The LCS is back (and in studio) for the Summer season and it couldn't come at a more interesting time. After a year's worth of online play and another disappointing showing at an international event, North America is in an odd place as a region.
Yet, the LCS had already been in an odd place for a while, and I'm not talking about anything related to international competition. Two of the most recognizable LCS faces in Bjergsen and Doublelift retired during the online era. Both continue to leave their fingerprints on the LCS in different ways — the former as a coach and the latter as a content creator and LCS co-streamer. I personally take responsibility for not building up player narratives as well as they should have. We have a lot of interesting talents in the LCS and it's time for me to start showcasing them better (at least within this column and on the LCS broadcast).
Here are a few words from the players themselves on their individual improvement, the upcoming Summer Split, and perception of their teams.
Let's get it.
**1. Cloud9 (13-5)**
Prior to the Mid-Season Invitational, I had a chance to catch up with a few of the C9 members remotely while they were in Iceland. They had just come out of quarantine while there, hadn't yet had the chance to explore Reykjavík, and scrims had been educational. Their mood was generally positive and their performance at MSI, they said, was still dependent on how much they could learn in a short amount of time while facing tougher opponents outside North America.
One other thing they all reiterated was that upon returning to North America from MSI, regardless of their own results, they would be the best team in the LCS due to having faced international competition.
Now having missed the Knockout Stage, having returned to LCS, and in a strong position to represent the LCS at Worlds due to the new system, the only wrinkle in C9's plans of steady improvement comes in the form of a roster swap: former C9 Academy bot laner K1ng in for former C9 bot laner Zven. Regardless of the intricacies behind the swap, integrating a new player onto the lineup can be an instant boon — usually in a team that needed a fresh perspective — even if it will take time to have the same level of synchronization as their previous teammate.
Once again, much like how Fudge was initially brought into the C9 fold, C9's first task will be in growing as a unit while K1ng's communication with the team improves.
**2. Team Liquid (12-6)**
"That week, I basically couldn't look at screens," Santorin said. "I was so dizzy I could barely stand up. While we were playing the semifinals I couldn't watch. I was just laying in bed. It was rough. I hate losing out on games and I felt really bad for my team that, even Armao, I felt bad for him too. He didn't have time to gel with the team before playing. It was a rough situation overall for everyone."
There are a few what-ifs around C9's MSI performance at the moment and the most unfortunate one of them is what if starting Team Liquid jungler Santorin had been able to play in their Finals instead of Armao. The Finals were still remarkably close. It's unfair to both teams to even speculate, yet the sentiment lingers. Team Liquid and Santorin's job for Summer will be in proving that they are the best team in NA, while shoring up some of their weak points showcased both in the Finals and throughout Spring.
"As a team, we need to work better as a team," Santorin said. "Building on our current team morale and keep improving that. I just feel so excited for Summer. There are so many little things that we wanted to change and we've had some time to really reflect on it. Watching the games from an outside perspective, watching us play in the Finals for example, there are so many moments where I'm like, 'Oh if I was there, maybe I would have done this.' I like seeing how my team works from the outside and that helps me a lot."
Although TL were the Lock-In Tournament winners, they sometimes were unable to transfer formidable laning pressure from Alphari or strong jungle and scuttle control from Santorin into larger map leads or advantages.
"I think a lot of the games that we threw when we were ahead in top were because we tunneled too much on killing top instead of being like, 'Yeah okay, let's get the Herald. Let's rotate to mid after we get the top push,'" Santorin said. "I think it's a lot more natural for the support to roam when they're ahead so it's a lot easier to transfer bot side advantages because the support can always come mid lane and do more on the map."
He added that they want to focus more on the bigger picture rather than snowballing one lane or tunnelling on one thing. "I wouldn't put that on Alphari, it's us as a team. We need to figure out how we want to snowball so these are the things that we want to continue to work on. Alphari gets a lot of big leads so it's up to us to use them properly."
**3. TSM (12-6)**
Before their Mid Season Showdown Losers' Bracket Finals against Team Liquid, TSM was seen as a team that was just below the top two entries of Team Liquid and Cloud9, but ahead of the likes of 100 Thieves, Dignitas, and Evil Geniuses.
After that same match, a sloppy 3-1 TL victory with Armao enacting revenge on his previous organization, the community bumped TSM down a bit.
