MIA: NA LCS and LCK Finals preview! Who will win?

Yung Hiro
Yung Hiro
Sep 8, 2018 · 9 min read

NA LCS Finals

The NA LCS finals is happening at 2 pm PST or 5 pm EST on September 9. Team liquid and Cloud 9 are playing each other for the NA LCS title. If Team Liquid wins, this will be their second LCS title and cement the legacies of a lot of their players. In terms of who is going to worlds, Team Liquid will go to worlds regardless, but if they do win 100 Thieves will go to worlds through points. The only way for C9 to go to worlds as of right now is through winning the NA LCS finals or winning the gauntlet. C9 winning will make things more interesting in terms of the gauntlet, it would be a battle between 100 Thieves, TSM, Echo Fox and Fly Quest for that worlds spot.

On the actual match up, it is going to be a very team fighting based series. Throughout both semifinals, there was a lot of team fighting involved because of the rune changes introduced in patch 8.16 which made tanks more viable, and NA, in general, like to brawl in the late game. C9 are going to rely a lot on their 7-man roster while Team Liquid will pour a lot of their resources into Doublelift.

Win Conditions:

Whoever wins the late game team fight, will win the game. NA as a region don’t subscribe to the 1–3–1 or the 4–1 split push. Throughout the semi-finals, teams were fighting a lot for vision around baron which is very important because if there ever was a lapse in vision the team with vision would go for a pick. This doesn’t mean that the early game is negligible, more so it makes the early game a lot more important.

Each team has their own specific lanes that they look to snowball in the early game which helps them win the upcoming team fights. C9 usually play around top lane or mid while Team Liquid are always trying to get Doublelift ahead. If one team does get a lead in the early game, it makes the upcoming team fight a lot easier because winning early will give the team more pressure and more time to set up wards and force the enemy team to walk into traps or force them to make dicey decisions. C9 to have a little bit of a trick up their sleeve with their 7 man roster. C9 with Blaber and Jensen are more mechanically gifted and focus a lot more on the skirmishes in 8 to 15-minute mark while with Goldenglue and Svenskeren are more consistent at converting leads through pressure and wards, not just skirmishes. Overall, Team Liquid are looking to snowball bot while C9 is going to be playing more towards their solo lanes so they can transition to mid/late game easier.

Champion Picks:

This final is on 8.16, so there were some changes. Aatrox and Taliyah are not permabanned on red side anymore so this lifts up some bans for red side.

Top: Mostly going to be tanks like Sion and Ornn. Red side we might see the Gnar as a counter pick. Also, teams might blind pick Gangplank on red side because he doesn’t really have punishing lanes or at least I don’t expect any high-risk carry picks in the top lane from Impact or Licorice. For the most part, Gangplank can play very safe with the resolve build and scale for team fights.

Jungle: Level 6 junglers like Sejuani/Nocturne/Kindred/Graves (to an extent, just likes to fight at that time period) and expect less early game junglers, but if we do see them it will be Gragas or Olaf.

Mid: This lane can be the big surprise for both teams, we have seen a lot of good mid lane counter picks from both NA and EU (Vayne or Leblanc). This is very important on blue side, especially when the red side team tries to counter pick the top lane (the team would have to blind pick mid to be able to counter pick top). We can expect champions like Leblanc, Irelia, Akali or any bruiser/assassin.

Bottom lane: More of the same, the more interesting picks are going to lie on C9’s side with the Leona and the Quinn. I’m afraid if they do blind pick those champs they might get punished by Team Liquid.

Players to look out for:

C9: Mid/Jungle Duo, both Blaber/Jensen and Svenskeren/GoldenGlue are very deadly because of how different the team plays when they rotate the players. It is going to be very hard for Pobelter/Xmithie to play against this.

Team Liquid: Doublelift (of course), Team Liquid have put a lot of resources on Doublelift throughout the semifinals. When it comes to just straight laning, Doublelift is a lot stronger than Sneaky but with the constant pressure that Team Liquid is putting bot they are just setting up Doublelift for success.


LCK Finals

The LCK finals will start 1:00 AM PST or 4:00 AM EST on Saturday, (late night boys!) it has been almost 3 weeks since the last LCK game and I am very excited. Griffin and KT are facing each other in the finals and both teams have something to prove. Griffin is doing pretty great for their first season of LCK and with their young roster, they are looking to get revenge against KT in the finals. In the regular season, KT was able to beat Griffin twice. We haven’t seen KT in a while so they might have some new tricks in hand but Griffin is also no joke, Griffin did beat Afreeca Freecs who was getting a lot of momentum throughout the Gauntlet. Nonetheless, KT are looking to win their first LCK split with this lineup. This super team lineup was made to win LCK and now is the time to live up to those expectations, unless KT pulls a KT.

