C9 vs NWS Game 1

Pick / Ban phase

C9 1st Ban Thresh: Taking away some of the pressure that Thresh allows his junglers to put on the side of the map he’s on. Thresh creates picks very easily with hooks mid-late game and throughout the entire game allows NJWS to make the aggressive plays they want to in order to secure kills. This is in hindsight, a step towards the split push comp that C9 wants to run, but it’s not obvious by this point.

NWS 1st Ban Maokai: Aimed towards Balls, Maokai is an extremely strong team fight oriented champion with his ult, and has less of a range problem than Alistar due to saplings. NWS thrives on team fights and is confident they can beat C9 in them, so taking this away makes perfect sense.

C9 2nd Ban Lee Sin: One of Watches higher impact junglers, this takes some of the kill pressure off the lanes in the early game. C9 aims in their Pick/Bans to survive and gain a small lead over NWS in the early-mid game and hopefully win with that momentum.

NWS 2nd Ban Zilean: Banned for the same reasons that Maokai was in that he has a very strong presence in team fights and also carries a strong early game with his Time Bombs. As NWS is on purple side, leaving Zil open would be disastrous for them, but this creates an opening for Hai to pick his comfort Zed with Zilean out of the way.

C9 3rd Ban Ryze: Very strong flex pick that neither Hai/Balls play very comfortably. C9 is aiming to take away one of the lane bullies available to Save at the top lane, we see later on in the picks how much C9 prioritizes the early-midgame picks as they try to snowball the game in their favor and bleed NJWS out.

NWS 3rd Ban Alistar: Similar to Maokai, high team fight impact and has a very strong laning phase due to his ability to auto attack after a W in this patch. NWS want to focus on shutting down Balls as he has somewhat of a limited champion pool, this almost guarantees that he’ll be playing Rumble however.

C9 1st Pick Zed: With Zilean out of the way, Hai is free to pick up his comfort Zed pick, showing he is clearly able to keep up in CS and put out presence in the game with it. This is obviously a take away from NWS at the same time since Ggoong is strong on him.

NWS 1st and 2nd Pick Nami and Elise: No need to reveal solo lanes here and NWS wants to pick up a strong jungler to shut down C9’s top lane again. Nami is a very strong lane bully from the support role, and this is also somewhat of a take away from C9 since Nami/Rumble is a strong combination for getting Rumble through the laning phase. So it’s highly possible that both picks here reflect NWS’s goal of shutting down the Rumble pick they’ve set up with the bans. This is also a take away from Meteos

C9 2nd and 3rd pick Khazix and Corki: C9 not wanting to reveal their top lane quite just yet either (It’s pretty obvious at this point though.), they pick up Khazix for Meteos of course, one of his more comfortable champions, and given that Elise has been taken away they want to secure Khazix in the odd case NWS picks him up as a laner. Corki being the strong lane bully ADC with good poke that C9 wants here, as we see later on it becomes a valuable asset in stopping recalls.

NWS 3rd and 4th pick Ahri and Kayle: NWS want’s to create a very strong back line with these two picks, predicting very well actually that Lemon will pick up Janna and Balls the obvious Rumble pick up. We’ve seen that Kayle can beat out Rumble in a 1v1 previously with proper usage of her Intervention, this also serves as a team fight tool to nullify Zed’s Death Mark damage. Ahri is easily able to reposition to avoid Rumble ulti and we can see after looking at NWS’s team comp that the entire pick ban phase was really aimed at baiting out the Rumble pick and defeating it.

C9 4th and 5th pick Janna and Rumble: NWS has read them like a book, and their team comp is designed to completely destroy them in team fights, where Rumble shines. C9 picks up Rumble as Balls comfort champ and is confident I guess that they can win the team fights, with the majority of top lane meta champions banned out, he doesn’t have much left to pick anyways.

