League Rundown - Episode 545: Upon the shoulders of Giants

[00:00:13] Speaker A: Gets a little too far here. He's gonna have to try and get himself out. Let me go. Tillery and the rest of the shots of fire. Zion is just killing the next Zion can eat it single handedly win the game by game by game by game by should be. Oh my God. Stupid passes through and manages to the table with Messiah tanking it up. I do not believe he just believe. I cannot understand this game. Unicorns of Love. It wasn't a mutant. The Nexus hello and welcome to episode 545 of the League Rundown. This is split one LTA week one preview and LEC week one review. This episode is lovingly entitled upon the Shoulders of Giants. I'm your host Kangas and I'm joined by two esteemed co hosts. Up first we got a Bickle. [00:01:29] Speaker B: It's been seven days and I'm still waiting for Ja for that rogue game to end. [00:01:36] Speaker C: Damn it. That was my joke. [00:01:38] Speaker A: GX vs Rogue already setting a record for the year for the longest game. I suppose that will happen every week one but this is quite a long record. Almost a full 60 minutes. We'll talk about that a little later. You heard his voice there though. We also have joining us Badger, I was gonna say. [00:01:53] Speaker C: Oh, I just heard that the eighth elder dragon was taken in the GX Rogue game. [00:01:58] Speaker A: Wasn't it only three elders or did they get a fourth? Oh my God. [00:02:03] Speaker C: It was fun. I'm pretty sure it was four elders got taken in that game and it didn't. [00:02:07] Speaker A: I think I blacked out on the third. I probably only the fourth one. That one was a wild game. Yeah. And also Hawk does not have a fun bird fact because he's not joining us today. He's feeling a little under the weather. So I instead have a bird fact that I learned at the bar a couple of days ago from somebody that was friends with another friend. Anyway, she just told me that the zoo she used to work at there was like a specific type of pigeon and that pigeon would escape all the time because it would just walk behind people leaving the front door and people thought it was cute and they didn't realize it was part of the zoo. So that's my bird fact is that there's some zoo in California that's like responsible for a bunch of non indigenous birds all over the place. [00:02:55] Speaker B: Well, if people want to hear anything hawk adjacent that contains the word hawk, they can listen to the Patreon pre. [00:03:03] Speaker A: Show and I can promise you it's probably exactly what you think it is. And then some you know, we really did a deep dive in all the most important news stories of this past week. Speaking of, let's get into news for the week in terms of League of Legends up first. Surprise, surprise, everybody. I think I kept it a pretty good secret, but it was officially announced last week after the pod, I think went up, but before we recorded that. Or sorry, after we recorded but before the pod went up. Either way, I'm on LTA north officially joining Riot Games broadcast for this next year, 2025. If you've been a long time listener. [00:03:49] Speaker C: Of the pod, it's about damn time. [00:03:51] Speaker A: Appreciate it, guys. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll know that there's been a dream of mine ever since I moved to Los Angeles in 2019. I believe I joined the podcast in late or like mid to late 2020. So we're coming up on five years now already. But yeah, I mean, this is what I've been working towards. So I'm very excited to be on the show and very excited to show everybody what I got opening weekend. So make sure to tune in. I'm casting the second series both days. It's going to be Team Liquid Dignitas and Lions C9. But reverse the order, it's Lion C9 first and then TL Dignitas on Sunday. So yeah, there we go. Now everyone has to be really nice to me because people have been giving me a lot of lip lately on the podcast. Badger, I'm looking at you. But now, now I'm official, so I could end your whole career. [00:04:42] Speaker C: I mean, I. My career is already over at this point, so you don't have to worry about. [00:04:46] Speaker A: Dammit, you beat me to it. All right, well, we'll get to the rest of the news for the week. Does anyone have an LCK update? Usually Mizell would give us the LPL update. I don't know what's going on. [00:04:58] Speaker C: Yeah, so they're doing LCK cup right now. So basically there's two groups of five. Those teams are figuring out how to get themselves into a play in bracket, to a playoff bracket to determine who's going to be the team to go to first stand in Korea. And surprise, surprise, Gen G is undefeated. D + Kia is undefeated as well. The other teams in their group because gen G and D plus are in the same group. Nongshim, Red Force, DRX and KT are in there and they're all 1 and 1. They've completed the circle of suck amongst the bottom three teams of that group. And on the other side, you've got T1 who's 1 and 1, you've got Hanwha who's 1 in 1. You've got the. I don't know their actual name, but they're the DN Freaks. Now that's the Berserker lineup with Pio Sick and Doo Doo is the top laner with Bulldog in life mid lane and then Fear X and okay bro. Okay. Savings Bank Brion are both 0 and 2. So. [00:06:09] Speaker A: Okay, wow. That was a full breakdown. The two things related. [00:06:13] Speaker C: What's going on? [00:06:14] Speaker B: You ask what DN freak stands for? It stands for nothing. It's only just dn. They are sponsored by DN Solutions. So they are the DN Freaks. [00:06:22] Speaker C: No. [00:06:25] Speaker A: It'S definitely Deez Nuts Freaks. [00:06:27] Speaker C: Deez Nuts Freaks. That's. [00:06:29] Speaker A: That's gotta be it. [00:06:31] Speaker B: Unlike most groups where you play within your group and then decide a ranking with that, you do not play who is in your group. You only play the opposite group. [00:06:40] Speaker C: Yeah, it's very weird that it's such a strange group. [00:06:45] Speaker A: So this is like basically their split one, right? So they were the ones that said it. We're not gonna do a split. Well, traditional split one. We're just calling what it is. This is kind of an exhibition split before going to a brand new international tournament. [00:07:00] Speaker C: Basically it's just to determine they're doing a expedited version like kind of how LTA is doing to figure out who their last stand is or first their first stand team is. Because we're stand team because we're six weeks away from first stand. [00:07:16] Speaker A: That's wild to think about. [00:07:17] Speaker C: That's a weird thing to think about. Hey, LEC just started this weekend. Oh, by the way, we're six weeks from the first international tournament of the year. [00:07:23] Speaker A: Well, it's gonna get weirder when we talk about the North American schedule because the America's schedule because it's. It's gonna be over in a blink of an eye. It's gonna be super fast. But with all that said, thank you for the LCK update. Also, we're keeping our eyes on some of the NLC stuff, at least when it comes to Los Ratones and cool stories that pop around there. 140k viewers for their debut match in NLC. That is insane that for a developmental league team. I mean, obviously they're all very popular players. A lot of them are streamers and Kadrill is the one kind of heading the team. But that's like sizably more than what we get for LCS right now LTA viewership. And I. I think that might be up there with, like, LEC and what they got in their week one viewership. So. Yeah, just shows you the power of these creator teams, man. It's crazy. We moved on to franchising way too fast. Money in the league was bad. We just needed content creators in the league. That's all we needed the whole time. Also, LEC salaries. There was a big news thing that dropped. Did either of you read that report? [00:08:36] Speaker C: I did not. [00:08:37] Speaker B: I skimmed it. [00:08:38] Speaker A: Skimmed it. All right, cool. I skimmed it as well. But if you want to skim it from home, it was basically a breakdown from Sheep Esports talking about the salaries of the LEC players. There weren't many names mentioned with specific salaries attached to them. I think Caps was the only one that was like, name dropped as the definitive number one most paid player. But it wasn't specified how much. But it's just like, averages and cool breakdown of stuff. So it tells you, like, this is the average salary. This is the median salary. This is the average salary of a Korean import. This is the average salary of a rookie. It's like, really cool. Just kind of like the numbers they chose to look at and what they broke it down and basically they're all getting paid more than any players at this point is what we learned. [00:09:27] Speaker B: They gave you the average by position. They listed the top five most paid players. They said Caps was number one, and then they sent the top. The other five were Hansama, Humanoid, Larsen, and Elioja. In no particular order. They gave each role breakdown. They gave a ranking of teams in terms of their salary. They don't list it specifically. And they also said the top three spenders in the LEC spend almost half of the amount of money of the league. [00:09:54] Speaker A: Yeah, 45%, right? [00:09:56] Speaker B: Yep. 45% from G2 fanatic and movie star Koi. [00:10:01] Speaker A: That's crazy. Koi being the third highest spender is really interesting. Obviously, Jojo coming over is big, but at the bottom, I mean, they also showed kind of like the. The shift compared to last year. Team Heretics is the lowest spender this year, dropping them five places in the spending order. They were like, kind of middle of the road last year and now complete budget. So I'm not gonna. [00:10:22] Speaker C: I'm gonna be real. You can pop quiz me right now what the Heretics roster is. And I. I would go like one for five. I know, I know, Flack. It is on that team. That's the only name that is that. It's like Carl Sin and. [00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:36] Speaker C: Black kid and. [00:10:37] Speaker A: Yep. [00:10:38] Speaker C: Stand, I think. [00:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah, there we go. Hey, there's three. [00:10:42] Speaker C: That's about all. [00:10:43] Speaker A: The only thing that their jungler is pretty good. [00:10:45] Speaker C: Oh. Is Shea, their jungler. [00:10:48] Speaker A: And then mid laner Camilo. [00:10:54] Speaker C: He had. [00:10:54] Speaker A: A pretty good, pretty good victory game in week one. Then also pretty bad victory game in week one. But it's okay. [00:11:03] Speaker B: With all due respect to team Heretics and sk, their roster play certainly looks like they're the two least paid teams. [00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, kind of makes sense, but cool story. Go check it out. Some really good reporting from Lec Wooloo. Roster news. We have a lot of stuff actually for El Tan. First up, Shopify, Rebellion. This isn't exactly roster news, but it's kind of clumped in there. They announced new partnership and new co owners of the organization Moist, Critical and Ludwig. So we have our own content creators here in North America coming in and buying part of a team. Badger. Does this save North