As such, TSM has become a fairly easy target. At the end of Spring, TSM were good enough that the mistakes they made were easily visible and could be used as teaching tools. Meanwhile, they would occasionally have an excellent run of play off of a SwordArt roam to top lane or timely pathing from Spica.
I've previously characterized this TSM iteration as an amalgamation between a classic TSM team and a classic SwordArt team. It's a bit surprising that they're not as early-game focused as many of SwordArt's previous teams (Flash Wolves in particular) but you can see the fingerprints of TSM's past all over their game plan while the team tries to evolve.
**4. 100 Thieves (11-7)**
In a pre-pandemic world, the mid-season offseason was one of larger roster moves from myriad teams. LCS players from outside of North America would go home to visit their families, perhaps grind some lower-ping solo queue outside of NA, or even attend the Mid-Season Invitational as a spectator depending on location. Last year there was no MSI, and this year travel is still significantly trickier with quarantine orders.
"The offseason was kind of boring," Closer admitted. "I wanted to go home but I couldn't go because of all this COVID stuff happening so I wanted the season to start. But it's fine now. The scrims started. And hopefully it's going to be better."
The 100 Thieves jungler seemed happy and eager with LCS on the horizon, especially with his team having made the largest offseason moves in the LCS: signing Reapered as their head coach and picking up former Schalke 04 mid Abbedagge.
"[Abbedagge] is my old teammate," Closer said with a broad smile. "We are good friends and I think we're going to be a strong team this split."
Closer said that the mid-Spring patch change, even prior to making any roster moves, hit 100 Thieves the hardest of any LCS team. They didn't know what champions were strong and didn't adapt well. It's something that Reapered and the team will keep in mind as they make a move towards the top spot in summer.
"Working with Reapered I can definitely feel that he knows how to be a champion," Closer said. "He's a championship coach and what he brings to the team is really important. I can already feel that. We've scrimmed a really small amount but he knows how to make a good team and now we have a really good mid laner as well."
**5. Dignitas (11-7)**
"How was my offseason? Same old, same old," aphromoo shrugs with a smile. "Just playing video games. Hanging with friends. Watched MSI when I could."
I've interviewed aphromoo several times through the years, but not having interviewed him for a while made this initial answer stand out. Aphromoo is so experienced and used to responding to questions that he automatically repeats them before answering. He actively makes my job as an interviewer as painless as possible.
It's odd to think that I've been interviewing aphromoo for over five years, or that he's played in not only the LCS since its inception in 2013 but through Seasons 1 and 2 of North American League of Legends before there was a league setup. On Dignitas, he now finds himself at the helm of another mixture of young talent (FakeGod, Soligo, and Neo) with fellow veteran Dardoch to help direct the squad.
"The first thing as a veteran player, teaching a younger player, is that it's okay to make mistakes," aphromoo said. "It's on the veterans to create a space where they're allowed to make mistakes but use all the information that the veteran player has and they're probably going to fuck it up, but that's okay. At least they have an environment where we're like, 'Alright, we're going to focus on this pattern, repeat it over and over until you get it right.' That's the first thing for me, especially for bottom lane."
Aphromoo said that the younger players on Dignitas were more listeners than speakers throughout their Spring Split run, and for Summer, one of their goals as a team is to continue to foster an environment where they feel more comfortable speaking up now that the team has become a stronger unit.
"Coming into the new split, we should be a lot more gelled where people understand how everyone wants to play," he said. "And for the three young guys they're able to talk about and take control over what they want to do."
Despite generally negative community sentiment around this Dignitas lineup prior to the Lock-In Tournament, they had a string of unlikely victories in the regular season off the back of Dardoch's large champion pool and surprisingly strong teamfighting.
"Our teamfighting came pretty naturally. Everyone has hands on the team," aphromoo said. "Coming into this season, it's the same thing surprisingly for our scrims. Our teamfighting is great. We just have to take our experience from last split, apply it, and be more stable in our macro game."
Now the goal is to get the entire team on the same page in the mid game, hardly a small feat even for top teams in the world.
"We fight really well, but once we get a lead we aren't that good at snowballing it," he admitted. "We miss a lot of windows in our tempo. Beside that, usually a lot of teams have certain picks where, 'If he gets this he's going to do super well.' For us, we didn't really have that and that's what I'm looking forward to coming into this split. I think that's going to be a lot better, especially once it coincides with our fighting."
