This year’s League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational was exciting from start to finish. Usually these international tournaments tend to be predictable; Korea and the other Asian regions will wipe the board with everyone else while the International Wild Card team and NA flounder at the bottom and EU chills in the middle.
This year G2 eSports, representing EU, decided to take a vacation and shit the bed, ending their run at 2-8. Supermassive, The IWC team, played extremely well, showing that with a few more years of support and attention, these outlier teams could become serious contenders.
Royal Never Give Up and Flash Wolves were expected to make it to the finals, and potentially win the whole thing. Nobody would have expected that NA’s Counter Logic Gaming would knock out Flash Wolves. In fact, both RNG and Flash Wolves failed to make it to the grand finals. When making predictions, Jatt and the other analysts put CLG at fifth place; NA never did well at these international tournaments.
As it turns out, the analysts were wrong and the grand finals featured the two time World Championship winners, SK Telecom, and CLG. NA has never made it to the grand finals of an international tournament (that Korea was also playing in), which is an achievement in its own right. Though CLG lost, getting clobbered 0-3 by SKT, they proved that NA is a serious region and a contender for the World Championship.
Thooorin , one of League’s largest beards, wrote an analysis on Aphromoo, CLG’s support. “Aphromoo showed us he was a good player two years ago. This year we learned he has become a great player. Now, he wants to be remembered as a legend,” Thooorin writes. Once CLG was able to evolve and move past Doublelift, they were able to take the tutelage of Aphromoo and show that they are the second best team in the world.
CLG picked Sona when the whole world was watching and won. That’s why I’m a CLG fan boy.
