MVP Blue - can they finally perform in the OGN stage?

Cheonju (Top)

Sense (Jungle)

Easyhoon (Mid)

Deft (ADC)

FLahm(Supp)

- 9th ~ 16th OGN Champions Summer (0W 3L in group)

- 9th ~ 12th OGN Champions Winter (0W 2T 4L last in group)

- 4th NLB Winter (L 2:3 Najin Shield)

Team Review

Unlike their sister team MVP Ozone, team MVP Blue has never had success in the OGN Champions tournament. They finished last in the group stage the two times they have competed in the tournament and they have always been looked at as one of the weakest team in the competition. After performing a complete overhaul of the roster during the offseason which saw Sunchip leave off to the army, Kangqui going into broadcasting and the rest of the members being picked up by KT, CJ and Najin the MVP Blue team picked up a trio of players from the former GSG roster. Along with Cheonju, Easyhoon and Sense, the MVP team also picked up the young and talented AD Deft and a former RoMG member F.Lahm to complete the roster. With a strong showing in the OGN Club masters tournament and in the Battle Royale, team MVP Blue is definitely ready to show the world that they can compete with the best teams in Korea.

Team Strengthes

Alex Ichhoon

When people talk about the best mid laners in Korea, you can never leave off Easyhoon on that list. If you brought his name up 6 months ago, people would have questioned your sanity but since then he has become the hottest mid player in the Korean LoL scene. Arguably the player who has improved the most since the start of last season, Easyhoon has shown us that on any given night, he can carry his team to victory. With his plethora of champion choices he can always keep the opponent guessing as to which champion he would use in that game and due to his potent ability on his signature heroes Karthus, Ryze and TF he may force the opponent to use their ban or pick champions like Ryze to prevent Easyhoon access to these champions. Aside from his solid fundamentals, what Easyhoon really excels in is his roaming timing. Whether it would be roaming as TF, using Teleport or just walking, you can always count on Easyhoon to be at the right place at the right time as either a backup to dives or if they themselves are executing a dive. It is no coincidence that Easyhoon was involved in almost 70% of his team’s kills since the start of OGN winter.

Most creative minds in the scene

Everyone remembers the last game of NLB winter championships when the former GSG team went for the famous 4 mid heimerdinger strategy to win however the one thing that most people don’t realize is the ingenious pick ban strategy which allowed GSG to be able to pull off this composition. GSG was blue side and during the pick ban stage they did not ban Shen, TF and Khazix while banning Nunu. With their first pick they took TF while CJ Entus picked up Shen and Khazix. With the next picks GSG took Caitlyn (surprise pick given Nunu ban) and Olaf while CJ picked up Ez and Sona. With their final picks GSG picked up Blitz and Heimer completing their strategy while CJ picked up Cho and the rest is history. The amazing preparation on GSG’s part was that they led CJ Entus to pick “OP” champions who were very bad at clearing minions in the early game (Shen pre sunfire cape, Kha pre W evolution, Ez) while picking up Olaf (one of the best lane pushers) early as the solo laner. With a terrible composition to stop the amazing push ability provided by the Cait Heimer combo along with picks from the yordle trap blitz pull combo, GSG was able to push mid all the way and end the game by the 19th minute mark. This game was a testament to the former GSG members’ ability to analyze their opponents and execute a strategy flawlessly and one has to believe that this ability will be useful for the new MVP Blue team to survive in their group. Even if MVP Blue don’t do all that well in the group, I have no doubts that they can be a hellish team to prepare against due to the sheer brilliance of their strategies.

Video credits to ESL Asia

Team weaknesses

Cheonju

Cheonju is probably best known as being the best rumble in Korea. While his rumble in undeniably top tier, when that champion is taken away from him his performance level drops noticeably. One of the reasons for this is that Cheonju has a limited Champion pool which makes it easy for the opposition to prepare a counter against him. Adding to the fact that Cheonju mainly played ADC in the NLB doesn’t help with the fact that Cheonju could be singled out as the weakness of MVP Blue. The encouraging sign is that recently, Cheonju has shown that his champion pool has expanded and that he can play champions other than rumble at a high level as well but it still remains to be seen if he can keep up this level of performance when the stakes are higher than before.

The Ups and Downs of Sense

Sense aka Solo aka ChuNyang was probably considered the best player on the former RoMG team when they beat Azubu Frost during the Summer season. There were quite a bit of rumours that several pro organizations were looking into employing his services for their team. Ultimately, he finally became pro with the current MVP team. There may be reasons why some teams decided to stay away from Sense including his well-documented stage fright (when he first competed in a lan tournament) but if I had to pick the main reasons why I would have stayed away from Sense compared to other junglers, it’s his consistency and decision making. On a good day, Sense can play very solid and be a play making force with his arsenal of favourite champions like Vi and Elise but on a bad day he simply becomes a feeder on this team and his team proceeds to get dominated by the opposition. The root cause for this consistency issues is that he generally lacks top tier decision making skills especially when he decides to initiate in a fight. Often you would see Sense engaging in a fight only to have the other team and he dies. Other times you could see Sense engaging in teamfights which ends disadvantageously for his team. These issues arise from several reasons but the oddity in his pathing and his positioning before entering team fights is usually the cause of his downfall. Now that he’s in a team house and is on a professional training regimen, it will be interesting to see how many of these problems he can fix through studying his own match replays and figuring out his playing habits.

The inexperienced bot lane

When you look at the bottom lane for MVP Blue, they are the only team to feature a bot lane duo without a competitive LoL career. While this may not seem like a big issue considering they showed some great plays during the off-season, they showed some flaws in their playing as well. In their matches Deft demonstrated that he possessed mechanical skills which may be able to rival his teammate imp’s but more often than not he showed overly excessive plays which sometimes led to great kills but sometime also led him to his death. If the other teams pick up on his bloodlust tendencies, then there could be situations where he gets purposely baited by the opposing team. FLahm the support, showed that he is a good Lulu player and one day he may be able to challenge Lustboy as the best Lulu in the world but in his current state, he showed one fatal flaw which prevents him from being in that discussion. FLahm would often utilize skills at the wrong timings in a team fight situation. For a support player, this could mean the difference between saving someone or letting them die. The other problem that both of these players exhibited was that when they were forced to anything other than Lulu or Ezreal, their effectiveness decreased slightly. However considering that they are new to the professional LoL scene (especially Deft who is really young), this duo definitely has the room to improve.

Key Player: Sense (Jungler)

With Cheonju not being quite at the top tier level, MVP Blue will need Sense to perform at his highest level every night. MVP Blue is a team that desperately needs a solid tank line so that their carries can deal the most amount of damage possible in team fight situations. If a strong tank line can be established then it should tremendously improve MVP Blue subpar team fighting ability.

Team expectations

While it’s hard to overlook MVP Blue’s impressive performances in the off-season, it was basically all on online tournaments and as Najin Shield has shown us in the past online achievements do not equate to lan success. With question marks across the board, this team could easily end up being a Easyhoon one man team. If MVP Blue were on the other group I could have seen them advancing but in this group they will have trouble escaping last place.