For the second straight year, two Korean teams will battle it out to determine the winner of the League of Legends Season 6 World Championship when the Final takes place over the weekend at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. This after an eventful playoff stage which saw games in San Francisco, Chicago and New York before some enthusiastic crowds.
Defending champions looking to repeat
Two time winners and defending champions SK Telecom T1 enter the Final as the heavy favourites, but will be wary of the red-hot Samsung Galaxy outfit, who have upped their game at a crucial time.
These two teams travelled two very different roads to the finale, switching difficulty of opponent roughly halfway through the tournament.
SKT rolled through the group stage before facing challenges in both the quarterfinals and semifinals. Ranked as the second seed out of Korea before the competition began, SKT took on the most talented roster at Worlds in China’s Royal Never Give Up first in the knockout stages, taking them down in four games. Following this, SKT faced off against fellow Korean powerhouse ROX Tigers in arguably the best five game series in the history of the game. SKT were victorious, somewhat surprisingly winning every game with Bengi in the jungle, allowing them to move on to the Final.
Conversely, Samsung had a brutal task just to make it to the elimination rounds before easing through to the Final. The third seed out of Korea only received that designation by beating KT Rolster in the Gauntlet and then fought through Group D, which many considered this year’s group of death. Samsung then swept past North America’s Cloud 9 and Europe’s H2K by 3-0 scorelines to meet up with SKT.
Mid lane expected to be key
The match-up to watch in this series is certainly in the mid lane, with the man considered the best League of Legends player of all time, SKT’s Faker, taking on rising star Samsung’s Crown. Both Faker and Crown dominated their lane opponent in the semifinals, with both teams using that dominance as a pillar for their victory.
SKT will surprisingly have the ability to lean on their Top laner Duke to carry if things in the mid lane turn sour. Duke had underperformed all tournament long, but was somehow revitalized against ROX’s Smeb, widely pegged as the best player in the world at the moment. With everything on the line, SKT will have high hopes that he can do it one more time for them.
After rising to popularity in the quarterfinals, Support Zyra has not only continued her 100% pick or ban status, but she’s so strong that Miss Fortune, typically used as an AD Carry and rarely seen over the past year, has risen to be the best counter pick towards her. Miss Fortune is played in the Support role because of her ability to push the lane early, coupled with her passive, allowing her team to eliminate a Zyra plant in two shots instead of three.
This significantly decreases Zyra’s oppression in the laning phase. Ironically this gives an incredible edge to Samsung Galaxy because starting Support player CoreJJ was formerly an ADC player, even on the LCS level stage, giving him much more practice on Miss Fortune than Wolf, the stable Support player for SKT. Coupled with Zyra, champions such as Syndra, Jayce, Nidalee and Ashe will certainly be highly contested picks, with many of them considered as first pick if not removed via bans.
It’s difficult to see Samsung pulling out a win, not only because of their inexperience in international events, but also because the team they’re up against have been here before, and won, even in the exact same building. SK Telecom won their first title at the Staples Center back in 2013 and the team will be very comfortable heading into the Final.
It will be a challenge for the Final to live up to the quality of play portrayed in the semi between ROX and SKT. However, it will be intriguing to see if Samsung can not only keep it competitive, but go a step further by defeating SKT altogether. In the end it’s the new kids on the block versus the defending champions, with everything they’ve worked towards for an entire year just five games away.
