How Samsung White built advantages out of nothing.

It's no secret Samsung White is unparalleled as the best team in the world right now. They demolished competition on their way to being Season 4 World Champions this weekend. I and many others could talk at length about the incredible subtleties in their play, in fact I have a few more ideas beyond this one already. I chose this to talk about specifically because SSW were kind enough to do it both from a lead and from behind against SHRC this weekend to really demonstrate how they can create advantages from nothing.

In both games one and four White had their level 1 lane swap matched by Royal Club, matching up 2v2 in the top lane. Both times White used that fact alone to create and advantage by having their duo be the first ones to swap back to the bottom side. Each time Mata bought wards and used the fact they were the first to swap back to safely invade SHRC's jungle for vision. 

In game 1 Mata and Dandy invade SHRC's red buff placing a combined total of 5 wards, 3 greens and 2 pinks. Almost immediately after they finish placing the wards Insec shows himself on the one at double golems and Dandy uses that knowledge to dive mid lane and snowball Pawn's Jayce. Pawn used the mid gank to push down his tower and roam top, Dandy used the vision to out maneuver Insec, and bot used the oppressive vision to safely pressure Uzi in the botlane. 

By the time those 5 wards were gone SSW had a 1k gold lead, significant damage on the mid turret which would fall soon after and had used the vision of Insec to gain vision control over the top side of SHRC's jungle as well setting up another tower dive. Still it's easy to downplay the importance of the early swap from Mata by talking about SSW's advantageous lane matchups and the level 1 first blood that helped them afford so many wards. Thankfully White provided us with an example of the same thing but from a position of weakness in game 4. 

This time instead of a first blood advantage and having pressured the lane before the swap it comes after Looper's Kassadin died to a gank bottom while Imp died in the 2v2 top. Off the back of the 2v2 death Mata backs and again he uses the fact that by being first to switch there's no threat of the enemy bot lane collapsing to invade for vision. He's not able to illuminate it as completely as the previous example but he still gets a strategically placed ward. 

Moments later that ward spots a level 6 Insec passing by to setup for his first Pantheon gank. When he walks past SSW ping him and Pawn cheats down from the mid lane while Dandy clears red. A few seconds after they spotted level 6 Insec heading towards bot White signals clear understanding of what's happening as they ping the bot lane where SHRC's duo is pushing the minions into the tower as hard as they can. Thanks to the early warning of Mata's deep ward Insec is barely able to get off his combo before Dandy's Rengar snarls out of the jungle to turn the gank into a disaster for SHRC, and shortly after Pawn arrives to clean up Uzi and take the dragon with his teammates. 

In game 1 Samsung White used the early swap back to slowly build one small advantage onto another. In game 4 they used the same move to turn an early deficit into a punishing advantage.In both scenarios Mata knew that by swapping first he was safe to invade for deep vision. That vision gave Samsung White the knowledge needed to make plays from ahead or behind, and build advantages from nothing. 

How OMG used champion select to sweep Najin Shield

Despite being a clean 3-0 sweep the quarterfinal series between OMG and Najin White Shield was an absolute treat to watch. Both teams had high points in the games from Shield's early dominance game 1 and Watch's incredible smite steals to Cloud's ridiculous Janna play, Cool's dominating performance against Ggoong, and OMG's decisive calls. Above all else though the series really showed how important a good champion select phase is to victory. Every single game OMG was able to out maneuver Shield in champion select, securing themselves comfort and counter picks while also punishing members of Shield who had smaller champion pools.

Game 1:

Game 1 picks and bans. Source: LoLesports.

Looking at just the bans we can get a clear idea of what each team is focusing on for champion select. NWS bans Maokai, a common meta pick and something Save rarely plays, Jayce a target ban against Cool that will end up being used later in the series, and a priority pick for both teams Ryze. We can see that Shield is trying to make sure they make good use of their first pick advantage. Ryze and Zed have 100% pick or ban rate in Shield's games during the Korean regionals and group stages. Ryze was also a 100% pick or ban for OMG's games in the Chinese regionals and group stages. By taking Ryze of the table Shield intends to win themselves the only contested pick. Considering both Zed and Ryze have been hotly contested by most teams in the tournament it seems like a sound move to ban Ryze and secure Zed, it's also Shield's first big mistake.

Unlike for Shield Zed has a sub 50% pick or ban rate for OMG's games with OMG only playing it twice in 12 games between their regional qualifiers and Worlds group stage. Not only that but when OMG played it they did not first pick zed, they saved it for much later in the rotation. This means Zed was not only not contested, but also something OMG feels comfortable playing against.