Overview and Thoughts

While I still hate the Elise picks, the Korean teams are actually making them look good. The value behind Elise is her ability to safely shut down the enemy top laners, which is why we see her being picked up a lot against Rumble. Rengar risks too much if he goes that deep early game into the enemy side, and Jarvan commits very heavily when he uses his CC, opposed to Elise who can throw out cocoons from safety and retreat if need be. NWS has a team fight advantage here with Kayle and Twitch able to pump out large amounts of damage in an area with relative safely due to C9’s lack of hard CC to deal with an interventioned target. On the flip side however, C9 has a split push advantage due to the need for Kayle to stay with the team and no one else on NWS able to truly 1v1 a late game Zed. Khazix does out scale Elise, but NWS’s team composition allows them to blow up anyone that comes within firing range of their backline. In the end this game is decided by C9 forcing NWS to leave their base to contest baron, and then Hai split pushing down an inhibitor, after that it just becomes a slow methodical game where C9 accumulates their positional advantage until they can close it out. NWS definitely had the superior pick/ban phase however and played team fights well. Zefa made some mistakes and tried too hard to commit to certain fights which allowed C9 to catch up.

C9 vs NWS Game 2

Pick / Ban phase

NWS 1st Ban Rumble: Very obvious first ban, Balls has been performing well on Rumble and he seems to suffer from a champion pool issue along with Hai

C9 1st Ban Thresh: See Game 1 Thresh Ban

NWS 2nd Ban Syndra: Direct strike at Hai’s champion pool, we’ve seen the Rumble/Syndra ban create a lot of pressure for C9 on purple side due to their loss of comfort champions and inability to exert pressure on their lanes otherwise. Had C9 banned Zilean at any point, NJWS would have picked up Zed first, and had they not, it wouldn’t have been safe to pick Zed into Zilean.

C9 2nd Ban Ryze: See Game 1 Ryze Ban

NWS 3rd Ban Alistar: Standard ban

C9 3rd Ban Maokai: Standard return ban. It is possible C9 could have left Maokai open and tried to bait NWS into the pick, however with Maokai, NWS may have had a strong enough front line to just dive 5v4 and very quickly decide the pace of the game.

NWS 1st Pick Zilean: Flex pick for NWS, takes this away from C9 but more importantly, prevents C9 from blind picking Zed into him. Traditionally Zilean does very well against assassins due to being able to nullify their burst with his ultimate. Not too much more to be said, theres a good reason he has such a high ban rate with how much team fight presence he has and early game pressure he applies to lanes.

C9 1st and 2nd Pick Nidalee + Corki: With three of Balls champs banned out, C9 picks up Nidalee to play the split push game which worked very well for them in the earlier match. Nidalee is also super strong in the laning phase which Balls has been struggling with at times. The Corki pick also reflects this in C9’s game plan as they’ve realized how important it is that they have strong laners in order to not fall too far behind early on. Corki gives C9 some safe wave clear as well, should they pick poor wave clear out of their jungler and mid lane. I feel like C9 was hasty in this pick up, as they still had option to pick their support and could have prioritized a jungle pick by taking away Watch’s comfort Lee Sin. C9 could have also picked up Lucian here over Corki, but they made the decision based on Corki’s superior ability at preventing recalls with his rockets. While Save held the potential AP nidalee top pick as he showed in the Korean Regional finals, they saved it till last pick on blue side, so it’s possible C9 didn’t want to risk going up against this unknown pick (Ironically they ended up playing against his top lane Kassadin anyways which was comparatively a worse deal for them.)

NWS 2nd and 3rd Pick Lee Sin + Zed: This is an interesting pick up from NWS, while revealing their Zilean flex pick as support they take away Zed from Hai at the same time. With Syndra banned, Hai has limited options left for strong aggressive laner that he’s comfortable with. Lee Sin is Watch’s comfort jungler and a counter to a potential Talon counter pick to the Zed pick that we witnessed from NWS themselves earlier. Overall these were very smart picks, setting NWS up to fight well in the early-mid game, showing that they have no intention of relying on late game scaling to win.

