NWS Take Commanding Lead of Group D With Win Over Cloud 9

by Matt “It’s Pure Luck” Lee

Coming into a crucial match with group favorites NaJin White Shield, Cloud 9 knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. In a post-game interview after defeating Alliance the previous day, Meteos told Sjokz, “Hopefully we can beat KaBuM later today and going forward, maybe we will beat NaJin White Shield. I don’t know, that one seems a little bit ambitious, but number two out of the group would be good” 

It turns out Meteos wasn't far off. In stark contrast from their earlier game versus Alliance, NaJin was in control for the vast majority of this contest. It began in picks and bans where NWS threw C9 for a bit of a loop. NaJin took Syndra away from Hai and then opted to forgo their final ban as they could not agree to one. By doing so, it left one extra “stronger” champion open and forced Cloud 9 to make a decision on what champion they did not want to face. C9 opted to remove Lee Sin from Watch, and NWS came back immediately with a first pick Zed lock-in for Ggoong. Here are what the rest of the lineups for each team looked like.

NaJin White Shield (1st pick)

Zed (Ggoong) – Ryze (Save) – Thresh (GorillA) – Corki (Zefa) – Elise (watch)

Cloud 9

Tristana (Sneaky) – Kha’Zix (Meteos) - Lulu (Balls) – Nami (LemonNation) – Talon (Hai)

The first few minutes saw the lanes playing fairly aggressive against each other. Hai and Ggoong had vicious trades early on, dropping both of them to under half health before the game was three minutes old. Shortly after that occurred in mid, GorillA showed why he continues to play Thresh and often sees it banned against him. A hook onto Sneaky saw the C9 AD carry dropped under half health and the lane was suddenly in NWS's control. Meteos paid a visit bottom but without having vision of Watch, all he could do was drop a ward down in the river bush to help out Sneaky and LemonNation. The risks were too high otherwise with Sneaky so low on health.

NaJin were slightly ahead in each lane except for top at this early point in the game. To try and relieve some of the early pressure Balls was putting on Save, Watch went for a gank top and forced a flash out of Balls who promptly returned to base to buy. With his lane shoved towards his opponent’s turret and flash no longer available, Balls did not teleport back to lane and saw his previously struggling opponent take the lead in creeps.

Right as Balls returned back to lane in top, the game saw its first major skirmish. Cloud 9 were caught without any wards in the river and paid the price for it. Right when Watch was coming out of the river, GorillA made a beautiful flash flay to catch LemonNation who would attempt to flash away only to immediately be cocooned and focused down. Both top lanes began teleporting bottom at this point. Watch flashed away to escape and Sneaky attempted to rocket jump and finish him off to get a reset…only to be thwarted by Zefa’s summoner heal.

This turned out to be a critical mistake with Zefa and Watch, both barely escaping alive. GorillA would fall for NWS in the fight but Save was able to flash over the river wall and finish off Sneaky for a two for one in favor of NaJin. Ggoong engaged onto Hai in the river to then allow Save to escape while just surviving himself. NWS found themselves with a one thousand gold lead and even more importantly is the early game disadvantage Save had was all but gone.

The lanes looked to start to slip away from Cloud 9 a bit after all of this transpired. The creep score leads for both Save and Zefa seemed to be growing slowly but surely. The surprise was that Hai was holding his own versus Ggoong in the mid lane in a very tough matchup. He was making very good use of his ultimate on Talon to keep pressure on Ggoong so he would not have to deal with the deadly all-in from Zed.

Cloud 9 continued their attempts to shut down Save with a successful gank at ten minutes but NaJin would simply respond by taking dragon for themselves. Gorilla began to roam a bit with Watch in an attempt to make a plays elsewhere on the map as well as place deep wards in the jungle of C9. They managed to force a flash out of Hai and immediately headed into the C9 jungle as a ward spotted LemonNation heading back to lane.

In a very aggressive play, Watch and Save nearly did get a pick on LemonNation with a clever lantern gank between the inner and outer turrets. He managed to just get out alive, but once again the top lanes were teleporting down to join the fray. NaJin went a bit too deep here as they were a bit scattered during this turret dive. They managed to pick up kills on both Sneaky and Balls, but Watch and Save would be dropped in return with one of the kills going over to Hai. Gorilla just barely managed to escape with a sliver of health and for a brief moment, it looked as if Cloud 9 was still in the game.

The turning point however would come at the very next team fight. As the teams converged around middle lane, Balls was chunked down incredibly fast by Zefa and forced to back away. Unfortunately for C9, it happened at the exact moment that Sneaky and Hai went all in to try and take out GorillA. GorillA would die at the hands of Sneaky but the price paid was too steep for Cloud 9. The trinity force Corki ripped through C9 as the trio of Balls, Meteos and Hai would be killed with Sneaky barely escaping alive. A dragon would follow for the Koreans and all of the sudden the gold lead had swelled up to almost five thousand at just over sixteen minutes.

Despite the fact that NWS had a massive power spike with Corki and a substantial gold lead, C9 again took a bad fight in middle yet again. Hai was hit by a hook from GorillA and looked to be able to escape back to the turret with ease. Yet he chose to go in on what was essentially a one versus three. He would be killed by Watch who rappelled right onto him and Balls would also die shortly after. NaJin took the middle outer turret and the gold lead hit seven thousand at eighteen and a half minutes.

NWS wasted no time in flexing their muscle with the mid game power spike they had. They knew the dangers of letting a Tristana team reach the late game stage; they won themselves doing just that versus Alliance earlier in the day. Determined to not let that happen, they kept vision of the jungle in their clutches and rotated around the map taking turrets with Cloud 9 able to do nothing about it. Knowing the game was all but lost, it seemed Cloud 9 wanted to at the very least take out their frustration on Save. They managed to pick up the kill but the problem was it took four of them. NWS would gladly trade this for the top and middle inhibitor turrets and inhibitors themselves.

NaJin would have one small, final hiccup. GorillA would be caught out and killed and perhaps over confidence led to Ggoong attempting to go all in just outside of the final C9 inhibitor turret. In the end it was just a minor inconvenience for NWS as they would wait for the respawns of GorillA and Ggoong. One final brief siege led to the final inhibitor turret falling and NaJin would just rush the nexus and its turrets for a decisive twenty nine minute victory.

Game MVP

            Tough call between Save and GorillA, but GorillA is the pick here. Save did become a ticking time bomb that C9 couldn’t handle late game, but part of the reason he was able to is because Watch did not really have to help bottom out at all. GorillA missed very few hooks and the one’s he did hit early on shifted the lane in favor of NWS. I doubt he will get to play Thresh again in the second meeting between these two teams.

Questionable Decisions

            C9 seemed to have trouble grasping their win conditions in this game. They took too many bad fights in the mid game when Corki is clearly stronger than Tristana, especially once he has a Trinity Force. It’s one thing for it to happen once, but two or three times is inexcusable. They needed to be more patient and wait for Sneaky to have his Infinity Edge before trying to team fight. They played right into NaJin’s hands by repeatedly agreeing to fight instead of disengaging with Nami.