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After being crowned as best Challenger team in Europe, our guys traveled to Los Angeles, to play LCS promotion tournament against very well known LCS team, Copenhagen Wolves. Our guys did almost a month of bootcamping, skipped Black Monster cup just to avoid showing off strategies to CW. Coming into this match, experience of BO 5 was heavily on our team’s side. Also, SorenXD and Airwaks never played together offline, and that being added to low neutral objective control by CW during LCS gave us a role of little favorites for this match. But the the things weren’t going the way we want them to go, which led us to losing three straight games to CW.

Here’s the recap:
Game 1: Even though we knew SorenXD likes to play AOE wave clear champions like Orianna, we still managed to leave Ziggs open for him. Alongside Tristana for Woolite, these two champions simply outtraded our team at every point of the game. With our teamcomp, based on early pressure from Elise, CW answered with next level strats: counterjungling to the max, getting triple buff start, and even leaving they own jungle camps uncleared – just to deny experience from Trashy and Odoamne. Hjarnan managed to freeze bot lane pretty good. Because of deep wards into our blue buff area, YoungBuck and Airwaks managed to stop Febiven moving on the map. With lane swap, CW successfully stopped Ryze outfarming Dr. Mundo on 1v1 lane, and most important, they completely shut down Trashy and his early game agression with Elise. No matter the first blood for Febiven, his Ahri just couldn’t find momentum, not only in this game, but also through entire series. Our team’s comp in this game was more early game and laning phase oriented. We didn’t use that for decent snowballing and our guys got punished by CW, who brilliantly controlled every single Dragon into this one. When it came to late game fights, neither of our heavy CC (Binding, Cocoon, Charm) couldn’t find nice pick on CW comp, and Ziggs with Tristana managed to keep our guys away from towers, securing first game for CW.

Game 2: Coming into this one, H2k straight away banned Xerath, Orianna and Ziggs from SorenXD, while CW bans remained the same: Nidalee, Zed and Alistar. Odomne locked Gnar, and this was first time we saw new champion in the competitive play. And probably the last time. We didn’t pull good lane swaps once again, resulting in early dragon for CW. This will be the key for another brilliant neutral objectives control for CW. 4 man at dragon pit at 2:30 minute mark, uncontested by our guys, resulted in early snowball by CW. Early game was pretty much all about mid lane, with a lot of flash ults on towards Febiven. Gragas pick for Airwaks was key in this game, which led SorenXD to snowball hard with great farm throughout entire game (more than 10 cs / minute). Top was pressured hard too, because of unconvinient Gnar pick. Trashy was again shut down completely by great ward control from CW. Hjarnan and AoD were doing great on bot lane, but it wasn’t enough to kill Corki twice, because of Zilean’s protection (ultimate). CW took two man baron at 28:00 minute mark. CW picks were simply better in the second game too, which led them to 15k gold after 35 minutes. Although our guys found some space in late game fights, it wasnt enough against fed Yasuo and Corki, with great initiation from Gragas, good protection from Zilean, and big tanky YoungBuck on Maokai.

Game 3: Our early game was bad once again. Bad coordination in top lane at red buff, getting Airwaks first blood on Odoamne. CW with almost same team as in the previous game. Febiven was shut down once again on Ahri. This pick wasn’t quite good enough throughout series, since CW had much better ward control. This stopped Febiven from roaming and Trashy from playing super aggressive. We found couple of objectives through the mid game, but Yasuo / Corki / Zilean pick was just too much. CW snowballed decently and grabbed third win in a row against our guys.

As a conclusion, our team was simply outwarded. One of the main characteristics of our team is agression – CW did great homework, and stopped early snowball. Secondly, our picks were not so powerful for teamfights, resulting in losing almost every single of them. We can only congratulate Copenhagen Wolves on such a great performance, I personally think they surprised everyone, including themselves, with both, gameplay and final score of 3 – 0. We will still have a chance at qualifying for LCS, since Riot Games decided to add 2 more teams to it.
Now we have to practice even more, and try to deserve spot in Europe’s finest League of Legends company.