Cloud9 started off the LCS summer split pretty poorly, by the end of week 5, the team was in last place with a record of 3 wins and 7 losses. However, they have turned everything around as they are currently sitting in 3rd place with 9 wins and 7 losses. Just now they impressed even more people by winning versus Team Liquid, the defending LCS champions and arguably the strongest team in North America.
However, winning versus Team Liquid wasn’t just a fluke, it was actually a very strategical victory. Cloud9 surprised everyone by switching out their star mid laner Jensen for Goldenglue. Goldenglue is a player that has been around for a long time and is popular in the community, but he has always had performance issues when actually on stage. Furthermore, they also switched out Blaber for Svenskeren. Before the game, everyone thought that the coach had gone mad as such a change would surely result in a loss for the team.
It turned out pretty quickly that Svenskeren and Goldenglue had been practicing a whole lot together while on the substitute bench. Svenskeren constantly roamed mid where he and Goldenglue would work together to just rack up kill after kill on Team Liquid’s Pobelter. The advantage that Cloud9 gained through these mid lane kills is what ultimately let them snowball the game out of control.
.@C9GoldenGlue gets a double kill as @Cloud9 collapse on @TeamLiquidLoL in the mid lane! #NALCS pic.twitter.com/eIYVouLy8t
— lolesports (@lolesports) August 12, 2018
Svenskeren was able to exert pressure on other lanes as he was so far ahead of the enemy jungler. The same was true for Goldenglue who could easily push out his lane and roam to bottom. This meant that Team Liquid’s Doublelift and Impact weren’t able to take over the game all by themselves as they were on the receiving end of numerous ganks by Cloud9. This entire strategy is what led to the surprising upset victory. Although Team Liquid was never truly out of the game, they were severely behind throughout most of it all due to the pressure that Goldenglue and Svenskeren created.
Being in the 3rd place spot means that Cloud9 is still in contention to go to worlds this year. Although it’s impressive that they have climbed their way up from the last place to 3rd, they would have probably been in a much better position if they hadn’t sabotaged their own roster in the first few weeks.