American League of Legends? [00:11:48] Speaker C: Saving it and you know, maybe we'll see. I don't know. We'll have to see what's going on with it. If we get back to 10 teams, that might save it. But if there's a reason to go back to 10 teams, I, I also need to have it to be discovered and explained to me in like a 27 point manifesto. Pretty much. [00:12:09] Speaker A: Well, here's here, here's what it is. How we get back to 10 teams is we, after two years, we cut all of ltas and we just bring two Brazilian teams. [00:12:19] Speaker C: You're right. You're right. [00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And then we're just lta for no reason at that point. [00:12:23] Speaker C: I will say though, the cool thing, one of the cool things they did, and I was about to check their website to see if they're still doing it, Shopify, when they announced, the day that they announced the partnership put the new jersey. Yeah, no, they actually did it. They have a, a jersey with pins and whatnot. It's actually sold out. Yeah, sold out in most sizes. [00:12:47] Speaker A: So it was like what, 20 bucks? For like 20 bucks, you buy jersey or something. [00:12:51] Speaker C: You buy it, you get a jersey and then you get the two like pins of the, the, the moist part of the, the collab. I don't know what, how do you even describe the moist part? [00:13:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The moisture, I believe it was, it kind of flew under the radar. But it was only the first 200 orders, I think. Yeah, for that price you can still go get a jersey. Absolutely. But that was a big marketing push. Was like, yeah, like, get a jersey. Now, the first, like, couple hundred are going to be for a really good deal. So shout out to anybody who did it because that is still a great deal. Bickle, were you trying to hop in there with something? Sorry, I think I. All right, cool. Well, things are about to get moist in the. [00:13:38] Speaker C: The LCS or. Sorry, let me back this up. The LTA has gotten a little bit. [00:13:43] Speaker A: More moist, a little wetter. We are wetter together, everybody. Wetter together. I cannot wait to lead Chance in the studio. Just saying we are wet. We are. [00:13:56] Speaker C: Yeah, that's good. That's gonna catch on really well in the studio. [00:14:00] Speaker A: I actually imagine it will. Something tells me that the average viewer will actually get into that. Maybe not average, but at least some of them will. Either way, back to some of the other roster news. There's a couple visa issues. Talk about. First up, SEOs on Shopify, Rebellion not able to make it in time. So Zazel will be filling in. Same thing with Dignitas and their jungler Shaden reportedly having visa issues. Although that one I've heard a couple of rumors about. Because there's also the controversy around Shaden earlier. People are talking like, is this air quote visa issues or is it Dignitas just not Canadian? He. Yeah, he is Canadian. Yep. [00:14:41] Speaker C: So none of the other Canadian players are having issues getting their visas to the States. Hell, Jojo technically got a European. He got a European visa before Shane could get a Canada to. [00:14:57] Speaker B: It would be a very Dignitas thing for that to happen. [00:15:02] Speaker C: Honestly, it is the most stigmatized thing possible. [00:15:05] Speaker A: And you know what's even more? Dignitas is not putting speaker in who was your last jungler, who's a free agent right now. And yes, his contract's expired, but you could just give him like, a shorter one. No, they're putting in one of their coaches, Lira, who has not played in competitive play since, like, 2017. [00:15:29] Speaker C: Do you want to. Do you want to take a guess as to what his last split was? [00:15:33] Speaker A: Wasn't he on Clutch? I think he actually went to Worlds with Clutch, didn't he? [00:15:38] Speaker C: He was on the Clutch roster that went to Worlds. Yes. [00:15:42] Speaker A: Okay. [00:15:44] Speaker C: Do you know what year that was? [00:15:46] Speaker A: That was 2019. [00:15:48] Speaker C: Yes. [00:15:49] Speaker B: Bingo. [00:15:50] Speaker C: Yes. [00:15:50] Speaker A: So did he play? He wasn't playing in 2020, was he? [00:15:53] Speaker C: No, he was. No, he. He's been a coach and a commentator in Korea. [00:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:59] Speaker C: Since then. [00:16:00] Speaker A: So most notable, I remember obviously making it to Worlds in 2019, but also the envious roster, if anybody remembers that one. I was actually a big Fan of that roster back in the day, mostly for the fantasy points that they scored me. But. [00:16:17] Speaker C: Or near Ninja L. Apollo. Hakuo. [00:16:24] Speaker A: Before Apollo, it was actually laud, I'm pretty sure. I think LOD was the ad carry in the. Yeah. After. Yeah. [00:16:33] Speaker C: Niski was on that team for a little bit. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Hakuo, dude, what a wild team. But yeah, lira's back. He will be playing. So that means sell your dignitas stocks now if you had any. Because I do not expect them to look good, especially looking at how the draw show went. We'll talk about that before we get into the LTAN stuff. Every time I'm gonna start to say lcs, I'm gonna have to catch myself. But yeah, is. [00:17:00] Speaker C: Is Mark Z gonna like, like flog you in public if you're. If you say LCS on the broadcast, like. Or. [00:17:06] Speaker A: No, but what. What we want to do or what I'm pushing for. And this was not my idea. It's one of the producers ideas. But I think it's really funny and we should do it. We should have a live broadcast counter like a swear jar. [00:17:17] Speaker C: Oh, how many times you say lcs? [00:17:19] Speaker A: Anytime a caster says lcs, like it pops up with like, your face and then like a number of how many times you've done it. [00:17:26] Speaker C: That's actually a really good idea. [00:17:29] Speaker B: That's what happens more often. Do we get more LCS drops or does the LEC continue to drop? More Mad Lions drops. [00:17:36] Speaker A: They did a lot of that. [00:17:38] Speaker C: I mean. Okay, all right. Oh, which one's higher? How many times LCS gets mentioned on the LTA broadcast this weekend? Or how many times Hill saying died last weekend? [00:17:50] Speaker A: Ooh. Well, we'll talk about that when we talk about Hill saying. Because I think you have a fun little game for us to play a little game. There's one other LTA north roster rumor that I've heard go around. This is unsubstantiated, so I don't know how likely it is, but there's reports that lion, the team, their support Lions with the Z might be having visa issues too. So who knows what that's gonna look like if they're gonna have to find a last minute, you know, swap as well. There's not many like supports that would be available at this point. So that's gonna be tough if that is actually happening and if they're gonna have to find somebody. [00:18:29] Speaker B: But they would also be in a difficult spot because it would need to be a Latin American player. [00:18:37] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Because they have two it's Odie and Lions. That's one of the Latin American players. Now with that said, that might actually make it easier than finding a North American player, now that I think about it, but who knows what that would look like for them. So I know Lions the support had a really good worlds on R7, took down 100 thieves. Considered like one of the goats of the region. With OD like those two, I know it's like jungler and support, which is kind of untraditional for us to think about as like the superstars of a region. But for lla, these are two of like the biggest names in LLA currently, so a lot of LLA fans are looking forward to watch them. That would be a big disappointment if Lions is not able to play. So we're rooting for him. Would love to see him play. But that's it that we have for news unless anybody has heard anything or anything is currently dropped on socials while we've been talking about it. No going once. [00:19:32] Speaker C: I was, I was just checking while you mentioned it. [00:19:35] Speaker A: It's happened the last like couple of times. You're like while we're covering news, something drops that we have to talk about it. [00:19:41] Speaker B: This is a really minor thing that I think dropped like earlier in the week is a Brazilian legend. BRTT has retired. [00:19:49] Speaker A: Oh I had heard rumors about that going around. I think we talked about that going around even on the POD in the past, but it's confirmed now. [00:19:58] Speaker B: I will double check that, but I believe so. [00:20:01] Speaker A: Well RIP Tool. Yep, he's retired legend. The Draven aficionado has now been taken behind the shed. I think that's what we do with once they retire. Right. They have no other transferable skills for society, so what the heck, no rooting for it. Brtt. That was just like weirdly flaming. I didn't mean anything by that. [00:20:24] Speaker C: Anyway, the most famous Draven player of all time. [00:20:27] Speaker A: Yep. If you want to give your thoughts on BRTT retiring and other Draven adjacent thoughts, make sure to join the community Discord. You can find a link in the description wherever you are listening to this podcast as well as shout out to everybody who supports us through the Patreon. Helps us get the audio sounding much better than otherwise would, and helps us put together fun little events to do with the community every now and then. And you can also support us on our shop if you would, rather than just donate if you want to get something back for it. League rundown shop.fourthwall.com yeah, I still don't have any of the mouse pads, but I do kind of want to get one. I need to upgrade my mousepad. And the hat is my favorite part. And the mug, dude, I drink from that mug, like, every week. It's great. