For fans of League of Legends, the Mid-Season Invitational or MSI started on May 10th. You can check out our article about the event here if you are interested. So, since MSI has started, let's do a recap of the first day's games.
To start the day off - literally, if you live on the west coast, due to the fact that the games start at 1:00 am since MSI is in South Korea this year - we had Korea’s SK Telecom T1 versus Vietnam’s Saigon Buffalo’s. To no one’s surprise, T1 had their expected victory, however, the Saigon Buffalos did put up more of a fight than anyone was expecting, giving T1 some difficulties in the early game. By the end of the game, however, T1 pulled out the victory, plus we got to see some jungle Vi, so good things all around!
Up next was Latin America’s Team Aze against Japan’s Detonation Focus Me. A much slower-paced game than the previous one with far fewer skirmishes and kills. With slow methodical play, Detonation was able to limit Aze to only 2 kills by the end of the match when they stormed their base and won. An expected victory from Japan, but we will see what else happens in their bracket down the road.
After that Europe’s G2 E-Sports went up against Oceania's Order and North America’s Evil Geniuses in back-to-back matches and won both of them! The match against Order was one-sided and G2 had managed to out draft them with counter picks and just a weird comp in general on Order’s behalf. Against Evil Geniuses, G2 had a harder time but was still able to always be ahead in draft and game. Evil Geniuses were able to hold out longer and almost got back in the fight before they lost in the first game that day, playing longer than 30 minutes.
The penultimate game of the day was China’s Royal Never Give Up versus Turkey’s Istanbul Wildcats. The game ended rather predictably with Royal crushing the Wildcats and winning the game in just 22 minutes. There’s not much else to say about the game other than Royal’s excellent play or the Wildcats' frankly poor showing.
For the last game of the day, we had Brazil’s Red Canids against the Pacific’s PSG Talon, and man, what a great game to end the day on! Red Canids put up an amazing performance, especially when you consider that their one of the smaller regions. The Red Canids crushed PSG Talon 13 kills to zero, dominating them for the entire game. While PSG Talon is no SK T1, as a dark horse, the Red Canids are the one to watch in upcoming games in my opinion.
Well, that's it for Day 1’s matches, check out MSI here if you’re interested.
