By Reece "Sabrewolf" Dos-Santos
With the demons of past failed LCS attempts behind them, H2k
took to the stage against Giants Gaming; both teams coming off back-to-back 3-0
sweeps against their first round opponents.
Pick/ban phase
Interestingly, because of how the teams chose to be set up,
Giants remained on red side for the whole series. What they aimed to get out of
this strategy, however, will remain an enigma.
H2k was relentless in their ban strategy of taking out the
threat of xPepii by removing Xerath, Leblanc and Syndra in all three games.
Giants, on the other hand, opted to try and adapt their banning to remove one
key component of what dismantled them in the previous game: banning Febiven’s
game one Jayce in game two and Voidle’s game one and two Janna in game three.
Pick-wise, both teams displayed good variety of picks and
compositions. H2k played a poke strategy with Corki and Jayce in game one
before moving on to more team fight orientated compositions in games two and
three. The only person that played the same champion in all three games was
Rydle on Thresh, a champion that worked quite well for him in the series, especially
in game three.
Into the Games
One thing that was noticeable to me across this series was
the performance of the bottom lane of Giants. While the action in the bottom
lane was often overshadowed by the standout performances of H2k’s top half,
Adryh and Rydle put up a very good laning phase in all 3 games. Adryh’s Sivir
in game one had a 20 minute CS lead six minutes in, in game three they also
heavily bullied out the bottom lane of H2k to the point where Hjarnan’s Sivir
only managed to get back into the game off the back off the performance of the
rest of his team. Despite the consistent lead in Giants’ bottom lane, there was
simply nothing the pair could do when faced with the absolute demolition that
Loulex, Odoamne and Febiven put up.
Game one saw three consecutive counter ganks from Loulex on
the middle lane as Fr3deric tried his hardest to shut down Febiven but
subsequently he ended up just pushing himself and xPepii further behind. Giants
made a little comeback with 4 kills and the first dragon but the next three
went to H2k and Febiven and Loulex slowly choked the Giants out.
Game two saw a
similar story of Giants’ falling behind on a solo lane early on. Odoamne took complete
control of the game on Irelia getting a huge cs lead and 4 kills early on.
Febiven’s Orianna also played a heavy part in their team fight presence in
backing Odoamne who went nuts decimating the Giants in any way possible. One
thing that was a slight let down for H2k was Loulex’s tendency to over commit
and go in to deep without the proper protection in order to set things up for
his team.
While these attempts proved non detrimental in any way, a
team in a better position than Giants would have been able to easily pick on
these small positional missteps. The biggest error for H2k in game two was over
chasing a good fight they could have used to push into the base, gifting two
unnecessary kills to xPepii’s Ahri.
Similarly in game three, Loulex’s presence across the map in
the early stages was heavy and the H2k solo lanes quickly took control of the
map. Odoamne’s Irelia had Werelyb’s Maokai in his back pocket for the whole
game and Febiven’s Ahri was a huge threat; however due to H2k’s tendency to
make missteps and positional errors, particularly on Loulex’s front, the game
took a lot longer to close out than it should have. H2k’s dragon control was also
very lax allowing Giant’s to pick up three, but the fact that this simply did
not matter at all proved how far ahead and how oppressive the solo lanes of H2k
were throughout this series.
If I had to pick an MVP throughout this series I’d have to
give my vote to Febiven, he had a super commanding series knocking xPepii down
and keeping him down across all three games. He remained a constant deadly
threat and made team fighting very difficult for the Giants.