**6. Evil Geniuses (10-8)**
This LCS year has been an interesting season for North American native talent. While the background community discussion has focused heavily on the high salaries for two particular players that came to the LCS this year or potentially removing the import rule (it's not happening), there's also been a genuine upswing in teams promoting or redoubling their efforts to focus on NA talent (whether it was driven by COVID conditions or budget, or not).
Going into the summer split, Evil Geniuses promoted 17 year-old EG Prodigies bot laner Danny to the starting LCS lineup, replacing Deftly. It was a surprising roster move that flew under the radar because of ongoing MSI discussion as well as major offseason moves from 100 Thieves with their Abbedagge and Reapered signings.
"It felt really really really good to be called up from the Prodigies team to the LCS roster," Danny said. "It felt like I was preparing myself for this moment, like 'Oh instead of Academy they're going to bump me up to LCS and they did." He laughed as if he still didn't fully believe it. "It feels super super good."
Danny's career started as a Challenger player browsing the NA in-house discords, looking for a team to play with. "It was actually an operation to put five of the best players on an amateur team. So that's how I began."
As Zenith Esports, Danny's team competed in amateur tournaments until they were scouted by Evil Geniuses to form the Prodigies roster. Less than a year later, Danny is now an LCS starting bot laner.
"The amateur scene for a long time now has been disregarded as a way to get into Academy or LCS," Danny said. He highlighted the recent decision to include both amateur and Academy lineups in the Proving Grounds circuit as a major breakthrough for the NA talent pipeline. "Once amateur players get to show themselves on Riot official tournaments, people can finally see that it's not just a few outliers out there. There's a lot of people in these tournaments who can be competing with the top Academy teams."
While Danny looks to prove that he's an LCS-calibre bot laner, Evil Geniuses look to bounce back after a disappointing end to their Spring Split. After a strong start in the Lock-In Tournament, EG plateaued in Spring, always dropping at least one game per week, ending up in sixth place overall.
"We've been having a lot of success on a lot of hard engage team comps," Danny said from EG's scrims going into summer. "I think we have a lot of variety as a team. I want to not be the one person on my team that could be the reason why we're not doing well. I want to be one of the best in my team even though I'm a rookie. "
**7. Immortals (7-11)**
In his first regular season match of the year, Immortals' Revenge locked in Irelia against Alphari's Kennen. Team Liquid had just won the Lock-In Tournament and Alphari was obviously a strong part of their success. By contrast, not much, if anything, was thought of Revenge outside of an argument as to whether he was LCS ready.
Revenge won that lane and Immortals won that game.
"Relative to people's expectations, I guess you could say I performed well, or better," Revenge said. "But for myself, I know that I didn't prove myself enough. I know I may have had some good games where I was beating better players but to me it's like, I know that the level I want to be at is the top and by far the best — similar to how people look at Alphari. And I know I can be at that level. In that regard I felt unfulfilled."
One of the less-apparent aspects of Revenge's personality is this personal ambition. Anyone who watched the broadcast immediately following that first match against TL knows that he attended medical school before deciding to try and be an LCS pro, but what's not often addressed is what exactly that means. It hints as a diligent and serious nature when it comes to practice and improvement. It means that the hardest person on Revenge is not the LCS community at large, but Revenge himself.
"A lot of the times this split, I was losing to myself," Revenge said. He paused and reiterated with a small huff. "A lot. In some of the ways I failed. That might not make too much sense but sometimes I get overconfident or do things that are risky and they result in me throwing smaller leads that I've already built up which should translate eventually into bigger leads."
Revenge is one of five members of an Immortals team with interesting individual pieces in every position. Sometimes they worked phenomenally well together and upset teams that were presumably supposed to beat them. At other times, they dropped games to teams that were beneath them in the standings. As a unit, overcoming these inconsistencies will be the key for Immortals to not only remain as one of the top eight teams to survive the championship cutoff, but move further up in the standings for a stronger position. For Revenge specifically, this Summer is a chance to prove that he's one of the best.
"I want to be someone that other top laners in the league are going to have trouble facing," Revenge said. "My goal coming into the split in Spring was just that I wanted to compete with everyone because at a certain point when you keep hearing, 'Oh, is he LCS ready?' you're kind of like 'Oh, can I even compete? Who knows?' You start to doubt yourself a bit."
Once the split started, Revenge immediately shuttered those doubts in his mind. "Of course I can compete with everyone," he said. "Now I need to show that I can be at the top."