Win Conditions:

Griffin was a different beast against Afreeca Freecs, but the most part they still play the same way. Griffin is really good at early game skirmishing along their winning lanes (usually top but they do better playing for bot). Tarzan is the main reason for this, he does a good job of playing for his winning lane, applying pressure, and basically splitting the map. If Griffin is able to control score through Tarzan’s early game pressure then I can see them winning the series. Even though Griffin is good at the late game team fights, KT is a lot better at team fighting in the late game. The times that Griffin was bested, especially in the series against Gen G and KT, their inexperience in the late game was exposed.

KT, on the other hand, is very versatile in terms of their play styles. They can play the split push, early game, or team fighting. This game for KT is more of a game against themselves. They have shown that they can handle Griffin’s play style, the problem is can they handle the pressure of an LCK final. If something goes wrong in the game like a failed baron smite, can they bring it back? They have shown in the regular season that they have worked on this aspect of the game, there were many moments where they mess up a team fight or Score misses the smite on baron but they were able to bring it back. The question is, can they do it in the biggest stage in competitive league of legends?

Champion Picks:

Top: This is going to be the main focus for KT and Griffin. Winning top lane is very important in the split push and for the most part, whoever has red side will counter pick top lane. Everything is going to be more of the same from the regular season. The one big change is that more teams are willing to blind pick the Gnar and Gangplank. Gnar can kind of survive a lot of matchups, the same thing with Gangplank because of the resolve tree build. The big difference is that we might see some hard carry top laners like Quinn or Jayce in the top lane against the Gnar/Gangplank.

Jungle: Throughout the gauntlet, Olaf and Gragas were very important picks. We are definitely going to see more of that. Olaf and Gragas are really good at ganking in the early game and they give a lot of power in terms of skirmishes. The picks that were popular before are still going to see play but for the most part, Olaf and Gragas are going to be the main focus. We might see the Sejuani or Skarner but not as much as the Gragas or Olaf. It will be interesting to see if a team is willing to pick the Taliyah. Throughout the gauntlet, Taliyah had a very hard time. She was permabanned and a lot of teams were first picking the Taliyah but this pick was exposed by Spirit’s predator junglers.

Mid: Chovy has shown a lot of champion pool weaknesses. He can be a target for KT to expose, especially in this meta where there are a lot of mid lane counter picks. For the most part, KT like counter picking top lane but on blue side, they might counter pick mid and put Ucal on a favorable matchup. Ryze is going to be a big contention of power so we might see a lot of Ryze counter picks like the Syndra, Irelia, Yasuo and etc. Also, bruisers could go back into the meta like Irelia which could greatly benefit Chovy (he did really good on this pick in the start of the season), because Chovy has only played control mages for the latter half of the split. For the most part, we are going to see a lot of control mages but the exciting part comes from the fact that most of these control mages have hard counter picks like the bruisers and assassins.

Bottom Lane: Not much different from the regular season. Varus is going to be a big pick for both teams. Especially because it is a Swain counter when playing the lethality Varus. Along with Varus’s rise, we might see other counter picks against Varus like the Miss Fortune. In terms of support, Lehends is still not going to play Rakan but we might see a Gragas. Bottom lane has some counter picks and interesting picks but for the most part, nothing has really changed.

Players to look out for:

The biggest match up to look out for is Tarzan and Score. Tarzan is the main reason why Griffin’s early game is really good. He does a good job of playing around his winning lanes and the only time he wasn’t able to do this was against Score. It’s going to be fun to see these two battle it out again.

Similarly, mid lane is heavily slept on at the moment. Chovy is seen as this god like player but people are sleeping on Ucal. This man has shown in KT that he is a very versatile player with good mechanics. In the series against Griffin, Ucal was able to solo kill Chovy and overall Chovy can be a big target for KT. Jin Air Green wings were also able to target Chovy in one of Griffin’s loses.
Mid and jungle are the biggest players to look out for in this match up but other lanes are also very important. Smeb has shown that he can handle Sword and Tarzan pretty easily and KT’s bottom lane has been consistently better than Griffin’s bottom lane in the two series’s that they did play.


Overall:
I am very hyped for both finals, more so for LCK because of how good KT and GRF actually are and the implications in terms of story line. NA LCS also has a hype final, I am always down to see Doublelift play his heart out in the big stage but this time C9 is looking scary especially with their 7 man roster.
Also, I didn’t forget about the EU LCS Finals! I really want Schalke to win! They look good but I don’t know if they can really beat Fnatic. I have been really surprised by the recent rise of Schalke, especially because they did get relegated at one time. I’m not as knowledgeable on EU compared to NA and Korea, in the future I will add EU to this weekly series.

Yung Hiro

Written by

Yung Hiro

I also, write about League of Legends…..in a soft voice

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