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for supporting us. You're the best. Now, I think you were ready. We're gonna hop into the episode proper, gentlemen. It's gonna start off with Lec because we have games to talk about. So let's just talk about the games. And then we're gonna end with El Tan and to kind of preview what week one is gonna look like and what happened with the draw show, because that happened this weekend as well. So up first with L, E, C. This is the way we're going to do it for the format going forward on the pod. We're going to talk about each team and how their week looked rather than breaking down every single individual game. Instead, we're going to focus on just kind of the bigger games to watch if you weren't able to catch them, or just the fun moments in some of the bigger games. So up first, in sole possession of first place Badger. You had them in your team draft for coverage this year. And. And surprise, surprise, they deliver. Giant X is three and, oh, undefeated to start off the weekend. [00:22:22] Speaker C: You know, I thought this was a team that was going to take a little bit of time to scale up just because you take a full Korean bot lane and you stick it with a bunch of, I would say, relatively newer players. Like, I guess the solo lanes are the more relatively new players, but closer. And the Jungle, being a great leader has been historically a great voice in teams. Great jungler with June who was a catalyst for when Fnatic was good last season when they were rolling. He was important to the team as well as Noah. And you stick that with, you know, two promising European players. The greatest Western coach of all time, imo. And Gyoto is the coach of the team, so, you know, he's got them boys playing well. They had two phenomenal games this weekend and then a fun game this weekend as well. [00:23:23] Speaker A: I think that's a good way to phrase that. [00:23:26] Speaker C: It was. It was fun. Let's just call it what it is. And so. But they're currently sitting at the top of the standing looking really good. Taking wins off of quality opponents, too, while they were at it. [00:23:38] Speaker A: Casey, the big one. I mean, a rogue sk, but the Casey match and that one, I think was like the best game that we had all weekend in terms of just, like, quality. [00:23:49] Speaker C: Sad thing to think about. [00:23:50] Speaker A: It's kind of crazy to think it's GX versus kc. But yeah, I want to double down. Props to Closer. He's just ran the map so well and played with Jackie's so well, who's playing mechanically, individually, on his own, incredibly. But then Closer is just setting him up to get kind of good lane states. But then also Noah and June just look like completely different players. They're so good. And June is playing the map so well off the back of Closer as well. So it's just felt like GX oftentimes. And I'll say this about Casey when we get to them too. They just played the map and just read the situations on the map incredibly well of where we do we need to be, where is the opponent and how do we punish them for being somewhere that they shouldn't be right now? [00:24:36] Speaker C: I think one of the things this team has going for them too is just since we're still in this like this state where we're still playing lane swaps and we're working around, you know, first dragon is the red teams like 85 of the time or something like that. Like you're working around stuff like this. If you have a player like Noah who can just be, you know, stable in a side lane, can handle himself like in a way that he's not like being detrimental to the team just for the time being, getting his farm, making sure that he's able to play the game and getting going while June's on the map. That's kind of an important thing to have in a team with your ad carry. So definitely setting them up for success very early on in the games and you can see it with their dragon controls and how they are playing around the maps with grubs and Attican and everything like that. So really straight great start to the team. You know, maybe, maybe you need to learn how to close out a, I don't know, a 59 minute game. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. [00:25:39] Speaker B: If they had been playing anybody but Rogue, they lose that game. [00:25:43] Speaker C: Well, the problem was they played Rogue. [00:25:45] Speaker A: Game in that game they survived a 4v5 base defense versus elder buff if. [00:25:53] Speaker C: That tells you anything about how the team plays 4 versus 5 against Elder and they managed to win the fight, dispel the attack and start to get mapped pressure afterwards setting up a Baron play. [00:26:04] Speaker A: It's all off of June. [00:26:05] Speaker C: He's crazy. [00:26:06] Speaker B: We shout out players for that game. I want to shout out Jack Spectra who was having his second ever game Casting. [00:26:14] Speaker C: Oh yeah. [00:26:15] Speaker B: And this is what he has to deal with. [00:26:17] Speaker A: That was very funny. He. He just didn't even know what to talk about. [00:26:20] Speaker C: He was like, I don't understand. [00:26:24] Speaker B: I do support his opinion though. The MVP of that game was all of Rogue for not plushing, for not pressing their flash buttons. [00:26:32] Speaker A: Dude, twice. There were two different moments. The, the. The fight in base, none of them flashed and they like sneak the Atticon and then get wiped a baron immediately afterwards because they don't flash you in the gate. Like, what are we doing guys? [00:26:49] Speaker C: You can't save them for next game. Guys, come on. Just like, yeah, doublelift knows all about that. That you can't save your flash for next game. Come on. [00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that was. That was something. But GX still, even though that was a fun game, they looked very solid in their other ones. I also want to give props to Lot. Top Laner who just was kind of just straight winning 1v1s. So everybody's stepping up on GX. It doesn't seem like they have a super weak link that's easily exploitable after week one. At least not in my opinion. Does anybody else disagree with that? Do you think that there is a weak link that somebody could look at because they play G2 next week? [00:27:25] Speaker B: I think it will end up being the fact that Lot is a rookie. I think someone like Broken Blade is going to be able to take advantage of that. But I do think GX has been looking really well and solid. And just the fact that Noah and June now aren't under the microscope, that is Fnatic. They've been playing really damn well. [00:27:46] Speaker A: All right, fair enough. [00:27:48] Speaker C: I mean, I wasn't inspired by Broken Blade's performance this either weekend either. So who knows knows how that's going to go as well. [00:27:57] Speaker A: Dude, Caps is trying his hard out. [00:27:58] Speaker C: Caps. Actually, we'll talk about that when we get to G2. [00:28:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Time to talk about the teams that had a successful first weekend. Surprise, surprise. That does not include G2 spoilers. But moving down the list, we have the teams that are clumped in two and one. There are four of them up first. I'll go with BDS. They played Vitality, G2 and Rogue. The team they lost to might surprise you. They beat G2. They beat Rogue. I mean, yeah, Rogue almost lost everybody, but they actually lost to Vitality bds. The read that I had on them is that Nuke and Ice are in pretty good form. Paris slots in well to be engaged for them. I liked the Engage supports and Nuke Also like pulling out things like the Oriana to follow up on that. It seems like they have a pretty clear idea of how they want to play the game and they really were just winning through like well set up team fights and good executed wombo combos. That's what a lot of their wins came down to, especially against G2. So I don't know if I have like super high hopes for this team, but they played pretty well. Definitely well enough to take down G2 despite. I think this is the one that they fell behind early versus G2 pretty hard. It was like multiple kills in the lead for G2. But then BDS was able to bounce back because like I said off of these big ENG stages, these big team fight moments, it was a big shockwave. [00:29:28] Speaker B: From Nuke at otacon that turned. [00:29:30] Speaker C: Yeah, the. The G2 Twitter account posted add another one to the collection. It was just the four of them getting pulled right into the middle of otacon and I'm just like, yep, there it is. [00:29:41] Speaker A: And that's something that happened a lot this weekend in general in the lec. And Mazel kind of hinted that it would happen because he saw it already going on in the LPL teams, just not knowing what the hell to do at otacon because that buff is way stronger than Baron. Like 20 minute Baron spawning you. It takes a while to kill, but you can kill it. Otacon will kill you if you try to take it at 20 minutes and you're not prepared for that. He shreds like 50 armor and magic resist when he's hitting you. It's insane. So you just become super squishy for the enemy team to then take you out. And G2 was on the receiving end of a couple of rough otacons this weekend. So again, we'll talk about that later. But bds, I think they were able to play pretty well. Like they. They had a pretty good read of what to do on the map and just maybe it was lucky. But it kind of did feel like they drafted specifically to kind of pull off this combo engage style question for. [00:30:40] Speaker B: You guys this entire year. Do we ever see the Ruinous Otacon? [00:30:49] Speaker A: Oh, that's a good question. We have not. We didn't see a weekend one. It was only ever ravenous. [00:30:56] Speaker C: You know, I'm gonna be real. I don't even know what the difference is between the two. [00:31:00] Speaker A: So I don't remember exactly what the break point is. But if there's a high kill game, then it's the Ruinous Otacon and when it dies, it spawns the little flowers that you can pick up, and they give you adaptive damage and experience. And then the ruinous is when it's a low kill game. It spawns and gives everybody an instant revival ga, which I think is just objectively better in pro play. [00:31:27] Speaker C: It's such a better. It's a better one to, like, try and have a win con for. [00:31:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Unless your name is Rogue. They play very poorly, but everybody else. You see exactly what happens once you pick up that buff is that you just start diving turrets. You start pushing for really aggressive plays, and then you don't get punished for it because you just spawn right back to base immediately. It's not even like a. Like a ga where you spawn back where you were or like a full death timer. You just teleport back to base, and then you start from fountain. [00:31:58] Speaker C: Okay. Yeah. [00:31:59] Speaker B: And you give over less gold when they kill you. [00:32:02] Speaker C: But. [00:32:02] Speaker A: Yep. So to answer your question, I. It's. We have to see it at least once. Like I was saying, across all major. [00:32:12] Speaker C: Leagues, A, there's gonna be like a G2 and Koi game down the line. Unless. No, they didn't. G. Whenever G2 and Koi play, Caps and JoJo peon, the two of them themselves are gonna make sure that no matter what, they're just gonna be scrapping. They're gonna try and fighting all over the world at that point. For. [00:32:40] Speaker A: I have a. I have a different one. I have a different prediction. It's actually. I think it could happen this weekend. We'll talk about it when we get into the predictions. [00:32:50] Speaker C: I know exactly what game you're talking. [00:32:52] Speaker A: I know the game because I think it could happen this weekend, everybody. I think it actually could. All right, let's move on the list, though. KC is up next. Actually, let's move on to Koi, because Badger, you're KC and you just talked about gx. Bickle, would you be able to talk to me about COY is actually JoJo Pun coming to LEC. Had a rough game, but then a couple good performances. And the team overall, still 2 and 1. [00:33:16] Speaker B: You start the week, you end the week. You look at it. JoJo played phenomenal. Things were going great. Coy was clicking. All things considered, just. Just ignore the game against Casey because JoJo sprinted it. [00:33:30] Speaker A: Yeah, that was rough. He. As the casters put it, his KDA was bad. He died unnecessarily. Despite being so far behind, he was still. Air quotes. Impactful in that game. So it wasn't like he tilted and I think intentionally like ran it