C9 3rd and 4th Pick Janna + Elise: Janna a good pick here, able to interrupt Sonic Wave from Lee sin and help peel Zed off the backline, C9 recognizes the threat in the previous two picks and doesn’t want to get steam rolled in team fights. Their goal is to stall out team fights and as such, Janna works here very well and also solidifies C9’s bot lane having a huge amount of early game presence. Her shields help neutralize support Zileans early game harass, and her passive move speed also helps C9 manuever around and reposition more easily to stall for the split push.

NWS 4th and 5th Pick Lucian + Kassadin: Save’s rather unique Kassadin top is NWS’s response to C9’s split push. Zed, Lucian and Lee Sin are all significant sources of physical damage, forcing C9 to build armor to last longer in team fights, while Kassadin is able to build full AP and absolutely demolish anyone he comes across due to the lack of magic resistance. With Rift Walk, he can chase and punish split pushing very well, making the Nidalee pick rather ineffective. This pick is not without a weakness however as Kassadin suffers from an atrocious laning phase and requires several items to get going. Lucian is a pick not only in response to potential lane aggression from C9, but more important for his tower pushing speed. It is of critical importance that NWS is able to quickly take down objectives and then rotate properly to avoid losing objectives for free, Lucians passive and slipperiness with his Relentless Pursuit allows this easily.

C9 5th Pick Talon : Partially highlights Hai’s poor champion pool, which I think at this point is somewhat of a horse every analyst alive is beating to death; Talon is the skill dependent counter pick to Zed, we’ve seen that Talon can use his own ultimate in order to avoid the majority of damage Zed can potentially put on him with his Death Mark, and trade rather well with him in the laning phase. This also however confirms without a doubt that C9 will be playing the split push game and absolutely nothing else. They get crushed in every time fight as witnessed, but with Talon a viable secondary split pusher is born as he becomes the only champion able to 1v1 Kassadin with any hope of victory.

Overview and thoughts

Had they not picked Zilean first, C9 could have picked up the strong team fight oriented composition which arguably is NWS’s strength over C9, spelling defeat for them. Corki and Lucian were both acceptable first picks however Nidalee should have been kept for the picks afterwards. Denying Lee Sin instead of picking Nidalee would have potentially changed the outcome of the early-midgame significantly as Watch would not have been able to shut down Hai as effectively as he had, and with slightly less of a disadvantage, C9 may have been able to take a 2nd inhibitor and bleed NWS out. Overall I would give the edge to NWS for this Pick/Ban phase, C9 has shown quite clearly that they have difficulties with that on purple side. Janna + Nidalee has demonstrated that similar to the Nami/Rumble case, with a shield and a heal they have an easy time surviving a 2v2 match up. On top of this NWS underestimates the auto attack damage from Janna/Nidalee and ends up taking a huge chunk of damage, preventing a lot of the potential harass they could have put out more safely. The turning point of this game is when Hai makes a critical error by choosing not to take an inhibitor and instead attempting to cut off some members of NJWS. He’s easily killed and NJWS is able to finally regain some ground as Kassadin begins to hit a critical amount of AP, being able to 1v1 every single member of C9 with ease.

Conclusions

C9 has shown that they were able to take sub optimal pick/ban phases and win games or make them very close through in game strategy. NJWS has shown that they are a stronger at team fighting, and their pick/bans have allowed them to be so in their games, however they are hesitant in making decisions on how to deal with split pushing and that was a weak point C9 exploited. In the end though, with one mistake from C9 they fell apart and I can’t help but think that they only attempted that bush gank at top lane in game 2 out of desperation and had mentally accepted defeat by that point. C9 needs to figure out how to deal with their purple side woes, or they will undoubtedly fall in the group stages, either losing a 5th game or giving a team a total of 3 games to figure out how to beat C9 on blue. Overall I am very impressed with their shot calling and in game strategy however, and I would rank C9 solidly at rank #1 NA if they could fix their champion select issues.

–Louis on League