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Monday, May 19, 2014

Just how did Denial lose against Curse Academy?

Most people have seen the Denial (DNL) vs Curse Academy (CA) clip from their game in the North American Challenger play in where Denial's vision control allows them to create an incredible display of objective rotations. It exploded on twitter when it happened as well as front paging on the League of legends subreddit almost immediately, follow this link if you need a refresher.

In the run up to the above clip Curse Academy has made two critical mistakes. The first is their vision control has entirely collapsed, the only vision they end up with is around Dragon which they were trying to get control of, and their own base. The second critical mistake is that they have mistimed the dragon. They rush down to get vision control around dragon and find themselves waiting around, which results in them starting to pull back in confusion as the clip starts. Denial knows the dragon is still not spawned, and they've seen CA set up around it.

Denial knows that trading mid inhibitor turret for dragon is not only basically free it's the better trade. The problem that generates the play in the clip is that CA has already started with drawing from dragon in utter confusion when Denial attempts to run up mid. Denial knows they can't afford to get caught in a straight up fight with their team being so heavily poke/disengage focused. They also know from clearing it out that CA has no vision on Baron or the route over to Baron.

From this the clip plays out, Denial hides in a pink warded bush in hopes of a face check. Curse Academy avoids the face check temptation but Denial quickly change plans and take the mid inhibitor thanks to the time involved in CA taking the long way to check Baron. CA pursues denial towards bottom lane eating poke and getting split up along the way allowing Denial to win the fight. All told Denial secures multiple kills, the middle inhibitor, and the bottom inhibitor turret before backing away to heal.

At this point is where the confusion comes in for most people, because honestly Curse Academy has completely lost this game. Against competent teams it's simply impossible to win from this situation. Denial has a lead, an inhibitor down, a second exposed inhibitor, and a poke/disengage team composition. If Denial were SKT T1 K the game would have roughly 5 minutes left before they kill the nexus regardless of who were taking CA's position. If League of Legends had Starcraft's restart from replay feature, this would be the Kobayashi Maru of League of Legends. Any strong team playing in Denial's position as of the end of that clip will win against anyone else 100% of the times they don't throw.

What Denial should have done at this point is push up the mid and bottom minion waves, then 5 man siege bottom. The combined pressure of the super minions mid and Denial's incredible poke is enough that the only way to defend the second inhibitor is to dive. Except a dive won't work unless Denial screws up as they have Karma's team wide speed boost, and Jayce's speed boost to escape any hard engage attempt from Curse Academy. Denial's team composition is purpose built for this exact situation and it should have allowed them to sit bottom sieging the inhibitor until it inevitably fell.

Instead what Denial actually exposed just how lacking in experience they were. Instead of pushing up after they healed Denial set up around baron and indecisively contested with Curse Academy for ward control of the area. It would be a full 10 minutes of indecisive moves and mostly farming from Denial that allowed Curse Academy to reduce the gold gap and eventually steal the first Baron of the game completely turning it around.

When they should have continued being decisive and pressed their advantage, Denial instead showed their inexperience allowing Curse Academy to farm themselves back into it which ultimately lost Denial the game.

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