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League of Legends Worlds 2019: stock up/stock down after group stage Day 4

By Josh Tyler

Day 1 at the 2018 World Championship Group Stage at the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center in Busan, South Korea, on 10 October 2018.
Day 1 at the 2018 World Championship Group Stage at the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center in Busan, South Korea, on 10 October 2018. /
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The first round robins of the League of Legends 2019 Worlds are over. Who sits in a good spot?

Every team at Worlds has played their three opponents in the group stage at least once and now will get at least a day to rest before their push towards the knockout round finishes. Which teams and players in today’s League of Legends action were looking good and which ones were hurting?

Stock up

FunPlus Phoenix

They got off to a shaky start in the group stage, losing unexpectedly to J-Team, but FPX has turned it around in a massive way. Today, they faced off with GAM Esports in what I thought was going to be a pretty explosive, but competitive, match.

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The game was explosive alright, but it was certainly not competitive. FPX ended the game in 23 and a half minutes, easily one of the fastest games of the tournament. They also only surrendered two kills and no neutral objectives in the game.

Faker

I know it’s repetitive to sing the man’s praises, but good lord Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok is just on another level. He once again made a bunch of normally competent players on Clutch look like they were straight out of Iron III, going 7/0/1 on Akali that included some disgusting tower dives, TP plays, and a 1v4 escape without blowing Flash that was straight up disrespectful. With a KDA over 7 and a 38% kill share, Faker‘s Worlds buff is certainly online.

Stock down

NA

Well it was fun while it lasted folks. Today, North America’s representatives, Clutch and Cloud9, got absolutely obliterated. Now Clutch losing to SKT was expected, but as I mentioned above they got completely outclassed. They only secured two kills and zero objectives during the game, were down almost 10k gold at 20 minutes, and lost in a little over 26 minutes.

On the other hand, though, Cloud9 came into today’s action with a chance to take down a shaky Griffin team. They looked like they were pulling Griffin around the map as Licorice was drawing pressure in the side lanes as Fiora, enabling them to take Baron. Then, for reasons I still cannot comprehend, they decided to stop doing what was working, got beat in several team fights, and ultimately lost. The Twitch chat spammed “NAram” and honestly, it was deserved.

EU

Oh, you thought that I was just going to give EU a pass on their performance today? In the words of Lee Corso, not so fast my friend.

Fnatic lost to RNG, putting them at 1-2 in Group C. Although they didn’t look particularly awful (other than Hylissang who went 0/6, the main reason Fnatic lost was because of Xiaohu playing out of his mind) it’s still not a great look. They’re in third place in the group heading into the second round robin, needing to take games off one of the big boys for a shot at advancing.

G2 did win their game over Hong Kong Attitude, but any fan who is being honest will admit that they made it way harder on themselves than they had to. G2 threw a 2k gold lead at 14 minutes and ended up being down by about 400 gold at 20 minutes before finally taking the game seriously and ending in 30 and a half minutes.

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Finally, we have Splyce, who really blew their shot to grab a hold of Group B by losing to J-Team. Both Norskeren and Humanoid looked terrible, dying a combined 12 times with zero kills (the rest of the team had four deaths and five kills between them. Had they won the game, Splyce would have been 2-1 entering the second round robin, in a prime position to advance out of groups. Now they have to hope for some shenanigans to take down J-Team or FPX.

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