In less than 24 hours, 6 of the best teams from their regions will be competing for the glory of their regions and bragging rights as the best team in the world at the moment. The Mid-Season Invitational is set to begin in Shanghai at 11:00 p.m. PST with China’s Royal Never Give Up facing off against the North American representatives, Counter Logic Gaming. In two previous articles, we covered the representatives from the two LCS regions and Asian regions. This year’s MSI also has a World’s implication with the top four teams guaranteeing their region a 1st place seed at the Season 6 World Championships.
The Teams
Photo Credit: LoL Esports
LCK representative-SK Telecom
What can we say about SKT that they have not demonstrated numerous times on the rift? This team is the most decorated of any team in League of Legends and is an e-Sports juggernaut in Korea. This organization has won both the Season 3 and Season 5 World Championships and they look to be en-route to picking up another win in the summer with their performance. In the regular season, they had a mediocre start, but finished ahead of the pack in third place. They had to go through several tough opponents before meeting the almost-undefeated ROX Tigers in the finals. The team showed that even despite the slow start to the season, they were the champions of Korea for a reason and took down their rivals 3-1 in the finals, the same score they beat the Tigers by in the last World Championships also.
LPL representative-Royal Never Give Up
The Royal organization are no strangers to international events and showings with their finals placing in the Season 3 World Championships, losing to the eventual winners, SKT T1 K. This season, the team picked up several Korean and Chinese talents who were once considered the best in their roles, such as NaMei and Mata, and revitalized the team. The results were immediate as RNG dominated regular season and kept up their form throughout the playoff stages, defeating Edward Gaming 3-1 in the finals. RNG also features two previous world champions from the Season 4 Samsung White Team, Looper and Mata.
LMS representative-Flash Wolves
The last time the LMS produced a world champion was all the way back in Season 2 where the Taipei Assassins beat Azubu Frost. Since then, the region has fallen a bit into obscurity as Korea and China have risen to dominate the Asian scene. However, during the Season 5 World Championships, the LMS showed that they had enormous talent in the scene when both of their teams made it out of the group stages. One of those teams was the current LMS representative, the Flash Wolves, who actually topped their group over the KOO Tigers in that tournament. To make it to MSI this year, the Flash Wolves had to go through their regional rivals, ahq, in the finals.
EU LCS representative-G2 e-Sports
G2 are the newest and least experienced team of all the teams at MSI. The team has seen almost no international experience, but they topped the European LCS as rookies and took every award with it also. It is hard to say what to expect from this team because if they play to their full potential, they can go far, but it’s possible that they could also break down from the pressure of facing some of the best teams in the world. Still, they have the talent and the skill to make their first big international event a success.
NA LCS representative-Counter Logic Gaming
CLG have become one of the household names of League of Legends in the Western world along with TSM. They have been around since the start of the game and have risen and fallen time and time again. The last world championship saw them bomb out in the group stages, even dropping a game to the wildcard team, Pain Gaming. The team made a huge roster change after worlds and before the spring split, removing long-time ADC and superstar, Doublelift, and bringing in rookie, Stixxay, to fill his shoes. The team finished second in the spring split and faced their domestic rivals, TSM in the grand finals that went all the way to the fifth game before CLG closed it out.
Wildcard Representative-Super Massive
It might be hard to remember that there are other significant scenes outside of the big 5 that dominate League of Legends, but Turkey made their impression on the international last year at MSI where Beşiktaş e-Sports Club represented Turkey. This year’s wildcard team, Super Massive, contains many of the members of the Beşiktaş and is considered to be the “super-team” of Turkey. The team performed extremely well in the wildcard tournament, but still come into MSI as the huge underdog and a potential dark horse of the tournament.
Predictions
Photo Credit: Youtube
There shouldn’t be that much debate that SKT are clearly the favored team to win MSI this year. The Korean scene is the strongest and their closest competitor, China, has been shaky this year. With that being said, China probably has the best chance of defeating the Koreans still. The next three regions, EU, NA, and LMS are pretty close in skill and those three teams probably can beat each other on any given day. Super Massive are the underdogs of the tournament and are unlikely to advance to the playoff stages.
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