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. Following our Day 2 recap and since Day 3 has started, let's do a recap of the third day's games.
It was just not Order’s day on Day 3 of groups for MS. Order faced back-to-back games against Evil Geniuses (EG) and then G2 and proceed to lose both of them handily! To start off against EG, Order just couldn’t get a handle on any type of map control whatsoever. The loss was also compounded by mistakes, one particularly egregious one was when Order’s mid-laner Kisee, popped his stopwatch by accident after winning a team fight while chasing down the remnants of EG, causing him to freeze leading EG to get away scot-free. The game against G2 was painful to watch because of Order’s poor draft picks leading to them getting bullied throughout the game. In the draft, they picked jungle Evelyn who then got bullied, invaded, and killed repeatedly during the game, causing Order to have zero map control in their own jungle even in the early game. The bad pick caused the game to end early and heavily in G2’s favor.
The third game of the day was PSG Talon facing off against the Istanbul Wildcats. The game was incredibly even for 80% of the time, but PSG gained a tiny 1k gold lead after a fight in mid lane at 16 minutes, and then at 20 minutes, PSG’s top laner Hanabi started a fight off a dragon with a 4 man Gnar ultimate stun that won them the fight. PSG then killed Barron and won the game with a base push at 23 minutes. The game was incredibly even until the 20-minute mark and an excellent show of skill on both teams' parts. Let's hope they can put up the same level of fight against the more experienced teams in their group going forward.
After that, we had Royal Never Give Up (RNG) crushing Red Canids (Red) as expected! There was some interesting champion picks this match with a Galio mid for RNG then for Red a Jax top and Draven bot. Unfortunately for Red, their off-meta picks did not save them from RNG. In fact, RNG’s ad carry Gala crushed Red so hard with his Lucian that he got a freakin Pentakill! Pentakills are incredibly rare in pro play and even more in international play, although the skill difference between RNG and Red is probably the cause. Nevertheless, RNG absolutely destroyed Red in this game.
Next up was the Saigon Buffalos (SGB) against Team Aze and it was a bloodfest! It was over in only 20 minutes and SGB won with 20 kills! That's one kill a minute baby! Plus SGB went into the game with a Ziggs mage bot to counter Aze’s Miss Fortune, and boy do I love me a good Ziggs. SGB made full use of the Ziggs to quickly take down turrets and launch bombs from across the map. SGB’s domination of Aze was total and complete from start to finish. My only question after seeing this game is if Team Aze will manage a single victory at MSI. With what I’ve seen from them so far this year I doubt it.
For our last game of the day, we had SK Telecom T1 (T1) expecting to dominate Detonation Focus Me (DFM). T1 started the game off with a kill onto the enemy AD carry at only 2 minutes and that pretty much set the tone for the match! In another incredibly bloody game, T1 would end the game at 24 minutes with 26 kills to the 11 of DFM! While DFM was able to fight back and keep the game almost even for the first 12 minutes they quickly lost control in the midgame and T1 proceeded to dominate DFM for the rest of the game. Will anyone be able to taint T1’s perfect record in the group stage, or do we need to wait till the rumble for the epic match between RNG and T1? So far T1 and RNG’s perfect records are unbroken, but let's see what tomorrow brings!
Well, that's it for Day 3’s matches, check out MSI here if you’re interested.
