The Chinese region, the consensus pick for the strongest overall region heading into the tournament, is out of the 2015 World Championships after EDward Gaming's disappointing loss that came in the form of a Fnatic sweep. The best-of-five sweep marked the end of a disastrous tournament for China, who came into the competition with dreams of an all-Chinese Summoner's Cup final.

The LPL as a whole finished Worlds with an overall record of 8-13, and with EDG's loss to Fnatic, all three Chinese squads will leave Europe with respective losing records. LGD Gaming came into the World Championships as the odds-on favorite to make at least the finals with their raw talent and LPL summer championship, but they face-planted as soon as Worlds began, dropping their first four games before slightly salvaging their trip with wins in their final matches against Origen and Team SoloMid. Invictus Gaming were no better, meandering through the group stage and getting eliminated with the same 2-4 scoreline as LGD Gaming. All the hopes of a perceived superpower region were then handed down to EDward Gaming, the Mid-Season Invitational champions and the winners of the spring season of the LPL.

While EDG's 4-5 record will look better than either of their counterparts, they were no better than LGD and iG when it came to how they play and drafted. EDG got the luck of the draw and were put into a group that was made for them to look at least somewhat good coming out of it. They got stomped by SK Telecom T1, but that's SKT T1, a team that is still undefeated following their one-sided romp of the Taiwanese champions, ahq e-Sports Club, in the quarterfinals. Their four victories came from H2k Gaming, the second seeded European team that would have most likely been the third seed if Origen had been playing in the LCS since the spring season, and the Bangkok Titans, the weakest team in the entire tournament.

EDG got out of the group stage with a 4-2 record, yet were close to losing to the Titans in a game that would have gone down as the biggest upset in League of Legends' history. But, as MSI champions and one of the best teams throughout the year, they were given the benefit of the doubt — give them a pass on a weak showing in the opening stage and expect more when they played in their element of a best-of-five in the knockout rounds.

Now that EDG are officially eliminated from the tournament, closing the door on China's 2015 Worlds, we can now assess what went wrong. In short — all the teams seemed completely unaware of the changes in the meta, which shouldn't be the case seeing as they were the only region to play in a similar patch during their Chinese Regional Finals with the juggernauts implemented. EDG were one of the smartest teams in domestic play this year, controlling the map and teamfighting as well as any team in the world, but that was all gone in this tournament and in their quarterfinal match against Fnatic. When they were given Mordekaiser in the second game that would eventually be remade due to a Gragas bug, they did nothing with their early-game composition and were on a course to let Fnatic scale their hyper late-game composition into its ultimate form.

Every time you expected EDG to start playing seriously and revert back to their MSI championship form, they didn't. They were slow on the uptake, lost the mid-game teamfights to Fnatic you'd expect them to excel in, and were systematically crushed by a stronger, faster, smarter, and more synchronized team that had similar issues in the group stages. Fnatic, if you forgot, didn't have the easiest time getting to the quarterfinals, needing a sweep on the final day of Group B's group stage to dig themselves out of a 1-2 hole they set themselves in during their first week of play.

Fnatic were like EDG in the first week of games. They had one strong performance against iG to kickoff the tournament — and that was it. From there, their next two games were, plain and simple, humiliating. They fell into ahq's trap of playing like it was a solo queue game with sprawling brawls across the map instead of playing like the intelligent team they were at the end of the summer European split and lost after having a lead. Fnatic then ended their abysmal first week of games by losing to Cloud9 in a match where they played into their opponent's hands, allowing them to successfully run their fast pushing turret they'd already used to pick up two wins the days before. Atop of letting them have their preferred strategy, they picked cockily into it, letting Huni choose Yasuo into a losing matchup against Balls' Darius and paying for it later in the game when the lambasted North American top laner ended Fnatic's week with a Pentakill.

The difference between EDG and Fnatic is how they adapted from their so-so opening showings. EDward Gaming didn't change throughout the entire tournament, keeping at the same level they entered the World Championship. They did go to the bench and pluck former starter Koro1 from his purgatory to let him play against Huni and Fnatic in the top eight, but just like how LGD switched out Acorn for Flame, a single player wasn't going to save EDG. The team appeared disjointed all Worlds long expect for a few key moments where their in-form teamfighting shone through their glaring mistakes — coming back against the Bangkok Titans from down 6k gold with their stellar coordination in fighting together.

Playing with shoddy communication and having weak drafts might be good enough to beat teams like the Titans that you can comeback against through pure talent alone, but Fnatic are a world-class, Summoner's Cup winner level of a team. When Fnatic got ahead of EDG in the second (and the remake of the second game) and the third games of the series, they didn't hesitate around objectives or play scared. As they did in their perfect regular split of this year's European LCS, Fnatic got a lead, made confident calls around the Baron pit, and then went for the jugular while their opponent was on the back foot.

YellOwStaR, the captain and shot caller of the team, took command when the games were at their most crucial points and created the plays that let Rekkles, Huni, and Febiven take leads over their peers. Huni, while still being a bit too reckless at times, was still able to snowball his Riven in the remake of the second game, getting ahead early and never letting Koro1 get any stability in the matchup. Febiven continued his amazing rookie performance at Worlds, going 14/1/12 in the first two games against PawN and EDG in the series. And Rekkles, who, ironically, gets criticized for not being reckless enough, was the one to bring his team to their first semifinals since 2013, tearing through EDG's funky composition of Kassadin and Sivir with a scoreline of 9/1/6 on the hyper carry Jinx.

Fnatic looked good — really good, in fact — but that doesn't mean they can start planning their trip to Berlin. EDward Gaming, for all their defining moments throughout the year, had a terrible tournament, never getting it together even with over a week of preparation from their last group stage game to tonight's series. EDG were blown out just as easily or even worse by SKT T1, and they were on the ropes from losing to Bangkok Titans before the International Wildcard team's inexperience knocked them back to earth. Either KT Rolster or the KOO Tigers, the two teams that will play tomorrow for the opportunity to face Fnatic in Brussels for a spot in the Summoner's Cup Final, have already proven this tournament that they can draft and execute their plans better than EDward Gaming.

The Chinese teams will now head home to wonder what went wrong and what they can do in 2016 to turn around their catastrophic results this World Championship.

Fnatic, however, will sit down and watch tomorrow as they find out which team they'll be pitted up against for the shot at the game's richest prize.

The LPL squads didn't adapt in time or change their ways, resulting them in going home early. Fnatic did, tuned up their issues that plagued them in the first three games, and were rewarded with a second chance that they haven't let go to waste: winning their last six games and only six more away from lifting the Summoner's Cup in their home region of Europe.

Tyler "Fionn" Erzberger is a staff writer for The Score eSports. You can follow him on Twitter.