The League of Legends LCS (League Championship Series) kicked off last Thursday, and if Riot was looking to create a major sports day feel, they succeeded with my group at least. We all piled into Ventrillo to watch and talk about the games, and if we weren’t spread out across the country I’m sure we would have ended up at somebody’s house together drinking a few beers and watching the games.
NA Region
The League of Legends LCS NA Region started off with two big LoL names as CLG took on TSM. CLG really looked strong and seemed comfortable, falling back into the familiar split push strategy that CLG fans remember so well. TSM just didn’t have any answers and CLG took the match pretty convincingly.
In the second game Curse’s Jungler SaintVicious went absolutely beast mode on Xin Zhao and really spearheaded the victory against Dignitas. Scarra seemed to get especially picked on in the mid, and even a late Baron steal with a Gragas ultimate wasn’t enough to keep Curse from rolling to the win.
After that CLG took out Good Game University despite GGU being in control early with first blood. It was a good match and both AD Carries played well. DontMashMe was great on Graves (his triple-kill after dashing out of an Ezreal Q was some of the best pro-play I’ve seen in a while) and ended the game 9-1-7 with 384 cs, but it wasn’t enough to get past Doublelift’s 12 kills and CLG’s experience in late game.
Thursday’s last match saw TSM take out Vulcun Command, the team which was known as Team FeaR until just last week when their sponsorship contract was sold by the FeaR organization. That distraction seemed to take its toll and Vulcun dropped this match to TSM, and ended the weekend 0-2.
On Friday the action didn’t slow down at all. Curse and CLG kicked things off, and CLG seemed to lose all the momentum they had from Thursday. Curse absolutely steam rolled this game. The entire Curse roster played well, but Voyboy and SaintVicious especially really brought it to their former team. Curse finished the weekend 3-0 and really looks to be the strongest overall team right now.
After that TSM bounced back with a win over Dignitas, Curse continued to win with a victory over GGU, and Dignitas finally got its first win over Vulcun.
The NA Region League of Legends LCS standings after Week 1:
EU Region
The League of Legends LCS EU Region started things off with SK Gaming vs. Fnatic, and a very close game came down to one good team fight by Fnatic where they took out 4 members of SK, then pushed into SK’s base where they picked up the ace, and then the win.
After that came the game that I had been waiting for all week, and it was Gambit Gaming vs. Evil Geniuses. For those that have been out of the loop for a while, that’s the former Moscow 5 team vs. the former CLG.EU team. The game went nearly 50 minutes, but it was all EG in a really dominant performance. EG’s top laner Wickd has been catching a lot of flack recently about not playing well, but he absolutely dominated Darrien up top, and really helped lead the way for the victory that saw EG score 20 kills to Gambit’s 3.
From there we saw Fnatic pick up another win against Giants Gaming. Giants looked strong early on, but just couldn’t secure the victory, and Fnatic came back to take the game with better team fight focus and more damage. Giants ran an AD Kennen/Sona bot lane comp that looked strong early on, but AD Kennen just fell off soon after laning phase.
The final game on Saturday saw SK Gaming get its first win against Copenhagen Wolves in a game where Copenhagen just seemed out matched from beginning to end.
Sunday kicked off with Gambit Gaming coming back strong against Fnatic on the back of a deadly Miss Fortune played by Genga. Copenhagen Wolves then took another beating against Evil Geniuses despite scoring the first two kills of the game.
The final two games of the week brought us a couple of surprises as Giants Gaming came back to knock off Gambit Gaming running that AD Kennen again with a Zyra support this time, and then SK Gaming took down Evil Geniuses, who up until that point had looked pretty much unstoppable.
THE EU Region League of Legends LCS standings after Week 1:
There’s more League of Legends LCS action this week, and we’ll have a preview of the upcoming games for you Wednesday right here on Gambreaker!
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