On OMG's side they ban two meta bans Zilean and Alistar that no one wants to deal with, and then use their final ban to target Gorilla's Thresh. They then use their own first rotation to secure Janna away from Gorilla. This does a couple of major things for OMG, first it pushes Gorilla off his comfort champions. Gorilla played 11 of the 16 games during Korea regionals and groups on either Janna or Thresh. Secondly, it also counter picks the Zed for team fights, Janna's shield and Ultimate are great tools to help teammates survive a Zed all in and Cloud would make full use of them throughout the series.

Shield knowing they're going to have issues team fighting with the Zed against a Janna build a reasonable 1-3-1 split pushing comp. The idea being that Zed and Kassadin get rolling early and split while the mobility of Kha'Zix and Corki with the peel of Morgana keep them safe. Unfortunately for them OMG also knows this and respond with a counter pick Ahri who can shut down Zed early and get picks on any Shield member foolish enough to try split pushing, and their own powerful split pusher with a much better early game Irelia. This gave OMG enough early power to stop Shield snowballing and enough pick pressure to force Shield into a difficult choice between dying trying to split push or struggling to team fight effectively against a stronger 5v5 comp. The game was actually quite close in large part to some incredible early pressure in the jungle from Watch but OMG's decisive moves and Cloud's vision control kept them in it long enough to overcome the early setbacks and take the victory their champion select phase had crafted for them.

Game 2:

Game 2 picks and bans. Source: LoLesports

In game two we can see clear adaptation in bans from Shield, they realized that while OMG has played Maokai it's not an overly likely pick for either team and removed it from their bans. They've also correctly identified Gogoing and Loveling as major players in OMG's first victory and removed the champions used so effectively by them. Finally they adopted the meta Zilean ban that's basically mandatory if you don't want to deal with a first pick Zilean. This time Shield is trying to stop OMG from getting the advantage with first pick by leaving up a lot of contested champions. They intend for OMG to pick Ryze, Kha'Zix, or Zed first and leave the other two for Shield. It clearly works as they secure Zed and Kha'Zix but again they've failed to account for how much priority OMG gives to those champions. Loveling had already shown he's willing to run other champions into Kha'Zix, and again OMG doesn't put much stock in Zed, the result is OMG gets one of the most contested picks for both teams, Ryze, almost for free.

OMG's bans don't change much switching to blue side. They keep the Alistar meta ban, and continue to target Gorilla's champion pool with Thresh. The one major change is moving Lulu into their bans. mostly done thanks to Shield banning away the Zilean that OMG had banned on red side, but also a reasonable target ban against Ggoong. The Lulu is not an integral part of OMG's champ select here but removing her as a potential flex pick made the Zed even more predictable and removed a counter to the burst they'd eventually build into their team comp.

This time around OMG gets the biggest contested pick of the series in Ryze. Again they counter the Zed pick with Janna and due to Shield's bans this time they bring Rengar for pick and engage potential instead of the Lee Sin. OMG builds a really good all around counter to what Shield is trying to do, countering the Zed all-in, having good siege, incredible burst potential, plenty of disengage, and even a late game Ryze that will make it impossible for Zed to split push. Shield again doesn't have an answer they put together a sort of awkward 1-3-1 comp but it's more of a weird poke siege comp due to the fact Save builds Nidalee as an AP top. The game ends up dragging on longer than it should have due to some incredible smite steals from Watch, but apart from the stolen Baron buffs the entirety of game 2 is as heavily in OMG's favor as the champ select.

Game 3:

Game 3 picks and bans. Source: LoLesports

Game 3 is an oddball honestly, it's the closest Shield comes to actually winning champion select, but ends up in a comp filled with stuff they're not comfortable on. The bans from Shield are good, they remove a lane dominant comfort pick from each of OMG's carries. They also assemble a strong 5v5 team comp with decent laning and excellent late game scaling. If it were any other team I'd say Shield had the edge in champion select here. The problem is, all but Lee Sin are champions Shield rarely if ever plays. Nami is Gorilla's 4th support behind game 2's braum, Ggoong and Zefa rarely played their picks in the regionals or group stages, and Save has neither played Maokai before nor is he known for his tank play. Shield has also again made some champion priority mistakes here, they take Lee Sin as the first pick giving Gogoing Ryze for the second time and failing to recognize Loveling is content to play Kha'Zix into Lee Sin. 

