificate.

In all seriousness though, now that we know the groups, what do we make of them? I have some thoughts and I’d like to take you on a magical journey through my expectations of the play-in and group stages now that we know for sure who will be there. I’ll start with the play-ins, and I’ll go ahead and make some assumptions about where the play-in winners end up during the main stage. Given how limited some of them are in what groups they can end up in, it has a very decent chance of being correct.