down or anything like egregious. But he was in bad positions a couple of times and was getting Giga punished for it. But like you said, games one and three, he really came back. And I also want to give props to the rest of the team. I think in particular Supa is a really solid secondary carry, if not just primary carry for this team. I think Supa had a really good weekend. Even in their bad game, like the one that they they Jojo ran it down. Stupa was almost carrying them in that. Like if he had just been a little more. Had a little more gold, he might have been able to do it. [00:34:19] Speaker B: In all three games, JoJo was kind of trying to make plays and being an influence. It's just that in that Casey game they really got behind and it just wasn't able to snowball off of anything. But he is very much meshing really well with that team. And you can see what happens now that they have that stronger laning playmaking style mid laner and it just really fits what they needed and it shows high potential for Koi, especially when they were already able to beat a team at the top of the table that everybody expected like Fnatic and they smacked. [00:34:57] Speaker A: Fnatic a big like upset. Yeah, he smacked humanoid. Jojo crushed him. But also even in their game three against Vitality, I thought they had a really cool draft. I really liked Olioya Zyra into the Ambessa because like yes, she can alt onto you or get behind the team, but you got all the plants, you have your Rylai's, you're slowing her. Like she doesn't. She's got a lot of dashes but still she's kind of move speed dependent. And then the VI as well, they had a lot of things that were coming into them. So Yoya just like power farmed and then then was a nuisance that they couldn't really get on top of. [00:35:29] Speaker C: So Zyra is just a really. I mean just the whole team was set up to be like, oh, you want to come into us? We're gonna play the counter dive. We got the to get the disengage and the re engage afterwards. You've got the tools to split up the fight with the Yone and the Kante Altis and then you can just let Supa do his thing in fights and just try and put as much damage out as he can while he's got an, you know, Ran and Aessa, a VI and an Ari trying to kill Him. [00:35:59] Speaker A: So, yep, it's a lot of threats, but, you know, when you draft correctly, you're able to deal with them. So. Yeah, I liked what Koi brought to the table in that regard as well. We'll talk about more of their schedule though, if they're able to keep that up because arguable that they have a tough schedule. Although they do play SK at the end of the week, but still. All right, let's move on then to Casey Badger. Talk about him. My boys. [00:36:28] Speaker C: So they. They have this player that, that just started. I don't know. They didn't really highlight him on the broadcast too much. This. This. Like this. [00:36:37] Speaker A: Something like that. [00:36:39] Speaker C: Call, call, call. Call listed. [00:36:42] Speaker B: I. I think he's a champion. Kalista. [00:36:45] Speaker A: Oh, right, right. [00:36:47] Speaker C: That's weird that they're. That's weird that they've created so much. [00:36:50] Speaker A: What about their like new 80 carry, though? [00:36:53] Speaker C: Yeah, so callist is close. Died once. All weekend long. It's pretty good. [00:36:59] Speaker A: I did not even know that. What? [00:37:01] Speaker C: He died once. [00:37:02] Speaker A: Wait, that's crazy. [00:37:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:37:05] Speaker B: He is a 32 KDA. [00:37:07] Speaker C: He's got a 32 KDA. He's Got the second highest DPM in the league. He's got kids, kids pretty good. [00:37:15] Speaker A: Turns out, dude, that when you have. [00:37:19] Speaker C: A kid, you've been like 15 years old in your like, system and then it's just like, oh, hey, by the way, Ghost is here. And then you have a whole metius or vetius doing like seven different roles kind of thing in high package leading into it. And then he's got second highest DPM. He's got an above 75 KP percentage. His. His CS is, you know, third in the league at this point. He's got a 32 KDA. All that stuff you can do all the stats. I mean, my only critique is that he's not finishing kills more often, but he's, yeah, playing for the team. I mean, when you got a good team around you like that, then it doesn't even matter at this point. But they, they had, they had a good weekend. I mean, obviously you would want to win that Giant X game at the end of the weekend, but just given the circumstances of how the. The draft was playing out, like it's another situation of, oh, we're playing hard, dive into hard counter disengage kind of thing. And then just not having the tools to be able to get on the back line. There was some kind of back and forth in there and then it was just, oh, by the way, I mean, we talked about it. Earlier, Giant X was 3. 0. They were 1 of the best teams this weekend besides the road game. So it. It all just push comes to shove when it comes to it. [00:38:47] Speaker A: So I, I really do think that Kalist. I mean, again, we're going to talk about this kid a lot. I imagine this split. But in his first weekend, that match against Koi, the reason I say super almost carried was because, God, he was. He had a lot of gold. He was set up, but he's just. He's not. Kalist like a list is the reason that they were able to shut Supa down and then kind of secure the win. Because, yeah, Jojo was behind, but pretty much everybody else on Koi was doing fine, if not ahead when they're kind of entering that leaving lane phase mid game start. But Vladi also. Oh my God, Vladdy had a great game against Jojo and overall just impressed me. Yike got revenge against G2. Yeah, that was exciting. [00:39:33] Speaker C: I think was Yike and Targus both getting their revenge against. I. I mean, if, if they could just circle one game on the calendar for this weekend that they wanted to win, that's definitely the one. [00:39:44] Speaker A: Like K also just crushing like this. This guy's, I think becoming the top, top laner in lec. His. [00:39:53] Speaker C: It just makes sense. [00:39:54] Speaker A: Just was disgusting. [00:39:56] Speaker C: Con's history. [00:39:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Could turn into the impact of lec. Who knows? I mean, he's gonna have to be there for quite a while. [00:40:03] Speaker C: Yeah, well, yeah, he's got a couple of years to go for that, so. But no, I, I. Yike had some yikes moments this weekend. Other than that, like, it's. They had their, their downs that they could. That they were achieving. Achieving or underachieving, I guess I should say. But give this team some time. I mean, you got a kid who's. Who's really good just getting up to the big stage for the first time. And there's other pieces around him that are pretty solid too, as well. So they'll be. I think they'll be. This team's gonna be really good. They're. They also go ahead. [00:40:42] Speaker A: I was just gonna say they arguably had the. The hardest schedule of the first weekend. Like, you look back at the teams that they played and they still going two. Two ones crazy. They beat G2. They beat Coy. They lost to GX, who's currently in first. Fnatic's like the only tough team left for them to play. Basically, if you want to consider that maybe BDS. But again, I don't think BDS is. [00:41:05] Speaker C: Can they finish the game against Rogue in 50 in under 59 minutes. [00:41:11] Speaker A: True. All right, well, that's enough about Casey. Exciting team to follow, but now let's talk about Fnatic because they're the other team at 2 and and 1. I think that overall this team is doing well. Maybe not the roaring start that I was hoping for, but I'm still happy with how things went. Razork in particular, I think had a great weekend. Humanoid and Outset had good games 2 and 3. But then it was just that game against Koi that they really struggled. I do want to give props again to their draft for game three. I think that this was one of the most filthy ranged poke drafts I've ever seen. It was Jace not going Tank Jace. It was just pure damage. Jace with hue and lethality Varys. So three poke tools into like a Victor and I think a Corki. So Corki can kind of do it with rockets, but like Victor really struggles against that type of range because he's just never going to get the damage off that he wants to. He'll get like one rotation of spells maybe. So I thought that was really cool that they just really threat overloaded with such range advantage and for the most part played the the map pretty well. It's just the Koi match that looked dangerous for them. They had a pretty easy strength to schedule. Otherwise it was Vitality and Team Heretic. So they haven't played Giant X BDS or Casey yet or even G2. So we'll see if Fnatic's actually able to maintain or not. But we. We spent a lot of time already talking about team, so I think we can get through the rest a little faster potentially. Except for this next one. G2 is one that I think does warrant a little bit more time. Bickle. G2, 1 and 2. What a disaster. They almost went 0 and 3 that game three. They did. They started off like, for the first couple of minutes behind. I don't know, we might have lost Pickle right there. [00:43:09] Speaker C: I mean, I could. I can. I genuinely was like. Until they had that fight around like 16, 17 minutes where they were starting to. I think it was the. It was the Rift Herald fight. Like everything leading on to like the Rift Herald between the setup and the actual play itself. Like, I was sitting there thinking, wow, G2 is gonna go three and oh, and three and we're gonna talk about how SK SK of all teams beat G2 on the first week of LEC. Like, what is life right now? [00:43:40] Speaker B: Like, yeah, CAPS wasn't gonna let that happen. [00:43:43] Speaker A: Yeah, dude. He gets a pentakill at the end. [00:43:46] Speaker C: That was. [00:43:46] Speaker A: Was sick. But it was still looking a little. [00:43:50] Speaker C: Victor Balance Champion, question mark. [00:43:54] Speaker A: What are your thoughts though, Bickle, on G2's weekend overall? Because they ended it with the win and it was dominant by the end of it. But like we said, the big early game was a little rocky and then they lost the other two. [00:44:04] Speaker B: It's funny because the early game was a bit rocky. In the game they won, but in the other two, they were looking solid for a bit until you get later into the game. Like they had a great lead against BDS until they get caught by that shockwave at Otacon. Like, they look. They look fine. They don't look like G2 level though, which is the concern. Like they still need that synergy to come together. And right now people are definitely asking. Really? You replaced Yike and Mickey with Skewmond and Labrov? [00:44:38] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, when you have a Dragon Soul and Otacon stolen against you in the same game, that's. That's rough. One of them was from a Victor Laser too. I mean, I know that the enemy Jungler was also in the pit, but. [00:44:51] Speaker B: Still, it ain't pretty. [00:44:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Not ideal of a start for them. But I think that, that, that is like the big strike