Excitement of the Summer Split

This past week the LCS Summer Split started in North America and boy was it exciting. With all the new teams and roster changes everyone knew it would be great but this first week was on another level. Opening up with a super week was a great decision on Riot’s part and really multiplied the excitement and helped put this season on the next level. 

There were a few noteworthy roster changes from North America that will be interesting experiments to watch. HotshotGG steps back from CLG, Nientonsoh takes over the top lane and Bigfatlp moves into the jungle. Edward moved from Gambit into the Curse bottom lane. This also brings up another question about player movement in the LCS and how it affects the teams, but that’s something for another post.

The CLG experiment will be very interesting to watch through the entire season especially since the team was put into relegation last split. Picking up Nien was an interesting move for the team since there were other players available for the top lane. Last split both Team MRN and Complexity were eliminated which meant the availability of veterans MegaZero and Nick Wu. From watching the games Nien doesn’t exactly look uncomfortable in top lane but he doesn’t look confident either. The struggles in lane phase don’t transition into the later game, Nien is able to team fight effectively purely based off his raw skills. This is going to an interesting thing to watch and see how long it takes for them to really work together with this new team makeup. The potential is there for this to be a homerun but at the same time I think it will make them a top four team. 

Now we come to curse and how this could cause the team to go down in a blaze of glory. Edward is a fantastic aggressive support player, former EU Allstar, who is now playing with Curse. The interesting part of this is that Cop has never been a very aggressive ADC so it just feels like it is an odd match. The different play styles could end up balancing each other out and being great. In week one it just didn’t look like they were a great combination. This could end up helping to break Cop out of this shell of passivity and make him one of the top ADCs in the NA scene. The other questionable issue is the language barrier, although this is a much smaller issue as he just needs to understand since he isn’t the shot-caller. 

Both of these problems should improve with more as the teams practice together and scrim other teams. This continues to show the evolution of the NA scene and hopefully create a good showing for the World Championships.