The Road to Worlds Begin— Week 1
21 June— by League Analyst
The LEC is back once again and the grind for Worlds has begun for Europe's 10 teams. For Fnatic, it’s also a chance to bounce back after their disappointing exit out of the Spring playoffs, where they lost 0–3 to G2 Esports.
As per usual, this first week of play consists of three games instead of the usual two. Fnatic’s first matchup in the Summer split was against the Spring split runner up Rouge. In draft, Fnatic unsurprisingly crafted a comp around their star ADC in Upset, giving him the Draven matchup into Comp’s Kalista.
In the game, Razork managed to find the plays necessary to snowball the volatile botlane. After some back and forth, Fnatic ran away with the game and closed out in a rather dominant fashion. Wunder ended the game 7–0–6, a great showing despite not having the flashiest of games.
In Saturday's game, the Draven was run once again, now against Excel. But some poor early positioning by Hylissang and an arguably worse draft resulted in Excel handing Fnatic their first defeat of the split.
In their final game of the week, the early game drafts were tossed out the window. Instead, Fnatic went full resident sleeper with both Kayle and Corki. SK responded in a similar fashion, and it looked like we were in for very little action.
SK found an early kill advantage in the game, but the gold stayed relatively even for the first ten minutes. But after winning a fight in the river and securing the baron, Fnatic took full control of the game and closed out after just 26 minutes.
In the first superweek, Fnatic came out with a 2–1 score. It’s still rather unclear what approach the team will have in regard to the meta, and we’ve seen two very different styles in these first three games. The expectation was that the game would slow down after the recent patch changes, but the results so are pointing towards something else. What comes next for Fnatic is hard to say, we’ll simply have to wait until next week when they face off against MAD Lions and Team BDS.
There is obviously much to work on, but the split has only just begun. Teams are still figuring out the meta after the durability changes, and I’m sure we’ll get a clearer view of the teams’ strengths after a couple of weeks.
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