against G2 is that the Caps is still playing Caps, Hansama still playing on Sama. They're still really solid players, but they kind of threw around objectives. They even had a Baron stolen against them at a certain point. I think that was game two, if I remember correctly. Or maybe I misremembered. Either way, I just remembered their setups around objectives were a little sloppy and they weren't playing goalie. They weren't keeping the enemy Jungler away. They weren't checking all their boxes. And they. They were one of the teams that fell victim to the Otacon debuff of like, oh, it's up. Let's go for it. Thinking that you have a numbers advantage and not realizing Otacon is just an enemy champion that's going to be slapping you the whole time time. So yeah. Are we hitting any alarm bells though, for G2? Okay. [00:45:49] Speaker B: I don't have alarm bells until they're eliminated from the playoffs. [00:45:53] Speaker A: Fair enough. Fair enough. They do have a tough strength of schedule though this next weekend, so they're gonna have to turn it around fast because G2 lost. Yes, KC, but losing to BDS, I think is the tough one because they still haven't played GX Koi Fanatic and let me tell you, they're playing a couple of those this next weekend. That'll be interesting. But yeah, again, I don't think hitting alarm bells yet, but if this next weekend they have a rough one again, that's when we start to say, yes, they've played all the best teams, but if they haven't cleaned things up by then, you never know. Upsets could just knock them out of playoffs content. Let's move on though, because that, that's like the, the big team to talk about here. Outside of that though, the, the rest of them, we're getting into the, the soup, as we like to call it. I'll talk about vitality though. Badger, do you have any big thoughts on vitality? And picking up one win in their opening weekend, but otherwise looking, in my opinion, pretty shitty. This is where you can talk about hella saying, you know, so. [00:47:02] Speaker C: All right, we're gonna play a game real fast. [00:47:04] Speaker A: Okay. [00:47:05] Speaker C: I looked it up earlier. How many players have more deaths in the LEC so far than Hilla Sang had in their second game this weekend? And for reference, for reference for the people out there and game two or day two, game five, Fnatic played Vitality and in a 20 minute, 28 minute game, Hilla saying died 11 times, prompting the casters to say, for the love of God, Hilla saying, please just stop. Oh my gosh. How many players in the LEC? There's 49 other players in the league. How many players died 12 or more times this weekend? [00:47:57] Speaker A: Oh, all players. I thought you were just in other supports. Okay. [00:48:00] Speaker C: No, all players. There's. Out of the 49 other players in the league, how many players have died more than 11 times? [00:48:09] Speaker A: Good question. Rika died a lot. Loopy died a lot. [00:48:13] Speaker B: I know for a fact Loopy has the second most deaths. I looked this up earlier. [00:48:18] Speaker A: Okay. That does not surprise me in the slightest. And teaser, that is the. The. They're. They're playing each other this next week. I think we might actually get. [00:48:27] Speaker B: I know Hillang 21 deaths and Loopy has 15. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Oh, that's crazy. [00:48:33] Speaker C: Okay, that's a good frame of reference. Loopy has the second most deaths and hat at 15. [00:48:39] Speaker A: And how many did Hilly have? [00:48:42] Speaker C: Well, total, he has 21 overall, but 11 in one game. [00:48:48] Speaker A: Three games. Okay, game. I'm gonna say there are three players. If Loopy's at 15, I think Reeker could be on that list. [00:48:57] Speaker C: Breaker is on the list. Very good. [00:49:01] Speaker A: I don't know. Maybe I feel like. Did Adam die a lot? I Think Adam died. [00:49:06] Speaker C: Died exactly 12 times. Yes. [00:49:08] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. There we go. We're doing all right. [00:49:10] Speaker C: A lot of play. So a lot of players who qualify for this list are at 12. [00:49:16] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. [00:49:16] Speaker B: Execute has to be on this list. [00:49:19] Speaker C: Execute is on the list. You want to keep going? [00:49:23] Speaker A: I mean, okay, let's just. [00:49:25] Speaker C: Let's just say there's eight players total. [00:49:27] Speaker B: Eight players total. [00:49:28] Speaker A: Okay. [00:49:29] Speaker C: Eight players total. You got loopy. Execute, Adam, Rika. So far. [00:49:34] Speaker A: So we got half of them. [00:49:36] Speaker C: You've gotten half the players. [00:49:39] Speaker A: Is JoJo, right? Because JoJo died like JoJo game. [00:49:45] Speaker C: JoJo is at 11. [00:49:46] Speaker A: Oh, no. Okay. [00:49:50] Speaker B: JNX Because I think both the solo lane. [00:49:55] Speaker C: You know, two stupidest games. [00:49:59] Speaker A: Sucks, man. I'm gonna throw one out there. He played a lot of tanks, but he also. I pretty sure died alive. It. Even on the tanks. 113 is 113 one of them? [00:50:14] Speaker C: No, 113 is actually at 10 for the 10 total. No, not 10. 11 for the. [00:50:21] Speaker A: Okay, so. So one bite. So I wasn't that far off. All right. Damn. I'm just. [00:50:24] Speaker C: No, no, no, wait. No, he's only at 8. [00:50:28] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Never mind. Yeah, well, sorry, 1, 1, 3. Didn't mean to slander you. [00:50:33] Speaker C: I wasn't familiar with your game. [00:50:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna throw out. [00:50:38] Speaker C: Has 21 deaths total. Loopy has 15. Execute. Has 13. [00:50:44] Speaker A: Carsy. [00:50:46] Speaker C: No, close. Right roll. Wrong. Wrong tier of Harry. Yeah. There's an 80 carry that has died 12 times. [00:50:56] Speaker A: No, it's gotta be Patrick, right? [00:50:58] Speaker C: It's Patrick. [00:50:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:51:02] Speaker C: Le Brav or Carlson and Carlson Both thread 11. It's Yike. Is the other one yike? [00:51:10] Speaker A: No, my boy. [00:51:12] Speaker C: So it's loopy at 15. Execute. Has 13. Adam, Gen X. Mickey X. Oh, yeah. I guess you never said Mickey. Mickey died. [00:51:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. [00:51:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Come on, let's be real for a second. That first game, that vitality game at the beginning, he was part of the reason. [00:51:33] Speaker B: That's a fair point. Point. [00:51:34] Speaker C: Mickey. Mickey and Oscar did not have a great first pairing together as a. As a. As a top support pairing and lane swaps. But yeah, no, It's. There are eight players who have died more than 11 times this split. Meanwhile, you have callist upset all those other guys just like, hey, we've got like 10 plus KDAs at this point. [00:52:01] Speaker B: What's that? Upset has a low. [00:52:03] Speaker A: Has a high. [00:52:04] Speaker B: KDA with low deaths. I'm shocked. [00:52:07] Speaker C: Surprise, surprise. [00:52:08] Speaker A: Hey, Vindicated. Upset's good. Everybody. Warning. [00:52:14] Speaker B: Enemy in the area. Upset. [00:52:15] Speaker C: KDA Protection activated the supports in the SK vs Vitality game going into it so far with one more game to One more game for those teams to play. Have 36 deaths between the two of them. [00:52:31] Speaker A: And let me tell. [00:52:32] Speaker C: Vitality still needs to play G2. And, yep, SK needs to play Casey, so. [00:52:36] Speaker A: That's the best part, dude. Oh, okay. Well, that was a fun little game to play. All that to say. Hilly is. Had a really bad first weekend, man. Holy. That was egregious. I. Okay, this is my hot take, though. This is gonna already be shitting on sk. I honestly think Loopy, despite dying less times, had a worse showing. [00:53:01] Speaker C: Yes. [00:53:01] Speaker A: Because at least when Hilly dies, he's doing something, and he, like, he's still doing the Hilly thing where he's just, like, throwing his body at the enemy so bad. There were only a couple of times where Hilly died, and I was like, what were you doing? Like, I don't even see the vision usually. He's just, like, blind and, like, the vision's bad, but at least he's trying for something. Like, right now, behind the end, it. [00:53:25] Speaker B: Looks like SK has four of the worst. Like, each role has four of the five worst players. Like, they have the worst top, the worst jungle, worst mid worst support. Poor Rahel. [00:53:38] Speaker A: Yeah, dude, Rahel was trying his goddamn artist out there. I don't know why we're talking about SK. They're 0 and 3 right now. We'll get into them in a bit. But that's all to close out the Vitality at least. Least. [00:53:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:53:51] Speaker A: Hilly Rough, but I think that the rest of the team. This is a team that I actually. If Hilly can just get a together, I could see them, maybe do some damage. Carsy was still doing all right, but then. Knack Naco, man, I. I don't know if that's the guy from the first weekend. What? Did you have any strong opinions on him? Badger, Top laner. Who? [00:54:12] Speaker C: Oh, for Vitality. [00:54:14] Speaker A: Yeah, who. [00:54:16] Speaker C: Yeah, who. Yeah, exactly. [00:54:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:54:21] Speaker A: Well, we can just move on then. All right, Pickle, talk to me about Rogue, because they're another team that. Oh, boy, did they get a win. [00:54:33] Speaker B: Sorry. Well, I fell asleep watching a Rogue game. Do I have to talk about them? [00:54:41] Speaker A: Give me 10 seconds of talking about Rogue. [00:54:44] Speaker B: Rogue is a team that plays in the lec that makes games go on for way too goddamn long. And the only reason they have a wind to their name, because they played Team Heretics, dude. [00:54:55] Speaker A: They just. They can get. This is the thing that baffles me. They can get objectives. They can get Baron, they can get Elder, they can get Autocad, and then they just lose their mind once they have them. [00:55:12] Speaker B: You have Adam all wrong. And Execute, formerly known as Junghoon. Three players who can go absolutely crazy on plays around the map. But it's Rogue. [00:55:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So they don't something about this org and nothing happens. Yeah, it's insane. [00:55:31] Speaker C: Well, you realize because. Because the that mid laner that's named Larson, the Larson Vortex, only knows how to play in games that last at least 42 minutes. [00:55:45] Speaker A: Oh, no. But there's pretty damn good late game games. [00:55:51] Speaker C: It doesn't mean he wins all of them. [00:55:53] Speaker A: Yeah, thankfully BDS gave us a quick victory over them, so at least that was something. Yeah, Rogue not impressed with them so far, but we'll see. They're at least not the worst team in the league. Hint, hint. We'll talk about them later. But first Team Heretics is the other one. They lost to bds. Basically this one comes down to Shayo trying his best on like engage tanks. And he was playing an ivern game too. And Camilo had one good game carrying on Victor, but then really struggled the other one. So like, if Shayo's trying