OMG reverted back to their red side bans from game 1 and used the same champion select strategy. This time they weren't able to bait Ggoong into a 3rd straight Zed vs Janna match, but they were able to secure Gogoing's Ryze again and steal away Zefa's Corki he'd played much of worlds on. This resulted in OMG mostly assembling the same style of comp they'd had the first two games despite the Lucian ban. Lane dominant ADC, Gogoing on a comfort scaling champion, play making jungler, and Cloud being an absolute nuisance on Janna. The one big weakness in OMG's game 3 lineup was picking up Zed last pick. The Zed didn't really do anything for their team comp. Something like a Yasuo which Cool had shown before likely would have fit the comp better but Cool seems hesitant to play it after his poor performance on Yasuo in groups.

Despite the fact Shield had the more well rounded comp it was still clear that OMG won the champion select due to their superior familiarity with the strategy and champions their composition involved. OMG were able to secure multiple contested picks, several of which were comfort champions for their star players, as well as force Shield into not just unfamiliar champion picks but also a strategy far different from that they'd attempted to build throughout the tournament. The relative strength of Shield's well rounded team did allow them to stage a bit of a comeback in the middle of the game but it was simply not enough to contest with the confidence of OMG on so many comfort champions. 

Throughout the series OMG showed superior champion select. It's clear OMG did their research understanding that Shield will first pick Zed given the opportunity, and exploited that fact as well as the limited champion pools of Watch and Gorilla to build advantages in their picks. They also made key adaptations like taking Zefa's Corki in response to Shield's Lucian ban to further push Shield out of their comfort zone. It's clear OMG's champion select was much better researched and prepared than that of NWS, and it was a key factor in OMG sweeping the series. 

Worlds Quarterfinal Predictions

Samsung White vs Team Solo Mid

I know I got bit once before claiming TSM had no chance, but I really feel like saying anything else here would just be hopeless NA fanboyism. TSM may have managed to squeak through to first seed in NA but they struggled in their group ending 1-1 with SHR and an SK that had to play one of their matchups with a substitute. Meanwhile Samsung White dominated their group even against EDG who've had SHR's number all LPL long, and SSW are the heavy favorites for the entire tournament. White has demonstrated better team work and better champion select than TSM. White's bot lane out classes TSM's by a monstrous margin, their Jungler is far and away better both at understanding and working from the jungle than Amazing, and solo laners Pawn and Looper are world class players who are unlikely to allow Dyrus or Bjergsen to put the rest of TSM on their backs.

Predicting Samsung White 3-0 the match is the only realistic option to those of us without access to time machines.

Samsung Blue vs Cloud9

Where Samsung White is incredibly strong, Samsung Blue has shown some weaknesses including dropping a group stage game to Fnatic. Some people mistake Blue for the better of the Samsung teams because they've managed to beat White in the team kill matches but they have clear weaknesses in champ select and their early game play. They also clearly have issues dealing with chaotic games as Fnatic and KTA have both proven.

Cloud 9 has managed to earn the honor of being the first NA team to take a game off a Korean team in high level play since 2012 with their victory over Najin White Shield to secure a ticket to the quarterfinals. In their games against Shield C9 demonstrated a clear understanding of the sort of chaotic split push pressure that Blue has proved weak against in the past. Cloud9's players are also not especially out matched by Blue's, Deft is not particularly aggressive in the bot lane, Dade's champion pool is small enough he can be pushed out of his comfort zone, and Balls has successfully proven he's a world class top laner. The big problem for C9 is they've been a bit terrible on red side lately, their Champ select suffers and it negatively effects the rest of their play.

I'm still not willing to call this series in C9's favor, but I think they've got the tools to give Blue trouble and take at least 1 game. 3-1 Samsung Blue.

Star Horn Royal Club vs Edward Gaming

This one is a bit hard to call as there's not a lot of direct confrontations in the LPL to draw from. SHR did have better group stage results but they didn't face an opponent as strong as SSW nor did they openly admit to concentrating on the bracket stage instead of groups. Namei seemed to struggle a bit in group stages as some positioning errors led to a tie breaker game against AHQ, he shaped up in the final game though which is a good sign for EDG.

EDG in the group stage seemed to have better champ select than SHR and they're less reliant on Namei getting ahead than SHR seems to be on Uzi. Also important to remember EDG did beat out SHR in their last meeting to take the 1st seed from China.

