By David Curry on June 24, 2014 at 8:00pm
The NA LCS has improved quite a lot since the Spring split; where Cloud 9 won the split convincingly sending them to the AllStar tournament. Almost every team in the league has new players and NA has become more focused on macro strategy, coaching and dedicated analysts to win, creating a much more open and questionable race for the top spot.
LMQ, Counter Logic Gaming and Team Dignitas are currently in a three way tie for first place. Cloud 9 and Team SoloMid hold joint second place with one more loss, both teams lower in the rankings than last split, when they sat first and second for the majority of the split. Curse holds third or sixth, depending on how you look at it. Evil Geniuses and Complexity take the last two places at the bottom.
Let's look at each team and figure out what is working, what is not working, what needs to change and where the team is going to end up in the current form.
LMQ
The Chinese imports - LMQ consists of five Chinese players that moved to North America, splitting from the Royal Club organisation in China. The five players have all shown impressive skill in solo-queue, ranking up to Challenger in no time and have performed well as a unit, although most players from other teams claim they will fall off as the season continues.
LMQ's strong point is definitely the individual players, their mid-laner XiaoWeiXiao has picked up the most CS in almost all games and has went wild in a few games with impressive KDA. Vasilli is another stand out player in the marksman role, known for his aggression and lane control. Ackerman, previously known as Godlike, is one of the best top-laner, previously playing for Royal Club in the Finals of S3 Worlds.
What's holding them back from complete dominance is their map control, once LMQ start to lose, they cannot find their way back. Bad warding in the enemy jungle and weak control of objectives forces them to create team-fights, hoping that their advantage mechanically will be enough to get them back in the game - it is rarely enough.
LMQ's issues stem from their Chinese influence, but once they understand warding and objective control, they should be a formidable opponent. Right now, we can see them finishing in the top four at least, barring any miraculous recovery of form from Team SoloMid or Cloud 9.
CLG (Counter Logic Gaming)
Counter Logic Gaming have always been a team just shy of the top spot, but this year the possibility is closer than ever. The team recently swapped Nientonsoh for Seraph, a South Korean pro-player with experience at Najin White Shield. Seraph moved from Korea to the US at the start of the split and CLG have been working on his English and in-game communication.
CLG are one of the best teams for map control and pressuring objectives, regularly understanding the patch earlier than other teams. This is thanks in part due to their support staff, consisting of OGN commentator and analyst MonteCristo. They also have one of the strongest rosters in NA, DoubleLift and Aphromoo are regarded as the best bot-lane and Dexter is known for his early aggression and jungle control.
Seraph is a work in progress and in some matches it looks like the communication is not there, yet. Seraph's English is improving, but he still needs to be a presence in game, offering his opinion on moves in the top-lane. CLG has all the makings of a top-flight team, but it has always been the curse of CLG fans to overestimate their team's ability.
Team Dignitas
At the start of the split, Team Dignitas replaced Scarra and Cruzer for ZionSpartan and Shiphtur, the two solo lanes from Coast. Scarra, the mid-laner, stepped in as the full-time coach for Dignitas and the team brought in Comely and Mylexia as support staff, bolstering the team in every aspect.
The changes seem to have paid off in the early stages of the split, Dignitas is currently joint first and have been able to take games off every team. Shiphtur has shown he is one of the best mid-laners in NA, with a 14.6 KDA, the best in the region by far. ZionSpartan has also shown his ability to adapt to different playstyles and the old Dignitas players have improved in their roles too.
Crumbz, the jungler, has been able to change his playstyle to more of a supportive jungler, buying more wards than any other jungler in NA and acquiring items to help his solo-laners in team-fights, instead of damage or tanky stats. Kiwikid has also shown up in the support role, becoming the team's main shot-caller.
Dignitas doesn't have a major flaw, they are just a streaky team and need to work on consistency. Last week, the team gave up a game to Complexity that seemed like a whitewash, if that happens too often we could see another middle of the pack finish, denying the team a place at Worlds.
Cloud 9
Cloud 9 are the only team that played in the Spring split to not make a change to the roster. Considering they came first and the same roster have won the split three times, we are not surprised Cloud 9 believes that they can win with the same individuals, but it does not seem to be going their way so far in the Summer split.
The team has always been smart when it comes to LCS, the support Lemonnation works on the picks and bans pre-game, the jungler Meteos works on early game map movements, buffs and objective control and the mid-laner Hai works on mid and late game shot-calling, giving the team one voice to listen to at certain points in the game.