to play this facilitating style of jungle, Camilo really needs to get more consistent with his ability to actually play off of the jungler. Because I, I was not very impressed. If you're like getting bodied as a Victor after your first game as Victor was like, okay, this guy's. Maybe he can play Victor. He's got it. And then he just gets crushed. It was like, oh, God, what are we doing, man? So, yeah, read on. Team Heretics, they beat sk, which is the last place team, lost to Rose, which is I would say the second worst team behind maybe team Heretics. But then Fnatic was the one that crushed him. So that brings us to sk, the team that we've been shitting on this whole time. Is there anything else? I feel like we've already kind of said everything about SK at this point. [00:57:10] Speaker B: Team Heretics and SK are so bad. It's. It's bad. [00:57:16] Speaker A: Carlson made Renekton. It reminded me watching Carlson play Renekton. I feel like in North America, our Renekton players have gotten. Gotten better, where they no longer just like, it's not memed of like, oh, they picked Renekton. We're just gonna lose. Now it's like, no, okay, we understand why Renekton's picked. Carlsen looked like 20, 21. Na renekton. That's what it looks like to Me and I was like, oh, no. [00:57:40] Speaker B: Heretics versus SK was literally a battle of Will either of these AD carries who are actually decent, get any sort of help from their team or are they screwed? [00:57:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That. That were the story of the game. Sk though, what I will say about them is, despite them being bad, despite them being 03, I. I still consider this a negative, but I can try and frame it in a positive way. They are very ambitious in the early game. Like, oh boy, do they play the early game aggressive. They threw in two of the games, but they did get a lead in. In the one that they played that made us kind of sweat and think, oh, God, is G2 actually gonna lose a game? They were diving the top turret with the lane swap, killing Hansama and Draven early. And like, they pulled off the first maybe like five, ten minutes of that pretty well. [00:58:39] Speaker B: Isma was five zero on Nidalee. [00:58:41] Speaker A: Yeah, but. But then that was. [00:58:43] Speaker B: They got one kill the rest of the entire game. [00:58:45] Speaker A: Yeah, Isma getting all the kills on Italy was not able to translate that into definitively winning the early game. And then I, I, I. It's tough to point the finger at one person because I don't think there were many shining lights on this team at all. But Loopy just died over and over again in these situations. And I'm thinking you are a professional player making a professional player salary. What? Like, why are you in Enemy Top Tribush when your junglers farming on your side of the map and everybody else has reset? Like, there's zero reason for you to be walking there. Like, there's not even like an objective coming up. You're not like, warding for ahead of time. There's just like, weird stuff going on with Loopy, and I think that was like the. The biggest reason that they struggled. And also G2 are just abusing the hell out of that kid. So. [00:59:41] Speaker B: Also, for jnx, I know it was accidental, but going Airy Poke Runes on Tank Jace and then going Tank Grass Runes on Poke Jace was certainly a choice. [00:59:54] Speaker A: I forgot about that. He's making Jace look like a balanced champion. That's. That's what he's trying to do. He's trying to deflate the win rate so that it doesn't get banned as much. [01:00:03] Speaker B: Well, he's certainly succeeding. [01:00:04] Speaker A: I think so. All right, that's enough talking about the teams, though, and how they did TLDR. The top is looking fairly competitive. And we had two teams I think stand out being GX and KC and then the bottom is looking rough, but hopefully G2 is able to climb above the rest of the teams at 1 and 2. Let's talk about next week. Actually before that, sorry, games to watch. If you were only able to catch a couple of games or didn't catch any games of lec, here are our recommendations. Badger, I'm gonna give you one to start us off. What do you think? If anybody can only watch one game, what would you recommend that game be? [01:00:43] Speaker C: Probably Giant X vs Casey. [01:00:46] Speaker A: Agreed. [01:00:47] Speaker C: I talked about it at length. I think those are probably on form right now. Those are the two best teams in Europe and you need some bright spots just given the fact that the the one team region themselves almost lost to the 10th place team in the entire region this weekend. So it gives hope for the future for, you know, these teams. And hopefully like G2 coming back into form is good for the region. But at the same time those expectations at this point are kind of low for Europe. I was watching it with some people and the entire time they're like, like now does this make Europe better if like G2 is like losing these games or does it make it a zero team region like people were worried about? [01:01:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's been the question of like what happens when G2 eventually falls? Because at a certain point I almost felt like they never could, but. And it's still way too early to say if they have or not. But that question is going to weigh on people's minds of like, well, what is the next. [01:01:57] Speaker C: Well, that's what we do best is we just overreact to one week. [01:02:00] Speaker A: Exactly. That's what people want. Change the title to Middle is January. Yeah. All right, cool. I agree with that one. Bickle, what game would you recommend everybody check out? [01:02:12] Speaker B: Who doesn't want to watch a game with four elder dragons and four parents? [01:02:16] Speaker A: It's gotta be Giant X versus Rogue gx. Rogue GX still looking like a great team, but oh boy, did they actually struggle against Rogue a little bit. And that game went to 59 minutes 15 seconds. I think like 16 seconds on the official clock. But like Nexus went down around 15. Either way, that one was wild. I also want to give a shout out to G2 versus KC. I actually think that that one was really good. G2 were in the driver's seat for a lot of it and could have won that game. They lost a Dragon soul and an otacon. They were both stolen from them. If Casey wasn't able to get Those, I think G2 actually has a chance to close that one out. So I recommend checking that one out especially just because it's a G2 game and it's KC and the crowd was also going nuts for that one. And then special shout out to Koi vs Casey where we had 10 kills in 10 minutes. And if you are a EU fan and don't like JoJo Pyun, you can watch JoJo run it down for about 26 minutes. So that would be fun. There we go. Now talking about next week and our predictions. We have three more days of games. That's right. You just loves throwing the matchups at us up first, I believe. Actually, are these all Saturday, Sunday, Monday again? Because I last week I did not look ahead of time before talking about it, but I just want to. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Perfect. If you are watching LEC games on Saturday, you're gonna catch these ones ones rogue vs fnatic to kick things off. We all have Fnatic. Yeah, it's pretty much speaks for itself. Rogue has not looked great. BDS versus Team Heretics is next. And bds, we all have taken this one. I think Rogue and Team Heretics are looking like two of the weakest teams. So no surprise that we have their opponents taking them out. But then GX vs Koi is where things get a little more interesting. I'm surprised we all have GX just because also how they kind of struggle to win the game against Rogue. Rogue. Why do we think Badger, the GX is just definitively going to win this one or do you think it's close but you still picked gm? [01:04:22] Speaker C: No, I think, I think GX just, I think they'll be all right. It's, it's I the way. Let's be real. Rogue should have won that game in like 38, 39 minutes. There was a four versus five base defense with, with Rogue having elder and in a man advantage, they had all, I don't know. They weathered the storm. They came out on the other side. They won the game. They're up three, they're three zero going into this. I, I, I'm not overly convinced by Coy and I think GX might be the best team on form right now in the LEC. [01:05:00] Speaker A: So I'm very excited for Jackie's JoJo. Whoever gets yone, they both want that pick. That's gonna be very fun. But I, I do actually think Noah Jr. Moon is just going to be the difference maker over Supra and Alvaro. But yeah, okay, cool. We all have GX taking that one then. Next up. Okay, Badger, you're you can have to explain yourself. We have vitality versus G2 D2 for me and Bickle. Badger picked vitality also 1 and 2 as a team. Right? [01:05:31] Speaker C: So either G2 goes oh and 3 and the European fan base loses their mind at this, this or I am wrong and they actually get back on form, which everyone wants to see at this point. So either it's a reverse curse or I'm really good at predicting the demise of G2. [01:05:50] Speaker A: Okay, so spoilers. He did not pick G2 for a single win this weekend. You just do think it's gonna be a crash and burn. That would be wild for G2 and G2 fans around the world. That might just put them out of contention for first stand then. I actually don't know what that looks like. For the breakdown of deciding teams, there's. [01:06:11] Speaker B: A playoff bracket based off of the top eight, so. Yeah, so long as they don't lose to Team Heretics and sk, they'll be fine. [01:06:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point because this is their hardest strength to schedule. We'll talk more about the other two teams later because Vitality is not one of the harder teams, but they do have two bangers after this. Okay, well, ending the day for Saturday, we have Casey versus Sky3.0 team versus 03 team. So we all pick KC, but naturally SK will somehow upset. That's just kind of how Europe works. All right, day two on Sunday. We have GX versus Team Heretics kicking things off. We have GX across the board. Then SK versus Vitality. Now this is funny. Badger and Bickleboats have Vitality. Understandable that you would say that I picked SK and the reason why first off, this is the game that I asterisks and said I Loopy and Hilla saying versus each other is gonna be wild. How many deaths total was a Badger between both of them? [01:07:12] Speaker C: 36. [01:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it's gonna be wild watching those two go up against each other. I actually do think though that SK were able to get earlier leads in some of their games and they played so aggressive early on that hell saying's just gonna run it down and is gonna be the bigger enter over loop. As long as Loopy doesn't throw it mid or late game by just doing something stupid. I actually do think that SK have a legitimate chance to overload in the early game against Vitality, who are playing fairly slow in in their games and not to like the same pace that that I expect from a Hill saying team. Although I guess hella saying was still playing fast. But he was just dying a lot for it. So, yeah, legitimately think SK could