Do or Die — FNC vs XL Preview
26 August — by League Analyst
Today is the day we all have waited for. The LEC roadshow is back and is heading to Sweden, where Europe's best teams will take to the stage and battle it out for the title. The match we’re diving into today is happening in the losers’ bracket on Sunday. It’s Fnatic and Excel who will taste battle in a must win match to advance to the 2nd round.
Going into the series, I would consider Fnatic heavy favorites. But even with that being said, it’s hard not to be a bit scared for them. It’s no secret that the team has looked shaky this year. Despite having such a huge amount of talent on the team, this roster can’t seem to stop stumbling over themselves. Draft “errors”, poor macro decisions and bad individual plays, those are the common issues that tends to get brought up when discussing Fnatic’s 2022 season. So what do they need to do now?
Against a team like Excel, Fnatic should focus on dumbing the game down. The difference in raw firepower is undeniably huge between these two teams and it would be difficult to rank any of Excel’s players above their Fnatic counterparts. But besides that elementary observation, it’s also a method of preventing the issues that keep showing up in Fnatic games.
Below, we have three drafts from the summer split that resulted in Fnatic losses. We’ll look at them separately:
N1: Caitlyn/Morgana, a classic botlane combination. It is very tempo reliant, but has one of the strongest siege setups in the game. The gameplan comes down to rotating the duo around the map and taking down towers as quickly as possible. When paired with the Azir, this composition is the ultimate tower taking team.
On paper it makes sense and Fnatic managed to take a 3–0 tower lead, playing to their wincondition. But then the fumble came as they decided to take a skirmish in the enemy jungle. The big weakness of these styles of compositions is that they require setup. Caitlyn wants to set up her traps and Azir can defend flanks with his sun disc. In the narrow jungle corridors, this composition gets completely run over by champions like Gnar and Amumu. It’s a clear-cut missexecution that swung the tempo of the game in Misfits favor.
N2: Vex as a counter to Taliyah. On paper a strong matchup, but on his first professional game on the champion, Humanoid got completely shut down. This is obviously not a draft “error”, but I would argue that it is one of many examples of Fnatic overcomplicating things for no reason. Instead of trying new counters to the meta champions, a less volatile option is to rely on comfort and setups that the team has used before and feel comfortable playing around.
N3: Ezreal/Pyke as a counter to Yuumi/Aphelios. Another solid laning matchup. But leaving the cat open comes with a heavy price; the second you start fumbling, it goes south very quickly. So as the team that struggle to keep it clean, is it really a wise decision?
What I want to spotlight with these examples is how poorly Fnatic has performed when trying these “fancy” counterpicks and non-meta compositions. Kayle, Fiora, Jayce and Corki are some of the other picks that haven’t worked out in summer. As I’ve already pointed out, it’s not necessarily abut the strategies being bad. But based on the gameplay that we’ve seen so far this year, I’d argue that keeping it simple might be for the best.
If we return to the series at hand and look at the two teams, it’s looking like botlane will be the center of attention. Will it be the story of the scaling Sivir/Zeri or the aggressive Draven/Kalista/Lucian lanes? From Fnatic’s point of view, both approaches should fit their wheelhouse just fine. Maybe they focus on finding edges elsewhere, knowing that Upset has been performing solidly all split long.
There are a lot of questions yet to be answered, which makes the series all the more interesting. Can Fnatic shut down Nukeduck’s dynamic and roam heavy style and free up their carries to unleash with full force? Another big question on my mind is if Humanoid can pull off his lane dominant style without overextending and opening himself up for ganks. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, anything can happen in the knockout stage and we’ll cover the journey from start to finish!
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