I think this one has some potential to go either way but EDG are the favorites given past results and the relative strengths of the teams. 3-1 EDG.

Najin White Shield vs OMG

Shield looked great in their gauntlet run to qualify as the 3rd seed from Korea, but their groups performance got a little spotty. They completely misprepared for more than one game letting major comfort picks like Irelia, Lee Sin, and Rumble through against Alliance and C9. Their champ select disaster resulted in two dropped games, and the one against Alliance ended up being a perfect game at that. Shield also looked very uncomfortable dealing with chaotic split push when they faced Cloud9.

OMG also suffered problems during their group stage games. Cool and Dada777 have not looked very good against their competition. Dada777 especially has become a glaring weakness for OMG with his limited effective champion pool which unfortunately lines up with Shield's star support Gorilla. OMG won't be able to exploit the weaknesses in Shield as well thanks ot their own weak support needing the same picks Gorilla uses to be effective. While OMG did show some ability to create chaos against their opponents they also quite literally escaped groups by a single auto attack.

OMG should be able to put up some fight against NWS but so long as they continue using Dada777 their bot lane will be an ever present liability against Gorilla. 3-1 NWS.

Mid Hecarim, it's not just horsing around

When Keane locked in Hecarim for the mid lane against CLG in game 5 I like many others was shocked. Hecarim was an out of favor melee jungler known for his speedy ganks facing the ranged wave clear machine of Ziggs in lane. After watching the game multiple times and reading up on some lane Hecarim guides though I not only know what Keane saw in the pick, but also where things went wrong for Curse Academy that game.

THE GOOD:

Hecarim has a shockingly strong laning phase. Where most melee champions struggle early on in lane without some form of ranged harass/farming spell Hecarim doesn't seem to suffer the same problems. Keane's starting item choice of boots combined with Hecarim's high base move speed and his passive that ignores minion unit collision made it shockingly easy for Hecarim to avoid most of the ranged harass coming out of Link's Ziggs. On top of his ability to dodge harass Hecarim brings a spammable aoe damage tool to both shove the wave and harass his opponent, as well as self sustain from his W. When put all together Hecarim not only survives the lane but actually does quite well managing to put harass back onto Ziggs and only falling behind in farm from jungler pressure and when roaming.

Lane Hecarim solves one of the champion's biggest issues, gold income. One of the major issues with Hecarim as a jungler that saw him fall out of favor was the gold flow of the jungle. Hecarim needs expensive items like Trinity Force to be fully effective and it takes forever to farm up that much gold as a jungler. Dedicated farm from a lane, helped along by his surprisingly good lane phase means Hecarim can hit those item break points quick enough to be relevant in the mid game. Hitting his big damage items quicker means opponents have less defenses and Hecarim can do the ridiculous 50% hp burst hits like we saw Keane do to Dexter 17 minutes into their game 5.

Even as a laner Hecarim's speed makes for impressive roams. As a jungler Hecarim's speed was a prized part of his kit, allowing him to zip through enemy wards and be on someone before they could react. Though moving from a lane makes him a bit more predictable that speed for Hecarim is still there allowing impressive freedom for the post 6 roams to put the rest of his lanes ahead. In this way Hecarim works a lot like Twisted Fate pick, he farms his way to level 6 as quickly as possible then roams to build advantages elsewhere on the map.

Hecarim is a strong split pusher. His spammable Q and high move speed allows him to shove waves into towers quickly and safely a must for any split pusher. Not settling for just shoving around minions though Hecarim is also capable of putting down incredible burst and chase onto someone caught alone trying to shove back his minion waves. We saw the ridiculous burst Keane put onto Dexter before he'd even finished his Trinity Force. That instant burst potential means Hecarim's split pushing forces a lot of enemy resources to come deal with him.

THE BAD:

Hecarim is about as melee as you can get with only small AoEs on his abilities all of which are targeted around himself. This means Hecarim is not very good at sieging objectives. That can be a problem as the game goes late and you're forced into sieging the enemy's inhibitor turrets, as well as it changes the dynamic of the team comp you build around him. Being very melee means it's easier for defending opponents to land poke and ranged CC to kill you under turret. So Hecarim needs to fight away from enemy turrets, and a team that helps him catch the enemy when they venture out for neutral objectives like dragon or baron.