take that one. Next up, we have G2 versus Fnatic. El Classico. Oh, boy. The titans of Europe against each other. I, along with Bickle, have G2, but Badger has Fnatic. Badger, you. You're just a G2 hater, so we don't even need to talk about that. Why do we think that G2 can still take this, though, even though FNATIC are above them in the standings currently? [01:08:26] Speaker B: I mean, G2, you can never exactly count them out or expect less of them. And even in a bad week one, they were still in a position where they could have won all three of those games. [01:08:38] Speaker A: Right? I. I still have faith in G2, and I think even though I put, like, Fnatic, I'm pretty sure I put them as coming out of the split first seed. I wasn't as inspired by their gameplay as I was by G2's potential. CAPS is just still the best player in Europe, and I'm not going to count that out. A Humanoid, I think, is still a little overrated. Subhumanoid, as I saw somebody in Twitch Chat say. I'm not saying that. I wouldn't call him that, but I saw somebody say it. Casey versus Rogue is the next game of the weekend. It's Casey across the board for all of us. BDS versus Koi is where it gets interesting. We have BDS for two of us, but Bickle picked Koi, and I'm forgetting why I picked bds. I don't. I don't actually remember why did I pick BDS over Koi? I think it was like Nuke and Ice might be able to pull out of their ass. [01:09:34] Speaker C: Are you sure? [01:09:35] Speaker A: I'm changing it. I'm changing it back to Koi. Get out of here. [01:09:38] Speaker C: Yippee. [01:09:41] Speaker A: There we go. Badger, would you like to join us on the base side? He's thinking. [01:09:47] Speaker C: No. [01:09:47] Speaker A: Thinking about it. [01:09:48] Speaker C: No, I'm good. [01:09:49] Speaker A: Okay. He's gonna stick with bds. Well, I think this one's gonna be interesting to watch regardless. Can Koi actually create some kind of momentum? Because they're gonna have a rough time against gx, we imagine, so this is gonna be their chance to be like, okay, we have easier teams for the rest of the the split here, so if they can win out from this position, it's really good for them. BDS could be that block. [01:10:14] Speaker B: This game will continue the trend because we had a Great game from JoJo followed by a bad game from JoJo followed by a great game from JoJo. He's gonna have a bad game against GX, so they're gonna lose that. It's gonna have a great game against BDS and they're gonna win that and it's gonna have a bad game against sk, but it's not gonna matter because they're SK and they're gonna win anyways. [01:10:35] Speaker A: I like that. I like that logic. That's pretty good. Badger, any particular reason you have BDS. [01:10:40] Speaker C: Taking it over Koi? Yeah, yeah, sure. I. Yeah, I definitely have reasons. Obviously thought about this. This leading into. [01:10:51] Speaker A: Let me tell. Let me give it to you. Ice is one of the best AD carries in the league. [01:10:54] Speaker C: Ice is. I think Ice. Ice and Noah are what Rahul thinks he could be in this league and what he could be. Honestly. Get him free. Free my dam. One voice. Free my dumb one voice, please. [01:11:09] Speaker A: Yep. Put Rahel on kc. He's going to looky. [01:11:13] Speaker C: Get him out of the sk. Get him out of the sk. Blender. [01:11:17] Speaker A: All right. [01:11:17] Speaker B: Well, I've heard of this little known support named Luan. I bet he'd do great with. [01:11:23] Speaker A: I think so, yeah. Speaks the same language. I could see it. Day three on Monday, Vitality versus Rogue kicks things off. We have two Rogues, one Vitality. Bickle, you're the odd man out. Defend yourself. [01:11:34] Speaker B: It's a coin flip. And Vitality is so crazy that Rogue, with their we're just going to go late play style, might not be able to handle it. In all honesty, with the bottom four teams, I feel like you can kind of flip a coin usually and get it right half the time. [01:11:55] Speaker A: That's a good point. Fair enough. I do think that Hella Saying is going to be so tilted from losing to Loopy that he's just going to run it down. So until he proves me wrong, I'm going to keep voting against Dilla saying, next up we have Fnatic versus BDS. Fnatic across the board, as it should be. Then GX versus G2. We have two GX believers that they will maintain dominance. And in fact this would put both of us. Yeah, me and Badger both think that GX will be 6 and oh by the end of week two. But Bickle, you still have faith in G2. Is it the same reason that you had G2 taking Fnatic? [01:12:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's G2. And also there usually is a team that starts off really well. That's not much is expected of them. And then unfortunately come the later half of the first split, they Start to fall apart. [01:12:45] Speaker A: Heart. Fair enough. And that. [01:12:48] Speaker C: It. [01:12:49] Speaker A: It seems like GX could be the perfect team to be that kind of team for lec. I would be very surprised if they're actually sick. So I'm. I. I think that they win these games, but they're gonna throw one of them. In fact, you know what? You know what? I'm gonna. I'm gonna do it because Mizelle's not here. I'm gonna put Koi. I'm changing my GX Koi prediction. [01:13:11] Speaker B: All right. [01:13:12] Speaker A: Be contrarian. Yeah. [01:13:13] Speaker C: Okay. [01:13:15] Speaker A: Because there's no way that they're actually six. No. By the end of the week. That would be crazy. [01:13:19] Speaker B: They won't be 6. 0. [01:13:21] Speaker A: It's probably G2 is actually the correct one to beat them. But I just want to change things up. Casey versus Team Heretics is at the very end. We all have Casey taking it, and that's it. [01:13:32] Speaker B: No, there's a game that got pushed down to the next row. [01:13:35] Speaker A: It's. Did I do something funky? I did something funky, didn't I? [01:13:39] Speaker B: Somebody broke something. Something. Hold on. [01:13:41] Speaker A: All right, I fixed it. [01:13:43] Speaker C: Who broke something? [01:13:44] Speaker A: There you go. Then we also have SK versus koi to close out the actual weekend. We have koi across the board because SK's big doo doo bad. But I think they're picking up one win, so I'll give them that. Set your calendars, though, for sk. Vitality. I think that that could set the record for most ever support deaths in a single LEC game. Hold me to it. It. Hold me to it, everybody. I don't know what that record even is, but could happen. But that's gonna be it for lec. That was the week one review and week two preview, which means it's finally time, gentlemen, to talk about latan. LCS died for this. You better respect it. The America's region begins this weekend. We had a little draw show happen this past weekend where we actually picked all eight. Eight teams. And we had, like, two pools of teams. One was all the teams that were at Worlds, so that would be Team Liquid, Fly Quest, 100 Thieves, and Lion Gaming, which was kind of like a merger of R7 and some other stuff. They had OD and Lions from that roster, so they got put into that side, versus the other four being Dignitas, Disguised, Shopify Rebellion, and Cloud nine, surprisingly, was on the other side of that. And it was a fun little draw show. Go check it out if you haven't yet. A lot of fun moments happened with the pros. Just kind of bantering with other Dignitas. Everybody on Dignitas. Did anybody watch that? Bigle Badger, were you able to catch it? [01:15:10] Speaker C: I didn't catch it. [01:15:12] Speaker A: I did. [01:15:12] Speaker B: I caught the pro. I caught the pros episode. I did not catch the draw show itself. [01:15:17] Speaker A: Okay, I'm making an edit. Hopefully it's out by some point tomorrow where it's just how like literally them just talking Dignitas. It's hilarious. Every player that's played on that org, like Sven and Xu were just going in on it. Zuri was just like awkwardly standing there. It was hilarious. But it gave us the matchups for week one. It's going to be a double Elim bracket. Top four teams going to Brazil to compete against the top four teams from the Southern Conference to see who we send to first stand. So the way I'm thinking about this is because we are one region, two conferences. First half of our split one is just our North Conference teams against each other. Second half is going to be in Brazil. Still technically that's not exactly how this, the schedule works, but in my mind that's kind of like the first half, second half that I'm thinking of. So if you want to join me in that. It's helped me kind of visualize it. But it's going to be FlyQuest versus Shopify, lion versus C900, Thieves versus DSG and Team Liquid versus Dignitas. That's right. Serdi, the I think most hype prospect ever to get promoted from Tier two. Unless somebody can think of another name that would be up there. Maybe Sniper, but I think 30 with what he's been able to do for himself branding wise on social media, setting record LP gains, having like an 80% win rate in challenger, having first and second place accounts on the NA server, winning NACL, winning. CEELOL finally gets promoted and what is his reward? He's playing against the Goat and raiding. MVP Impact, baby. Let's go. So that's gonna be a fun time. What do we think about that statement though before we get into the matches? Is 30 the most hyped ever promotion from tier 2? [01:17:06] Speaker B: I'm trying to think there's anyone that comes to mind that kind of breaks that. Danny was pretty hyped. [01:17:15] Speaker A: I don't think he was. He came out of nowhere because nobody knew who the fuck Danny was. They were like who is this guy? Why isn't this Doublelift and Jensen playing on this roster? [01:17:26] Speaker B: You're trying to think of somebody who had like a big enough performance in Tier two that they were able to grow a reputation without just shooting up out of nowhere. [01:17:38] Speaker A: I can't really think of anybody. Sniper again is the closest because he's just been talked about since he was like 13 or whatever. [01:17:45] Speaker B: In a sense you could make an argument for Ayla because he had some games filling in for for Team Liquid where he looked really great and then had to go back down to Academy. [01:17:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:18:00] Speaker A: But it. It's a stretch right? I think that that's why I think Sturdy is just the most hyped ever promotion in our region. Which I think is cool for him because he definitely deserves it. He's deserved it for two years now and he's just been in jail in Tier two. Like what the hell do I do at this point? But again is rewarding tier 2 jail. His reward is going up against Impact. We'll talk about that at the end though because that's the last match. First match FlyQuest vs Shopify Rebellion we didn't do this last week on the episode. I realize that might have been confusing for people. Usually we break down the rosters just to confirm everything in case you don't follow on league pedia or such. So sorry that we didn't do that for LEC last week but we'll do it here. Up first FlyQuest versus Shopify Rebellion Badger you do Shopify. I'll do Flyquest to start us off because FlyQuest is the easy one. It is the run back