Week 4: Over the Hill but Far Away
With half a split to go, it's time for fresh starts and sustained momentum.
Welcome back Scuttlers,
After the first Super Week of the year, we saw rouges challenge titans, warriors rebound from tragedy, and prospects stifled. With the dramatics out of the way, Super Week not only gives us an entire round robin to reflect on, and another half of a split to look forward to. With this in mind, we’ll see two types of approaches: fresh starts and sustained momentum.
The victors coming out of the first round robin will use this moment to push the envelope. If you waltzed ghosted through your first wave of opponents, your sights are set on the ones that got away: your big losses and the rare slip-ups. Your goal is to tailor your approaches, read into your matchups, and try something new with the grace that comes with a strong record. It’ll be a mad dash to the top for these teams, like FlyQuest, Cloud9, and Evil Geniuses.
And the losers will take a breath. After playing each team once, matchups will only get harder. Opponents that snuck wins off of you will have had weeks of scrims and practice to refine their competitive edge and identify new holes in your gameplan. 100 Thieves, Team Liquid, and Dignitas, for example, all boast the potential to rewrite the script and use the remainder of the split to reenergize their players and their fans.
So who will look at the second half of a split as a victory lap, and who will view it as a grudge match? Let’s talk about it.
Instead of reflecting on silly little projections we made before the split, let’s talk about where some of the teams stand, and what their positioning looks like going into the second half of the split.
FlyQuest
Going into Super Week, FlyQuest had a massive target on their back. They had the pressure of maintaining a perfect record and previously triumphed over some of their hardest (on paper, at least) matchups of the round robin. However, TSM did good, and not only took the win on FlyQuest, but seemingly rattled them in the process through an incredibly confident game from start to finish.
Despite FlyQuest’s perfect record now sullied, I still think this a franchise-defining split for the organization. They’ve built a roster of young, standout talent, found new franchise players, and consistently made teams adapt around the gameplan that FlyQuest wants to employ each match. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect TSM’s win to be the only loss FlyQuest carries with them into the end of the split, and I hope the team maintains their composure well enough to make that a reality.
Golden Guardians
I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong — I was truly a doubter. And this week, Golden Guardians said “f*ck you” to the troves of LCS fans who shared that sentiment. Now sporting the longest win streak of any LCS team and a spiffy 5-4 record, this should be a significant turning point for the organization. Stixxay has demonstrated higher highs, especially with the support of huhi beside him. River is continuing to blossom and Licorice is holding down top lane despite a strong pool of competition across opposing teams.
So Golden Guardians have proven that they can at least make it to the top half of the standings, but can they stick it out? I think so. With this strong momentum, I expect them to consistently challenge bottom-tier teams and take games off of squads we expect to be key contenders, like they did against 100 Thieves last week. If they’re able to continue to develop and maintain this pace, Golden Guardians are on track to really redefine their standing in the LCS.
Dignitas
This star-studded team is hands-down the biggest disappointment of the season. My personal fandom aside, when you look at a squad consisting of Armut, Santorin, Jensen, Spawn, and IgNar, I do not see a 0-9 team. Frankly, I would expect a middle-of-the-pack standing at the bare minimum, and you can solely base that on the fact that the current squad has staggering 20 international tournament showings (MSI and Worlds) across the starting roster. This depth of experience and proven mastery does not make a 0-9 record acceptable. Either Dignitas has somehow assembled the Infinity Gauntlet of players who have officially become “washed” or there are some structural issues that need to be addressed within the organization.
TSM
TSM has had one of the most fun round robins to watch so far. After a red-hot start to the season, the squad dipped when faced against top dogs C9 and Evil Geniuses, but has since turned their stumbles into a spring. While many — including me — had their doubts about this team, their victory over FlyQuest demonstrated that this scrappy, ambitious team could challenge even teams fans believed to be untouchable.
Plus, their players and playstyle is damn fun to watch. Solo’s Cho’Gath into FlyQuest led to a 0-5-0 KDA at 20 minutes, but delivered him a dragons hoard of gold in his pocket through a CS lead and turret destruction. Bugi plays a creative, high-impact game in the jungle and Maple is the perfect counterpart to that playstyle as a proven playmaker and enabler. Neo and Chime were believed to be the weaker end of the team, but even they have demonstrated crucial upsides — especially on Chime’s end.
100 Thieves
When I look at 100 Thieves, I see a team that is absolutely the sum of its parts. Doublelift. Closer, and Bjergsen have been performing fairly consistently (outside of a few hiccups), but Tenacity and Busio still leave much to be desired. I’m optimistic that they will rise to the occasion with due time and increased team synergy, but 100 Thieves’ performance holistically has fallen short of their high skill ceiling.
As the squad looks forward, I sense that they also feel something similar to this sentiment. Many of the team’s losses feel like they came out of 100 Thieves’ underperformance rather than radical outplays. I’d expect this puts a chip on 100 Thieves’ shoulder, and if they play to their potential, I would expect a stronger record than 4-5 out of the second half of the season. The ball is in their court.
We’re going to talk about the handshake — or lack thereof.
In short, during C9’s match against Team Liquid, Diplex shot an “xDDDDD” in all chat to Team Liquid after killing Haeri mid. Yeon fired back with his own “xd” after winning a dragon skirmish, but then followed up with “worse than our academy team.” At the end of the game after GGs were being exchanged, Zven ended the game with a “back to academy >D” in all chat. As the teams greeted each other and shook hands, Zven was caught on air dodging a handshake from Yeon.
Zven later apologized for what he believed was a poor display of sportsmanship, but admitted that the banter fired him up and made the match more exciting. Yeon quote-tweeted Zven’s apology, saying that it isn’t even worth an apology. Despite this, some spectators called it “beef” or downright rude, and the situation blew up a bit.
So did any player cross a line? Frankly, no. In any traditional sport, some level of in-game trash talk is to be expected. Adrenaline is rushing, teams are getting hyped, and this stuff happens. In many cased, a little quip or an XD is harmless in chat, and far worse things are said in ELO hell solo queue. Even the dodged handshake seems like a relatively minor blip in the grand scheme of things.
Let the players mald for a week. Let the LCS broadcast use this footage for a hype segment (a much, much more playful subject matter than the previous Doublelift x TSM segment). Let each team’s social media accounts meme about it. At the end of the day, both players seem to realize this was child’s play, and the fans and spectators hyping this up to be some absurd display of disrespect have never seen football players get in a post-play scrap or tried to make it through their first ranked placement matches as a jungle main.
Closing Thoughts
With that out of the way, we have some solid matchups as the teams head back to the rift for Week 5. I’m excited to see if Golden Guardians can keep Stixxay alive for yet another week and triumph over Cloud9. I want to see two faith-filled fan bases in TSM take on CLG. And two teams with chips on their shoulder in Team Liquid and 100 Thieves will face off against each other to hopefully find their footing this split.
While the first half of the split blew my expectations out of the water, this week marks a new beginning. With a chance for revenge stories, miracle runs, and redemption arcs, we’re entering one of the most exciting points of the split.
Until next week, Scuttlers.
Calling going 0-5-0 in my ranked placements “big-brain TSM strats,”
Nick Mo.
A special ScuttleStack thanks to Marshal — a longtime friend of the publication — for editing this edition of the newsletter. May your jungle leashes always be generous and your smites surefire.