Alliance Save their Worlds hopes with a Flawless Victory over Najin White Shield.

by Reece "SabrewoIf" Dos-Santos 

It had been a long time coming for Alliance but the EU Super team finally hit the pinnacle of their potential and really hit the ground running with a perfect game over the heavily favoured Najin White Shield from Korea.

Coming into this game, Najin White Shield were undefeated in Group D and easily one of the favourites for the whole tournament considering their complete domination of the Korean playoffs gauntlet - taking out KT Bullets and the heavily favoured KT Arrows alongside the Season 3 World Champions SKT T1 K. Alliance showed promise in their first game against Najin Shield but were unable to convert their early game lead into a win due to a reluctance to push hard and fast before Shield’s hyper carry protection comp began to scale into the late game. All the right components were there in Alliance’s arsenal to take down Najin Shield: strong laners, tight synergy and the ability to not get out-rotated. Unfortunately, vision control was rather lax and that lead to an eventual loss of map control and the game.

This time, however, Alliance had come off the back of a very convincing win over Cloud 9 (which earned Shook a respect ban from Shield on Rammus) but clearly they did not respect him enough. Shook ran the map solo queue style, making huge plays and picking up the first three kills for Alliance and he proceeded to never let go of the stranglehold he had over Shield and the map. While Alliance destroyed ten towers and picked up fourteen kills, Najin White Shield were unable to pick up a single kill or objective, including Dragon and Baron, for themselves.  By the end of the game Alliance had amassed a 24k Gold lead and not once had the tide ever shifted in favour of Najin Shield. This was clearly a victory that was gained through hard consideration of what went wrong for them the first time, as more vision was both invested in and controlled (32 vision wards placed by Alliance compared to 16 by Najin Shield) alongside the fact that Zefa’s Tristana never had the time or the opportunity to scale up and become relevant in the game.

If this is what Alliance can pull out, it's clear that they are a team that should not be as overlooked as they were coming into this tournament. Shook and Wickd have shown that they themselves are now more than worthy of target bans towards them and should be wary of bans coming in on both Lee Sin and Irelia, but with this consideration it also frees up the possibility of Froggen, Tabzz and Nyph having bans less targeted towards them. What this victory has definitely done is changed the mind-sets of many people: Alliance is no longer just the Froggen show; it’s a true Alliance, a true super team of mechanically world class players.

Froggen built this team to challenge and overcome the best teams in the world, With this flawless victory over Najin White Shield, his team has done just that and can look forward to the possibility of doing so again.