of the the last split roster. They are one of the teams that did not change anything. That's right. FlyQuest still have Whipo inspired Quad Masu and Busio coming in but Badger did I buy you enough time? What's Shopify's roster look like? [01:19:07] Speaker C: So Shopify's roster is top lane formerly C9 fudge contracts or jungle formerly C9 contracts mid lane formerly challengers ad carry not on C9 ever but yeah bvoy and then support is supposed to be SEOs but currently filling in for sales is formally of C9 zazel oh my God. [01:19:44] Speaker A: It really is just. [01:19:46] Speaker C: It's really just as deep. It's just how many former Cloud9 players can we put on the same team? [01:19:51] Speaker A: That's quite funny contracts ball Fox coming back from NRG though being on remember that org playing for them and CLG before them Rip but so mid Jungle should have a good amount of synergy together Fudge Palafox I don't remember if their time if their paths crossed ever contracts might have they did not Tracks Yes I'm trying to remember Legend Contracts? [01:20:19] Speaker B: I don't think so. [01:20:20] Speaker C: Years ago, was it? I thought they did. [01:20:21] Speaker B: Fudge has only been on. [01:20:23] Speaker C: Oh wait. [01:20:23] Speaker B: He played academy for a little bit. [01:20:25] Speaker A: Played Academy and I don't remember if Contracts was an academy at that time because contracts got moved up. But don't think he was trying to remember the timeline. Either way. [01:20:35] Speaker C: That's beside the point. [01:20:36] Speaker A: That's beside the point. Either way, this is, I think, a pretty cool roster to put together for Shopify Rebellion now with Moist Esports behind them. They should have a lot of fan base as well, but not a lot of faith in us. We think that it's gonna be a 2. 0. [01:20:50] Speaker B: Fudge Fudge did not overlap with Contracts. He did, however, play with Palafox in Academy. [01:20:56] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So at least there's maybe some synergy there. We'll see. But not enough to give us at least a even a game win. I think a big part of that for me is SEOs not being the start starting to support Zazel. I mean it's game one, day one. So I don't imagine Sales would have been like a huge difference maker. [01:21:14] Speaker C: But still playing against the team that one summer. [01:21:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:19] Speaker C: Put with the same roster, push gen. [01:21:21] Speaker A: G to 5 games. Didn't team that took a game off. [01:21:24] Speaker B: Of Hanwha took two games off of Gen G, made quarterfinals at Worlds, won the LCS and is keeping their roster together. [01:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah, understandable. 20 for Fly Quest. Let's talk about the second series instead where we all have way more faith in the team that's going to be losing this one. Apparently. No, it is all two O's across the board. Lion versus C9. We all think C9 is going to take it. But let's talk about the rosters. Bickle, I'm going to give you C9. I'm going to take lion. [01:21:54] Speaker B: For C9. They are keeping Thanatos Top Blabber, Jungle and Vulcan support. They've brought Sven back as their AD carry and have brought in Loki from the LCK Challenger scene as their mid laner. [01:22:09] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of eyes will be on Loki because this is I think the eighth mid laner in six years. Seven years. They. They've had a lot because Diplex only played like a couple of games and they got Diplex if we count Diplex. And they should be the eighth in like seven years, which is just insane. That's like every year you're changing your mid laner. C9 have yet to find a guy to truly replace Jensen. When they lost him back in the day they're up against lion, the newcomers to the league from LLA as there's gonna be an LLA team in north and Southern conferences. This is the one that we got here. Here it's Licorice returning North American player in the top lane. Odie is the Jungler along with support Lions as the LLA representatives. Both these guys were on R7 notable for taking down Hundred Thieves at Worlds. They did beat them in that best of three series in the play ins. And then they have two import mid and bot laners from Korea. Saint and Henna notably. This is actually kind of a cool fact for the mid lane. We're going to talk about this because I get to cast this game. Saints did play against Loki in LCK Challengers. So we actually have some data on these two against each other because they were in the league at the same time. So I think that's gonna be kind of cool. I haven't done all my research on that yet, but we're at least gonna have stats and stuff to talk about with that on the broadcast. So that'll be kind of cool. Badger, do you happen to know anything about Loki or Saint? Either of these guys coming in from LCK Challengers. [01:23:42] Speaker C: Loki I know a little bit more about, but it's not anything that I feel confident being like, oh yeah, this guy was, was pretty good. All this stuff I, I, I thought I looked him up. He was like halfway decent, wasn't he? [01:23:58] Speaker B: Part of Loki was Hano life. Challengers Saint. [01:24:03] Speaker C: That's right. [01:24:04] Speaker B: DK challengers. [01:24:06] Speaker C: Oh yeah, yeah. Saint was the quid replacement for being Showmaker's understudy. [01:24:15] Speaker A: Oh. [01:24:16] Speaker B: People argued that Saints actually the better prospect of the two. [01:24:21] Speaker A: Well that will be interesting for lion to see how they're able to play because expectations and again this is hope hoping that Lions the support is actually going to be playing for them. And the rumor, once unsubstantiated, we at least all still think that C9 takes it 2 0. But I think I'm actually really excited for that match. First look at the LLA representative of how well they do. And also the mid lane matchup is kind of cool because there's already some history there to talk about. [01:24:46] Speaker B: Cloud 9 got really lucky with their draw. [01:24:49] Speaker A: They did because lion was arguably the weakest, if not just definitively the weakest of the teams in pool one. C9, the strongest of the teams in pool two just happened to be that they matched up against each other. But let's move on. 100 Thieves versus DSG is our game to kick off things on Sunday. I'm going to give it to both of you. Badger, if you could do 100 Thieves and Bickle, if you could do DSG as the rosters, Badger will have you start first. [01:25:20] Speaker C: In the top lane. Sniper in the jungle river mid lane. Quid, how many of you've heard this one before playing AD Carry? FBI open up and then a list. Yep. [01:25:37] Speaker A: Only one roster change from last year, that being FBI, which I think arguably is the biggest pickup of the off season for the lta. But Bickle, who are they playing against? [01:25:47] Speaker B: Yeah, they're going up against Disguise, the new Kids on the Block, the creator team and the guest team in the lta. It is going to be Castle Top, Xu Jungle making his return to North America. Abada game is. [01:26:03] Speaker A: Oh yeah. [01:26:04] Speaker B: Making his debut in the lta in the major regions. It is Scary Jerry at bot for AD Carry and in support Huhi. [01:26:16] Speaker A: He's still playing, baby. Let's go. [01:26:18] Speaker C: I'm gonna be real. I didn't realize who he was the support for this team until I looked at this doc. [01:26:23] Speaker A: It's how funny dude, that guy is still playing League of Legends. He outlasted Oleg, my goat. Hell yeah. [01:26:31] Speaker C: That's a weird thing to think about. [01:26:33] Speaker A: We all have 100 Thieves taking this one, but we all have DSG picking up a game two and one. The reason I have DSG picking up said game, I actually do think that Scary Jerry has the ability to carry if he gets a lead. That's what we saw in the NaCl. So if DSG are able to play to bot lane, at least one of the games that could be a win condition. Alternatively, top side, I actually have a lot of faith in Castle and XU as a combo. So I think that maybe Castle is going to be able to take over a game against Sniper, who has a tendency to sometimes in games. He's really good as a player mechanically. But Sniper every now and then would just have a game that he just like non existent and was a bit of a liability for them. So that's why I think one game. Why does everybody else have a game for dsg or is this just kind of like a shot in the dark? [01:27:20] Speaker B: I think if any team is is if any series is going to go two one, it's going to be the 100 DSG series. And I didn't want to predict four. [01:27:29] Speaker A: Two zero s. Okay. All right. Well, I actually had a different series in mind going to the three games. I did pick this one, but I actually have TL versus Dignitas the last game of the weekend. TL winning it. But two 1. I do think the dig are good enough for one game, even if it is lira coming in the jungle. And part of that is because it's freaking lira coming in the jungle. How the hell are you supposed to scout against these guys? You don't know what they're gonna do because Lira probably has no idea what the hell he's gonna do. Also Serdy as a carry, I think if he's able to get like a game as Camille or a game as Jax, he actually could potentially take over a game even if he is against the Goat of Impact. [01:28:12] Speaker B: You're forgetting this wonderful world. This wonderful world. Cut. Lane swaps. [01:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Impact's pretty good at those, but it's the best of three. Are they gonna lane swap every game? Yes. Come on, damn it. [01:28:26] Speaker C: Absolutely. [01:28:27] Speaker A: All right, well, thanks for talking me off the ledge, guys. I'm still gonna keep it, but I think it is more likely now that it's a 2. 0 for Team Liquid. But I. I just want Saturday to do well, man. Come on. That's gonna be it for the week. We'll have to wait to see how things shake out for LTA matches. The first weekend of the America's region. Brand new. Love it or hate it for the brand, it is happening all the same. And all we can do is still show up to support the players and the teams that are competing for our entertainment as North American League of Legends fans. Can't wait to see you there. A reminder, I will be casting the second series each day. So lion versus C9 and Team Liquid versus Dignitas. Would love it if you could come check those out everybody. Again, it's been my life, not lifelong dream, but at least dream for the past couple years here to make make it to this level. And I'm very excited to kick things off here for week one for the first ever weekend of LTA North. Also, thank you Bickle and Badger for coming on for another episode of League Rundown. It was great having anytime excited for what the future holds for our region and for what another year looks like for the league Rundown. Thanks for tuning in everybody. If you could leave us a five star re review wherever you listen to the podcast. It really does help us get noticed more often. But really what I want you to take away is the fact that we love you and we'll see you next time. [01:29:51] Speaker C: Bye everyone. [01:29:52] Speaker A: Peace.