The Samsung Galaxy organization has looked
significantly improved this season. The swap of Pawn to Ozone and Dade to Blue
in the mid lane seems to have benefited both teams, and both have demonstrated
their strength in the group stages and quarterfinals.
Blue ended group stages by going 5-1, only
dropping a single game to the KT Bullets. In the quarterfinals they defeated CJ
Frost 3-1 after Frost took game 1 with a dominating performance by Swift and Coco. Dade showed off his
favorite Ghost/Flash summoner combo, taking his team to 3-1 with impressive
Ziggs play and some exceptional work on Twisted Fate.
Ozone ended the group stages by going undefeated
across all six games, capping everything off with a 3-1 victory over the S3
World Champions, SKT T1 K. While defeating the previous world champs is
certainly impressive, SKT T1 K had certainly fallen off as of late. The support
for SKT, PoohManDu in particular looked sloppy having just returned to the
line-up. He got picked off multiple times for being out of position, unsafe
ward attempts and missing skillshots. These and other moves made SKT T1 K look
like perhaps they were not prepared for the changes to the meta in the 4.15
patch. Despite SKT T1 K looking less dominant, Ozone played well and appeared ready
to move on to the Semi-finals.
As for the match-up between Blue and Ozone
itself, I believe Ozone has a distinct advantage for a couple of reasons:
champion pools and Looper.
Champion Pools:
Ozone takes the cake pretty handily here. Ozone’s
Pawn has shown the ability to excel at almost every midlaner he picks up, and
he has picked up a lot of them. We consistently see bans against Pawn’s
Nidalee, Leblanc, Lulu, Ziggs, and Yasuo. On Blue’s, Dade is well-known for his
Ziggs and TF - everything else seems pretty mediocre besides his old Zed play,
but Zed is not very good against the current change to Exhaust.
At
support, Mata and Heart can play a large number of champions, I don’t expect
this to be a big point of interest as far as bans go for either side, though I
will definitely be watching how many Thresh bans go through. In the Jungle,
Spirit and Dandy’s repertoire of junglers consist mainly of Lee Sin, Elise,
Evelyn, and Kha’zix. (Nothing different here. Most Korean junglers play the
same group of champions.)
AD
Carry (sorry Riot, Marksmen) has a very interesting dynamic to it. Both Imp and
Deft have champions that can have a major impact on the game. Imp is of course
known for his Vayne mechanics, and the duo of Imp and Mata make them scary even
with a relatively passive carry. Also with the current number of invades into
laneswaps, Vayne is a pretty safe pick that will scale incredibly well in the
current state of the game, being able to peel for herself from dangerous melee
top laners like Jax, Shyvana, Renekton. On Blue’s side is Deft with Ezreal.
This season he has picked it 4 times and has a 100% win rate on it. He’s
incredibly comfortable with it, even running his own style of Blade of the
Ruined King first, and is known on the Korean Ladder as the best Ezreal player
there. Keep your eye on the picks and bans from Ozone and see if they try to
take Ezreal away from Deft to make him slightly less comfortable.
The Looper Effect:
When
Looper (Ozone) first came onto the scene taking over for Homme at the beginning
of S3 World Championship Playoffs, everyone was a bit confused. Looper may not
have had the greatest set of premier matches on the big stage, but at the time
he showed one thing that has come to greater prevalence in the current meta; he
was great at using teleport. Whether it was his Singed teleporting in to run
amok and disrupt the other team, or his Shen ultimates, Looper always showed a
great affinity for being prepared to jump in and give his team an advantage with
a split push. In the current meta, this is probably one of the greatest tools as
it’s almost required for every top laner to take teleport. Though Looper’s champion
pool has had to progress with the meta, the same mindset has stayed with him
moving on to champions like Jax, Shyvana and Mundo.
The main
reason I think that Looper will have a significant impact on these games,
though, is because Acorn isn’t quite the same type of player. Acorn is a
dominating top laner and likes to punish his opponents. This can be seen
through him only running Teleport (as opposed to ignite) two out of the four
games he played top vs CJ Frost. He tried to punish Shy in lane, and did a good
job. However, Looper is the kind of player that doesn’t mind playing the farm
game, sitting under turret, and simply allowing his opponents to push his lane
in; he plays for the late game. I will be watching two things here.
First, does Acorn try to play those punishing
champs like Renekton? Or does he switch his style up and also try to scale
harder to match Looper since Looper will likely play safe. Second, if Acorn
does go for those aggressive early top laners, how well do Looper and Dandy
ward to keep him safe from any types of dives that Spirit may try to pull off,
since Spirit also plays a number of aggressive early junglers.
Featured Match-up: Dandy vs Pawn in the Midlane.
Both players should draw a lot of attention in Picks & Bans. I expect Pawn
to do better in the 1v1, while Dandy will roam more to help out his other
lanes. It will be very interesting to see if Nidalee even gets banned, however,
since both Samsung teams have been counter-picking her with Yasuo. I expect to
see a number of picks and bans for Ziggs, Twisted Fate, Orianna, and maybe even
an exciting game of Leblanc to try to blow one of these safer farmers up.
My prediction is
that Samsung Galaxy Ozone will 3-1 their sister team Blue.
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