During the Spring playoffs, G2 Esports fell to the lower bracket after losing 3-1 to Fnatic in the first round, but recovered with successive 3-0 wins over Misfits Gaming, Fnatic, and Rogue to become LEC champions once again.
Even though Rogue were considered the favorites heading into the finals, G2 were silently confident of their chances to win their first domestic title since 2020.
On talk show Summoning Insight, hosted by Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles and Duncan “Thorin” Shields, G2 Esports head coach Dylan Falco revealed how the team deciphered and targeted Rogue’s weaknesses in drafts during the final.
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G2 Esports were Rogue’s main scrim partners, says Dylan Falco, and that gave them an upper hand
G2 Esports and Rogue ended up being primary scrim partners because they were on different sides of the playoff bracket, said Dylan. This gave G2 valuable data about Rogue’s tendencies.
“Over 80-90% of their wins against us were with a very strong ranged support counter pick, or tank jungler, like Jarvan or Hecarim,” Falco said.
Thus, G2’s plan going into the final was to deny Kim “Malrang” Geun-seong his favored picks. The Korean jungler has been an integral part of Rogue’s run to the finals, utilizing a lane-focused jungling style that gave his team leads in the early game.
Shutting him down meant denying Rogue’s early game advantages.
G2 Esports ended up banning Hecarim in all three games of the finals. On red side, they then picked Jarvan in the first rotation, which narrowed Malrang’s champion pool even further. Volibear was another tank jungler that Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski could have used as well.
In the current meta, champions like Jarvan and Ahri provide high value with their crowd control and gap closing skills, allowing G2 to be proactive in the early game.
More importantly, drafting this way gave Jankos and star mid laner Rasmus “caPs” Borregaard Winther plenty of agency. In game one, Jankos on Jarvan took an unusual jungle path to appear in the mid lane from bot side even though he started his clear from the blue buff.
Rogue’s wards only covered the top jungle entrance as they expected him to path top side, making Jankos’ gank on Emil “Larssen” Larsson’s Lucian unpredictable and successful.
Prioritizing a strong mid-jungle duo, however, meant giving up something else in the draft to Rogue. Thus, G2 had to contend with drafting a stable bot lane against a likely Aphelios first pick.
They scouted Markos “Comp” Stamkopoulos and found that Miss Fortune and Xayah are both not part of his champion pool, two marksmen that counter Aphelios. Miss Fortune and Xayah have a 56.49% and 54.37% win rate against Aphelios respectively in high Elo solo queue, according to U.GG.
“We could leverage that to put very little draft resources into bot lane,” Falco said. As such, G2 were open to pick either Miss Fortune or Xayah later in the draft.
The draft strategy narrowed Rogue’s effective champion pool while maximizing G2’s core players’ proactivity, giving the European organization the win and a ticket to the Mid-Season Invitational 2022.
You can watch the full Summoning Insight episode with Dylan Falco here.
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