League of Legends Worlds 2019: stock up/stock down after Day 1 of group stage
By Josh Tyler
After Day 1 of the main event for the League of Legends 2019 Worlds, which teams and players impressed?
Time was up, faith was confirmed, a presumed titan fell, and there was a ton of superb League of Legends to be watched. After the first day of the Worlds main stage, which players and teams looked best and worst?
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Stock up
Faker
I know that’s a bit odd to say about the greatest League of Legends player of all time, but I’ve had concerns that maybe his best days were behind him. Those concerns were quickly thrown into the trash on the back of Faker‘s 9/0/8 performance on Tristana, going into Nemesis‘s Ryze. The Unkillable Demon King is back at Worlds!
Kayle
During the play-in stage, we saw Kayle picked three times and banned another seven, giving her a mere 23% pick/ban presence. Now that the group stage has started, though, Kayle was picked twice and banned another three times in six games. She’s suddenly become one of the biggest power picks at Worlds and could warp the meta going forward.
Team Liquid
No bones about it, TL looked great today in their 31-minute takedown of Damwon Gaming, despite them giving away power picks like Gragas, Vladimir, and Alistar, while being forced onto the likes of Aatrox, Jarvan, and Galio support. Every player made a huge contribution, from Impact’s solo kill on Nuguri, Xmithie‘s strong early jungle pathing, Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen doing some ridiculous damage on Leblanc, and Doublelift closing the game out with a quadrakill. It put TL in a prime position, especially given how iffy IG looked in their win over AHQ.
Stock down
FunPlus Phoenix
What the actual hell was that FPX? After all the talk about how this team got the easiest group at Worlds, considering how strong just about all their players are, and given that J-Team really only has one player that can stand up to the players on your team, how the heck did FPX throw up an absolute clunker of a game as they did today? People will point fingers at misplays by Lwx, Doinb being completely ineffective on Sion mid, and Tian looking lost in the early game, but it really was a full team misplay today.
ShowMaker
Before FPX, the biggest upset of the day was Damwon getting taken down by Team Liquid. Yes, Liquid played this game very well, but one player who really did not was Damwon’s mid laner Heo “ShowMaker” Su.
Next. Worlds Group D lane by lane preview. dark
Starting at Level 2, ShowMaker got chunked out of lane by an obvious gank that he either ignored or didn’t see. This gave up lane priority, which gave Liquid an early Infernal Drake, and basically handed control of the lane to Liquid’s mid laner Jensen. He ended the game with less damage dealt to champions than his jungler Canyon (who was on Gragas) and Liquid’s support CoreJJ (on Galio).