His late game is nothing to brag about. Hecarim's big power spike is the Trinity Force which sets up his mid game nicely and helps his mixed AP and AD scaling. It also means that he will not be as effective in the late game. He can continue to stack glass cannon and hope to finish out the game quickly while he's still far enough ahead the other team can't build defensive items, or become sort of a utility semi-tanky split pusher and flanking initiator, but either way he'll pale in comparison to late game monsters like Ryze.

Head on team fights are terrible for Hecarim. He's too  fast, his big initiation tool sends the enemies running away from him, and no matter how fed he is he'll never be as tanky as someone like Mundo. That means if Hecarim attempts to simply fight a head on team fight by running straight at the enemy he'll both run the enemies away from his team, and out run his own team, leaving him stranded in the middle of the other team with no backup and not nearly enough effective health to get out. You can deal with that by getting flanking team fights, but you need vision denial and room to move about to get a proper flanking team fight, which leads to the next problem.

When Hecarim falls behind it's hard to recover. It's hard for him to engage in heads up team fights, he needs vision control to either team fight properly or split push, his biggest power spike is his Trinity Force completion which typically comes first, he can't siege very well, and is about as Melee as you can get. All this adds up to Hecarim being mostly useless when he falls behind. He won't be able to split push, engage fights, or be much use in siege defense, from behind.

WHERE IT WENT WRONG:

So we've got the good and bad of the pick out of the way and we can see Curse Academy definitely went to work making use of the good parts of mid Hecarim. By 18 minutes Keane had done reasonable in lane against Link's Ziggs, and used the impressive speed and burst of Hecarim to roam and rack up 5 early kills before even finishing his Trinity Force. The biggest missteps for Curse Academy were actually in champion select. We heard in an All Chat segment that they were determined to play the mid Hecarim since they'd prepared it but their composition didn't really set it up as well as they hoped.

Seconds before going "Woah! what?" Source: Lolesports

Curse Academy built a cheesy speed buff composition to boost the Hecarim but few of their champs were set to spike at the same time as Hecarim and they weren't particularly good at the mid game picks he'd need to avoid his problematic sieging. Instead of trying to build a speed buff comp they'd have likely been better suited building a pick/disengage comp around it. So instead of Zilean we'd want Janna, Nami, or Thresh support for crowd control(CC) and disengage. An Elise pick instead of the Lee Sin for jungle would sync nicely with the pick comp goals as well as make up for Hecarim's sieging a bit, all while still keeping within the new trinity of competitive junglers. The Lulu top is actually decent for a Hecarim pick/disengage comp considering the meta at the time of this game, though I'd have liked a Corki for ADC to better synergize with Hecarim's power spike timing. With our new Lulu, Elise, Hecarim, Corki, Janna/Nami/Thresh comp we still use Hecarim's early roam power to help build everyone to their mid game spikes quicker but there's far more weaknesses than the one CA built. We've now got CC for picks, extra siege potential from Corki and Elise to make up for Hecarim's lack, and the potential for both a 1-3-1 or 4-1 split push where the core group has enough safety from Support ultimate and crowd control, Elise cocoon, and Corki's leap away that they can safely avoid an enemy engage onto them.

Curse Academy's team comp wasn't the only problem in champion select though, the team CLG had assembled was also very problematic for Hecarim. CLG had built a decent team fighting and sieging comp with both incredible late game scaling and plenty of ability to stall the game if it falls behind. With Ziggs, Ryze, and Tristana they had plenty of wave clear in case of falling behind to stall out Curse Academy long enough for those three to out scale the opposition. To make things worse Ziggs' near global range ultimate also meant CLG had strong answers to both the roaming and split pushing potential of Hecarim. Ziggs could use his ultimate to get involved with other lanes without having to keep up with Hecarim's impressive speed and shut down split push attempts with relative ease. When ahead CLG's comp is also excellent in team fights, with an impressive amount of AoE as well as Kha'Zix and Tristana's ability to reset their jumps and keep pursuing with each kill, and sieging turrets thanks to the high range and poke of Tristana, Ziggs, and Kha'Zix. Before Hecarim had even been hovered by Curse Academy CLG had built a comp that was good at countering Hecarim's strengths and stalling long enough to utilize their own.

There were some errors made in game as well by Curse Academy but those were far less relevant to their success in the game than their unfortunate champion select phase. CLG had a comp well built to counter Hecarim's strong points and weather the mid game storm of CA. On Curse Academy's side they not only let through problematic answers to Hecarim they also failed to build a comp that truly took advantage of the champion's strengths.