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It’s almost hard to believe that we’re coming to the end of the 2017 League of Legends World Championships.
We’ve seen so many teams pass through, and after six weeks of competition, only two are still standing.
It’s not just any two teams, though. SK Telecom T1 (SKT) are three-time World Champions. Samsung Galaxy (SSG) are one-time Champions, and also played runner up last year. While there are certainly a lot of people who are a bit disappointed to see yet another Korea versus Korea final, these are undoubtedly the two teams that deserve to be here the most, and that should hopefully give us the most interesting final match.
I generally take a predictive approach to these articles, but with only a single match in our sights it’s almost impossible not to go back to their previous matches. Both of the semifinals were incredibly intense affairs. Games were traded left and right, with major objectives stolen.
SKT were brought to the edge in their series against Royal Never Give Up (RNG). The switch to Peanut in games four and five was certainly not the only reason for their victory – they had also won game two with Blank – but changing Junglers really also changes a team’s playstyle. Peanut’s Jarvan coupled with Faker’s Galio made for a formidable combo and was able to lead their team to victory.
I do find the ongoing criticisms of SKT’s bottom lane a little shallow. They certainly did have some individual misplays, there’s no denying it, but Huni’s teleports left them without support just a bit too frequently.
The Botlane definitely had issues; Wolf’s mechanics in particular leave holes in their games. As a world-class Toplaner, however, Huni should be able to plan and time his teleports better so as to aide the duo.
Regardless of the fact that this team has exploitable weaknesses, it takes a certain calibre of team to actually take advantage of them. We are still talking about SKT, who are incredible at improving and adjusting throughout a series. I spoke last week about the impossibility of separating the performance from the reputation, and this week was such a great example of why both these things need to be taken into account.
SSG, coming in as the third place representative from the LCK, were not the team most of us expected to see in the finals. Longzhu Gaming and RNG were absolutely seen as the stronger teams at the start of the tournament, and even Team WE may have been assumed stronger prior to the quarter-finals.
And in line with those earlier expectations, SSG did initially struggle to get going. Giving up the Xayah and Rakan picks came about through a clear lack of foresight; as Defico pointed out, WE taking the Rakan to begin with left the Xayah being actively undesirable for SSG. From there, they ended up in a team comp that needed to get ahead early to prevent their opponents, especially the Kassadin, from getting ahead, which they just weren’t able to do
Though SSG dropped the first game in their semifinal, they picked up and improved from there to pick up three wins in three reasonably swift games. They picked themselves into much easier win conditions; the strong engage compositions were neutralised with disengage, and SSG out-macroed WE. The three wins for the Korean team maxed out at 36 minutes long; they were all won by strong gameplay rather than coming down to a single, deciding teamfight.
The last time these two teams met, SKT beat SSG handily in three games. SSG don’t look like they’re going to go down so easily this time, especially having taken out the other teams they’ve faced so far. SKT are sitting at a 60 per cent win rate; SSG are somewhere past 85 per cent.
I hate to reduce things to picks and bans, because at this level although one team comp may have advantages over another, there are never zero win conditions for the less advantaged side. Still, given SKT’s somewhat inconsistent performance to date, keeping Faker off a global playmaker (like, I don’t know, Galio for example) could have a major impact on SKT’s ability to make up for mistakes.
It’s a close one. If this goes to five games, I will be absolutely shocked if SKT don’t win. My gut feeling, though, is that this could be the year that the empire falls. Given SSG’s ability to pivot mid-series, I’m almost positive that they will be up 2-1 at some point in the series, and I’m hopeful that they will go on to win the fourth game and the championship.
At 6pm AEDT on Saturday, the final match will kick off. Will we see SKT pull off the first three-peat in League history? Or will SSG be the first team to beat SKT at worlds?