**8. FlyQuest (6-12)**
When Licorice first started for C9 in 2018, it was amidst backlash at replacing Impact with the then-unknown Cloud9 Challenger and eUnited top laner, Licorice. FlyQuest is only the second LCS organization for Licorice, who until the 2020-21 offseason, seemed like a Cloud9 staple.
"I had a really hard time figuring out what role I should fit on the team," Licorice said of his first split with FlyQuest this past spring. "When you don't have a dominant voice or someone to rally behind it can get very confusing very quickly. I also think that it's just hard to transition from one kind of player to another. You see a lot of players and they're tank players or carry players. People don't branch out very often. It's a process. I don't know if I'm going to be the big leader for FlyQuest but I am going to try to step up a bit more and bring more of what I can offer."
Licorice's individual struggles were also reflected in team struggles throughout Spring as FlyQuest lacked cohesion and a team identity. Although there were a few games where they were able to rally behind rookie mid laner Palafox or jungler Josedeodo, FlyQuest significantly underperformed compared to their own expectations and the expectations of the LCS community.
"My opinion is that the first thing to figure out [in an identity] is finding out which champions fit," Licorice said. "Because every player is going to be like, 'Oh I like this the best.' And maybe it's not actually the best but it does the best for them. Once you figure out mid lane does well on these champs and top lane does really well on these champs, you start to have comps form already and it fills out from there."
He added that this is a more organic way to do it that suits the players rather than immediately locking in a split-push composition or a front-to-back teamfighting composition that FlyQuest hopes to implement now that they know their players a bit more after a split of competition.
"Keep it more simple," Licorice said of his own goals for the upcoming split. "In the past I've focused a lot more on what people think or what analysts think of my play and I followed it really closely and tried to figure out how to make it better. Where I'm at now, I'm trying not to care as much."
**9. Counter Logic Gaming (5-13)**
This Summer marks the second year that veteran jungler Broxah has been plagued by visa issues in Spring and has only had the Summer to be with his team from the start of the split.
"It makes a really big difference," Broxah said with deadpan delivery but a wide smile. "I'd say this year compared to last year I have a bit more experience being in the situation so from a mental standpoint I wasn't as stressed after arriving." Laughing, he said that he at least had a better game plan for how he was going to deal with it upon arriving in Los Angeles, having already experienced it with Team Liquid the previous year.
"One of our main focus points this past offseason was to get to know each other in and outside the game," Broxah said. "So we've been spending a lot of time scrimming. We played some board games and just got to know each other better." Towards the end of Spring, Broxah added, they all played well individually, but didn't always play well as a team and it was reflected in their inconsistencies. That's the primary focal point for CLG moving forward, especially since the odds are already stacked significantly against them due to the standings carrying over.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing for Broxah, CLG, and the beleaguered CLG fanbase, was that once their starting lineup came together, they looked significantly improved and their failings were made more devastating due to strong early starts and narrow losses.
"Even before I arrived the team was really solid Level 1," Broxah said. "They had some really solid early games and it just came down to closing out the game. In the mid and late game where we had to coordinate as a team and everything had to come together, usually we'd fall apart."
"We're not going to catch up to a team like C9 right away," he added. But I think being given more time, we will be able to catch up. That's what happened on Team Liquid."
**10. Golden Guardians (3-15)**
Of the two Collegiate players promoted to Golden Guardians from Maryville University, jungler Iconic is the one who survived the cut into Summer. He returned from visiting his family Davenport, Iowa to participate in Golden Guardians' mid-season tryouts for all positions and quietly emerged the victor, holding onto his spot for Summer.
"They tried out people from the Academy team for every position and then for certain positions they also tried out people outside of the team," Iconic said. "It was fun." After an entire LCS split, Iconic feels like he's improved a lot, particularly when it comes to working with his team.
Iconic is unassuming, and agreeable. He speaks straightforwardly, which is a good quality to have in a developing jungler, given how frequently the role itself changes and how it's such a focal point for a team's early game. When talking about Golden Guardians setting realistic expectations for the year, he simply said that he hopes to win as many matches as he can.
"In terms of practice and stuff like that, it was pretty similar," Iconic said of making the jump straight from collegiate League of Legends to professional LCS play. "In college there's a lot more you have to deal with outside of League of Legends. Scrims are basically run the same and you're just playing against better people."
