League of Legends Worlds 2019 play-in Day 5 recap: did Damwon underachieve again?
By Josh Tyler
Two teams have advanced to the League of Legends 2019 Worlds main stage, but who impressed in their wins.
Damwon Gaming and Clutch Gaming have each punched their ticket forward to the Worlds group stage, while Royal Youth and Lowkey‘s dreams of winning the League of Legends World Championship ended today. Who performed the best in these two bouts, seeing their stock go up, and who underperformed as their stock dropped?
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Stock up
Clutch Gaming
In general, Clutch looked extremely clean in their 3-0 takedown of Royal Youth in the second series of the day. The first two games ended in under 30 minutes and Clutch never surrendered a single Baron the whole series. In fact, Clutch only gave up six towers and two dragons during the entire series. That is a clean win.
Yasuo
To the glee (or dismay) of many observers, Day 5 of the play-in stage featured not one but two games of Yasuo. Nuclear went 5/3/7 on the Unforgiven in a Game 3 win for Damwon, but Artifact went 0/2/1 in Lowkey’s Game 4 loss.
Cody Sun
I mean, it’s really impossible to overstate how good Cody “Cody Sun” Sun has been in play-ins so far. He went 42/4/36, including 23/0/12 in this series. After going through a lot of turmoil the last couple of seasons, Cody has emerged as that steady carry force for his team and may end up as one of the best players at Worlds.
Celebrity
Lowkey stunned Damwon in Game 1, taking down the LCK’s third seed in just over 41 minutes. Despite the fact that Hani went 1/4/11 on Ornn and DNK went 1/6/10 on Gragas, Lowkey was carried by their ADC Nguyễn Phước “Celebrity” Long Hiệp, who went 10/3/6 on Tristana to carry the game. In their three losses, Celebrity had some underwhelming games on Lucian and Ezreal, but he did his damnedest in Game 3, going 4/3/5 on Kai’sa.
Stock down
Damwon Gaming’s drafts
Many observers criticized Damwon’s decision to run Garen/Yuumi bot lane into a team with such massive ability to disengage and kite him out (Ornn, Gragas, Tristana, and TF). They also paired this draft with two squishy assassins – Qiyana and Akali – and a Vladimir top lane who suffered those same issues Garen faced. Damwon repeated this mistake in Game 3 drafting Yasuo for Nuclear, but luckily his other lanes were able to stabilize some of their bot lane’s failings.
DNK
I thought Lowkey hung around with Damwon much better than expected (heck, they even took a game off the Korean representative) but one player who did not look good was jungler Đỗ “DNK” Ngọc Khải. DNK went a combined 3/14/19 in their four games.
Ranking all mid laners at the 2019 World Championship. dark. Next
Tolerant
Royal Youth had a lot of issues running against Clutch in their series, from pure mechanical misplays to poor macro to individual mistakes. One player who stood out in a bad way, though, was support Barış “Tolerant” Çepnioğlu who unfortunately got caught out repeatedly and couldn’t find key hooks to turn plays around.