Spring Promotion Day 1: LCS teams avoid heartbreak

Recap of the opening day of the Spring Promotion tournament: ROCCAT and Echo Fox survive courtesy of mistakes from Millenium and Team Liquid Academy.

We are in the middle of exciting promotion tournaments in both the EU LCS and NA LCS. While the gameplay hasn’t been pristine, it is still fun to watch teams fight for their LCS lives. So much hinges on these tournaments:

Let’s take a look at what happened in Day 1.

ROCCAT win a mistake-filled series with Millenium

This series went the full five games but never should have gotten that far. Roccat was clearly the better teamfighting team but constantly opted away from their win conditions and took bad fights with no vision.

In Game 1, they had a superior teamfight composition, but instead of setting up around objectives, they chose to fight without vision. Millenium top laner Quentin “Kaze” Gourbeix got huge on Fiora and Millenium should have closed the game with a 30-minute Baron. However, ROCCAT jungler Jonas “Memento” Elmarghichi stole the objective, giving his team time to breathe and set up correctly around objectives.

In Game 2, ROCCAT displayed better team play but were done in by a disastrous decision in the pick phase with Felix “Betsy” Eddling picking Sona in the mid lane.

The Sona had zero impact, star ADC Pierre “Steelback” Medjaldi fell behind in itemization (had to build Maw third), and ROCCAT overall had very little damage.

Millenium started Game 3 well by burning Sang-won “Parang” Lee’s flash in the lane swap, but they bungled the turret trade, giving up two waves of tempo. ROCCAT achieved CS advantages everywhere and snowballed to victory.

In Game 4, ROCCAT achieved a lead with a teamfight composition and threw it away by trying to split-push. That led to a Game 5 in which ROCCAT seemed more intent on grouping as five and teamfighting to the win. Millenium fought back and got an ace off a horrific ROCCAT Baron call, but ROCCAT held off the buff, found the right fights for Steelback to carry and won the game on their ADC’s back.

Echo Fox come back to beat Team Liquid Academy

A lot of people believed that TLA’s advantage in the duo lane would help them to a series victory, and that was exactly the story of Game 1.

But in Game 2, both top laner Park “kfo” Jeong-hun and mid laner Henrik “Froggen” Hansen built large CS leads that were too much for TLA to overcome. TLA ADC Chae “Piglet” Gwang-jin’s ability to get leads in lane regardless of composition or jungle pressure is unbelievable, but Echo Fox played the map much better as a team.

Echo Fox still had things to work on, namely split-pushing with appropriate vision, but their dominance in the solo lanes showed. That again proved the difference in Game 3 as TLA picked a scaling comp and decided to teamfight while in their power troughs. Echo Fox picked up kill after kill when TLA should not have been fighting and won easily.

Game 4 was a Piglet carry. That’s it. He would not let his team lose. Regardless of the outcome of this series, it was nice to see that we got at least one vintage Piglet carry game. He can be hard to work with, but he is a preeminent talent and he’s not going to be at this level forever. Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts.

But Froggen is a world-class talent himself and would not let his team go down. Echo Fox achieved a vision control advantage in Game 5 despite a very close gold and kill differential. Better vision and a few calls in which TLA was not grouped gave Echo Fox a second leash on life.

It was nice to see both LCS teams hold down their spots.

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