By Reece "Sabrewolf" Dos-Santos
With their first appearance in an
international event coming just before their LCS debut, some people were
initially sceptical on how the Unicorns of Love would face up to the
competition of IEM San Jose. But the team came out to play and play hard.
Pick/Ban phase:
Unicorns of Love stayed adamant on removing
Jayce and Zed from the series along with Warwick in game 1 and Pantheon in game
2. Meanwhile Lyon saw to remove Thresh in both games but targeted Pantheon and Vizicsacsi’s
odd ball pick Poppy in game 1, then opted to his Gnar instead and remove
Warwick.
Lucian and Corki premiered as the only
ADC’s picked across the two games played but every other role saw a range of
variety, the biggest surprise factor being Kikis’s decision to bring out a
Jungle Kayle which in the end worked out rather nicely for him as his team.
Generally Unicorns Of Love opted for a “stun and destroy” theme across their
team comps focussing on having Braum in both games as well as picking up Syndra
and Gnar in game 1 and Irelia in game 2. Meanwhile Lyon Gaming clearly had the
idea of picking comps designed to make plays across the map employing a roaming
Alistar support in game 1 with Lee Sin and Leblanc. This was attempted again
with Orianna, Sion and Evelyn in game 2. The fault in Lyon Gaming’s team comp
set ups and playstyle choice however was that they required Lyon to not fall
behind and still maintain the ability to actually set up all the plays that the
champions enabled, unfortunately for them they simply weren’t ever
allowed.
Game 1:
Game one started off slowly but it was
evident that the Unicorns were clawing ahead slowly, by the 6 minute mark both
solo lanes were ahead by over 10 cs and Dodo on Alistar had begun to start
roaming in order to try and get a 3 man catch with their jungler Thyak.
Unfortunately for Lyon this led to unsuccessful gank attempts on Power of Evil
and eventually led to Dodo being pink ward baited and killed seven and a half
minutes in.
The situation then only began to get worse
for Lyon as the solo lane cs lead had doubled to 20 in favour of UOL by 10
minutes and Dodo became more desperate to land another attempt on ganking Power
of Evil. By the time they finally succeeded, it only left Maplestreet to get
return killed in the bottom lane and put further behind. Thyak managed to land
a dream steal on dragon at 13 minutes meanwhile Vizicsacsi
increased his cs lead to 50 while taking a tower moments later.
The pressure on Lyon Gaming was evident as
Dodo remained fixated on using his Alistar to roam and make plays but they
simply never fell into place, instead Maplestreet on Lucian remained a sitting
duck to ganks and eventually got pushed out of relevance entirely.
Things looked like they might change as UOL
made a sloppy play in topside in an attempt to take an inhibitor tower and
gifted away 4 unnecessary kills but the chokehold they had amassed up until
this point was simply too much to handle for Lyon Gaming. With 3 dragons, 1
baron and a 14k gold lead, Unicorns of Love took game 1.
Game 2:
Game two in my opinion played out like a mirror image of game one. By the 5 minute mark Vizicsacsi
was 10 cs up ahead of Porky again. The clear difference in his impact to
Porky’s was so big he was able to teleport bottom lane for the first blood on
Dodo, not get the assist for it and still go back to being dominant on his lane.
Meanwhile Power of Evil was picking up easy kills on Seeiya.
Lyon however made good use of their Evelyn
pick by flanking bottom lane and synergizing the surprise with another surprise
appearance of Sion as well. Lyon had also learnt from the mistake of leaving
Maple alone and he was provided with more support from Dodo and his team this
time around. However by the same point of near 14 minutes Vizicsacsi
had once again amassed a 50 cs lead and was fast becoming a monster. This was
backed up the sudden 4 slaughter that occurred around 19 minutes lead by Vizicsacsi’s
first picked Irelia.
Going into 20 minutes Lyon Gaming had
however managed to take 2 dragons but on the flipside they only had 3 kills
which were all on Thyak’s lessening impact Evelynn.
In almost an exact repeat of their first
game mistake, Unicorns of Love go in big for an inner turret and Vizicsacsi
manages to hard dive the team for a kill. But things appear to go south for the
Unicorns in the 3rd dragon dance as they once again over aggress and
fall prey to a 4 man shockwave, into Sion Q, into Corki rockets that removes 4
Unicorns from the map instantly. However like in game 1, 4 kills for Lyon
appear to mean absolutely nothing as they simply cannot find the resources to
hold off the Unicorn’s relentless aggression.
Outlook:
Overall the Unicorns looked impressed
throughout this series; they appeared to ramp up as time went on and they got
more into the flow of the games but the biggest worry throughout this was their
clear over aggression in the mid game period which could be attributed to
over-confidence. If Lyon were more able to grab hold of momentum swings they
could have heavily punished the Unicorns in both games but once put behind they
struggled to have any kind of late game presence. The overall series MVP in my
eyes was Vizicsacsi,
his top lane dominance was outstanding and entertaining to watch.
GG 2-0 to the Unicorns of Love