The main issue right now is the mid-lane. Hai has been ill and his champion pool is quite odd, pulling out picks like Kha'Zix and Fizz, instead of the regular mid-lane picks like Nidalee, Lulu, Yasuo and Twisted Fate. Meteos is also having issues on Rengar in the past two weeks, showing inconsistency with this champion, Sneaky also appears to be stuck on Corki, his favorite champion.
We expect Cloud 9 to stick around the mid-pack this split, unless they regain confidence and build up momentum in the end, plenty of analysts still see them making it to Worlds. They could make it to Worlds, but it would take a big effort to knock LMQ or Dignitas off the top-three.
Team SoloMid
Team SoloMid decided they needed changes at the end of the Spring split, TheOddOne dropped into a coaching role and European jungler Amazing stepped in. Xpecial, the support, got benched for "attitude issues", allowing ex-C9 Tempest player Gleeb to get a spot on the team.
The early changes appear to have put TSM in a worse position, but this could be due to the growing NA competition. The jungler Amazing is better mechanically, but lacks the selfless play-style TheOddOne brought to the team, repetitively helping solo-laners get stronger, at his expense. Gleeb is a step down from Xpecial in experience and shot-calling, this has taken an affect on the bot-lane for TSM.
TSM look like they do not understand win conditions and how to play to the players and champions strengths, instead waiting for the other team to make a mistake. Their vision control and map movements are far weaker than the top four teams and they need to stop thinking like a solo-queue team and start working together to win games.
TSM did bring in Locodoco as a full-time coach and it appears to have been a good choice, with TSM pulling good numbers in the past two weeks. They still look quite poor against the better teams in the league, but if Locodoco can iron out some of the issues plaguing the team it might secure them a top four finish.
Curse
The joke about Curse is they will always finish fourth, but that does not seem like an insult this year. After replacing BunnyFufu with TSM's Xpecial, it looked like a solid upgrade, but the team looks as inconsistent and lacklustre as ever in games, narrowly losing out to the best teams and dropping games to the weaker teams.
The team, currently in sixth, looks weaker than the top three teams and cannot pull games from Cloud 9 or TSM, rooting them in sixth place. Their solo-laners both show little impact in the game and even with Xpecial the bot-lane appears weak against other duos. The jungler IWillDominate does offer a lot of early aggression, but his team cannot follow up.
Curse needs a lot of work if they are going to finish anywhere above fifth this split, the solo-laners need to up their game and provide more power in lane, the bot-lane needs to come out of their shell and show they can fight against the best and the team needs to come together in the late game and show consistency in their wins.
Evil Geniuses
When EG first came to North America, a lot of people joked about the team being made up of Alliance rejects, the EU team AllStar mid-laner Froggen had put together. YellowPete and Snoopeh, two of three players from the EU team, have already dropped out of the new NA team, being replaced by C9 Tempest's Altec and veteran Korean player Helios.
Before Helios joined, EG looked like a team destined for one of two spots, second-last or last. This might still be the case, but the improvement in jungle is immense and Helios' early jungle pressure beats most NA junglers. Altec is also a big improvement over YellowPete, offering more consistency in the bot-lane and quite reliable late-game carry potential.
That said, they still need their solo-laners, Pobelter and Innox, to improve in laning phase and late-game. Both are known as great solo-queue players, but regularly die in lane against other players, showing their inconsistency in the LCS and their inability to adapt to new play-styles.
The EG team also suffers from the same issue as CLG, having a Korean player who is slowly learning English. Luckily, Helios is a more active personality and not afraid to make calls, even if these calls are in broken English and might be confusing for players to understand.
Complexity
Sadly, it is hard to see Complexity anywhere but the bottom of the leaderboard. They just managed to scrape a win into the LCS and so far they have shown inconsistency, issues with VISA and a replacement in the jungle, swapping out Brokenshard for C9 Tempest Kez.
The top-laner Westrice regularly dies in lane to opponents, Prolly is comfortable on a wide range of champions but cannot perform well on meta picks. The bot-lane is actually quite decent, but lacks any real horsepower to hard-carry the team through games. Kez is a nice addition to the team and works better than Brokenshard in the few games we have seen him play.
Map control is pretty poor from Complexity, compared to the top-three teams. The lack of deep wards, understand of where and when to war and poor control of objectives all tally up to them being in last place. We don't know what Complexity's coaching situation is, but we doubt they have a dedicated analyst and coach like the top-teams in LCS.
The Next Six Weeks
What will happen in the next six weeks? We cannot say - the NA LCS has become more like the EU LCS, where anyone can win or lose. Dignitas has issues with consistency, LMQ has issues with late-game and coming back from being behind and CLG is still trying to gel the team together, on the same week TSM is growing in strength and C9 could become the titan of NA once again.
Check back at Player Theory for more coverage on LoL eSports, including details on the EU LCS.
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