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.

Dignitas vs Cloud 9, what happened?

Like every game, It all started in Champion Select

Right off the bat we can see that Cloud 9 has made some crucial mistakes in champion select. First they allowed Scarra to have his Gragas which is a well known comfort champion for him. Second Cloud 9 picked Riven for Hai, a match up that worked for people like Faker in the past but remains a mistake for reasons I'll get into in a minute. Finally the Cloud 9 team composition is a mess. Leona is strong engage, Riven and Elise are great pick champions, Shyvana is a strong split pusher, and Lucian is a lane bully, there's no real synergy in the Cloud 9 team. Dignitas' team composition on the other hand is exquisite, they have tons of hard engage and a reasonable amount of disengage. Where Cloud 9's team has no clear goal Dignitas' composition screams that they want to be able to pick advantageous fights and escape from poor ones. 

Hai is Definitely not Faker

Everyone no doubt remembers SKT T1 mid laner Faker's Riven play destroying the mid lane and highlight reals hitting the front of the League subreddit multiple times leading into the Season 3 World Championships. Likely having seen the same plays as us Hai purposefully chose the Riven and expected to man-handle the no-doubt predicted Scarra Gragas. Unfortunately the Riven pick was not heavily prepared by Cloud 9 as some digging on Probuilds shows Hai has rarely played it in solo queue and a concentrated look at past professional games shows Hai has not run mid Riven during Season 3. 

Hai's lack of Riven experience quickly became evident as he made mistake after mistake. Scarra made short work of exploiting every mistake and setting Hai's Riven further behind. The gif below is the first time Scarra crushes Hai, off screen before it starts Hai gets chunked by a Gragas barrel and expends all 3 jumps of Riven's Q signaling to Scarra that Hai can be burst down.



A few moments later Hai returns to the mid lane and again makes the same mistake. In the gif below you can see it starts with Hai finishing his 3 jump of Riven's Q, he then uses his E and Scarra, knowing Hai has no more mobility skills left, immediately reacts and Dignitas secures another kill.



These continued mistakes by Hai and Scarra's relentless capitalization on them all but removed Hai from the game. Hai never does recover either, he ends the game an abysmal 0-7 on his first outing as mid lane Riven.

Sometimes Objectives just aren't Enough

Despite the early kills Dignitas picked up Cloud 9 actually possessed an early lead thanks primarily to well timed rotations allowing C9 to secure uncontested objectives. In the early game Cloud 9 would secure all three outer turrets to Dignitas' one, as well as the first two dragons of the game. Unfortunately thanks to reduced early gold values of Dragon, very close farm numbers on both sides, and Dignitas' staggering 5 early kills, Cloud 9 would only reach a peak gold lead of 1.9k. A lead that quickly evaporated when Hai was again caught by Scarra and killed allowing Dignitas to pick up the mid outer turret and their first dragon of the game. 

Cloud 9 would pick up a few more objectives throughout the game, even going so far as to have Hai and Sneaky back door the bottom inhibitor while Dignitas was picking up a Baron. Their best efforts were simply not enough to compare to the far superior fighting composition Dignitas brought to the table. 

Imaqtpie lives to Fight another Day

The fight that essentially secured the game for Dignitas was actually an attempt by Cloud 9 to force a fight. Seeing QTpie and Kiwikid pushing bottom lane, but critically failing to have knowledge due to lack of wards that Crumbzz is nearby, Cloud 9 attempt to dive onto QTpie in hopes of quickly burning him down. The problems with Cloud 9's composition quickly become evident. Both Hai and Meteos blow all of their gap closers at the very start of the fight just trying to catch up to QTpie and are caught by a Vault Breaker from Crumbzz. Sneaky and Lemonnation manage to catch up to the fight and things almost look like they'll go okay for Cloud 9, but again a lack of wards meant C9 is completely unaware of Scarra combing in from behind them to clean up C9's duo lane and make the fight  go 4-2 in Dignitas' favor.

Both teams willingly engage the next fight which happens a short time later in mid. Cloud 9 does their best dumping Lucian, Leona, and Riven ultimates in an attempt to kill QTpie but a clutch flash from QT dodges the Riven ult that might have finish him off. Dignitas clean up the fight without losing a single member allowing them to pick up Baron after which C9 never willingly engage another fight, and the game eventually falls to Dignitas.

A Taste of Their own Medicine

Going into super week few people had faith in Dignitas to win any match, much less a match against last splits reigning champions, Dig received a mere 10% of the fan vote for this match. Cloud 9's signature team fighting dominance made it difficult to bet against them, but Dignitas not only brought the better team composition they also executed it far better than Cloud 9. The early shut down of Hai exacerbated the issues with Cloud 9's champion picks and they found themselves on the opposite side of a familiar situation. A team with superior team fighting coming out ahead fight after fight. 

While the mistakes of Cloud 9 played a roll in their loss, it was Dignitas who exploited those mistakes. No level 1 cheese, no gimmicks, simply Dignitas refusing to give C9 an inch of breathing room. Now the focus is on next week and the question of if Dignitas can sustain the kind of coordination displayed in this game. If this Dignitas continues to show up to the LCS it's easy to see a future with them being a competitor for top 4 and victories a plenty.