J Team (JT) originally came into the LMS in 2016 as the successor of the Taipei Assassins — the organization that once hoisted the Summoner’s Cup back in 2012. Despite that, J Team has once again failed to make it to the World Championship after falling in the 2018 LMS Regional Qualifier.

J Team struggled for most of 2018 with its talent-stacked roster, but still made it further than it ever had in the Regional Qualifier with a brief burst of teamwork and careless ingenuity. Even so, that burst didn’t go any further: J Team was promptly swatted down 3-0 in the final by G-Rex and will miss the World Championship for the third year in a row.

J Team started the 2018 LMS Season with more hope than most teams. Hung “Karsa” Hau-Hsuan had just departed Flash Wolves and ahq’s veterans were finally taking a break. It felt like the LMS title was wide open for J Team — who made firm upgrades at AD carry and Support with the acquisition of Raise Gaming’s Chen “LilV” Chin-Han and Legend Dragon’s Wang “Ysera” Tsung-Chih. J Team was still filling in players at Jungle, but it was the highest level of talent the team had amassed yet.

Unfortunately, the acquisitions didn’t quite pan out in Spring or 2018 in general. LilV was a star late-game carry on Raise Gaming, but consistently made early game and positional mistakes to put J Team on the backfoot. Meanwhile, Ysera never had the opportunity build synergy with the revolving door of junglers that was Chen “Hana” Chih-Hao, Chen “Alex” Yu-Ming, and Shih “Breaker” Yueh-Ting — largely remaining ineffectual in both his roaming and vision efforts.

As a result, Chu “FoFo” Chun-Lan struggled to find results from his own play in Spring — being docked from the position of “Best Mid laner in the LMS” — and JT relied heavily on the performances of top laner, Hsu “Rest” Shi-Chieh. Each player had individual moments, but J Team hardly ever looked better than a cobbled mess of a solo queue team. Each player was performing extremely well on the Korean solo queue ladder, but that didn’t matter when J Team fell behind a revamped Machi Esports and rising rookie MAD Team, to miss playoffs in Spring.

Summer Split initially proved to be an improvement for J Team, but things only got worse for the team as they flirted with missing a chance at Worlds entirely. At the start of the split, J Team established a simple identity that its talented players could build together: Group up as five and beat the other team in fights. Choosing fights, as well as the micro nuances in teamfights, is actually fairly complicated, but at a basic level — it was a good start for J Team.

LilV and Ysera still largely proved to be ineffective in the laning phase, but FoFo and Rest provided enough pressure in their respective solo lanes to make up for it. Once it got to mid game, LilV started to look like himself again and the results showed it. J Team started 4-2 and were looking good for a playoff spot. That was, until the team hit another massive wall.

J Team dropped six games in a row following its 4-2 start, as teams began to find out its simple approach of front-to-back teamfighting in the mid to late game. JT’s poor coordination around vision and its limping bot lane were exposed as teams began to draft accordingly to exacerbate those weaknesses. Opposing teams challenged JT’s need for a passive early game and it just couldn’t adapt, eventually prompting a coaching change that would inject some life into a near-dead playoff team.

J Team hired former Royal Never Give Up Head Coach, Huang “FireFox” Ting-Hsiang, to take the reigns of a thrashing team with no answer in sight. FireFox stabilized the roster enough for it to make the playoffs, as the team narrowly beat Afro Gaming to secure a tiebreaker with G-Rex for the final playoff spot, eventually climbing to place 4th in LMS Summer. For once, cohesion seemed to be a thing for J Team past teamfight setups and things were looking up.

Firefox crafted a very simple identity for J Team in playoffs that led to some decent results: a 3-1 victory over Hong Kong Attitude and a competitive 0-3 loss to MAD Team, the LMS’ #2 seed for the World Championship. Rather than focus entirely on the mid-late game teamfights, J Team focused exceedingly on early game pressure and placed Breaker on champions like Nidalee and Olaf that can reap the fruits of strong early game lanes. It was the best approach the team had all year and all things considered — J Team was actually a favorite to qualify for the World Championship.

Despite that success, JT moved away entirely from its carefully crafted playoff approach to more balanced team compositions for the Regional Qualifier. J Team was far more fallible with a passive early game approach and all of its weaknesses began to show up again, with Ysera constantly making errors in terms of vision, whether it was facechecking and dying or baiting his team into a bad fight. Breaker also didn’t look too hot on more passive junglers, as his predictable pathing habits were easily taken advantage of by Machi’s Lee “Bugi” Seung-yeop and eventually G-Rex’s Anson “Empt2y” Leung.

After J Team narrowly beat Machi 3-2 to make it to the final qualifier match, G-Rex stood out as the favorite after its own convincing 3-1 victory over Hong Kong Attitude. FoFo and Rest pulled out all the stops to keep J Team in the series, but both players will once again miss the taste of international play on a grand stage. J Team collapsed easily, 3-0, as G-Rex dealt payback for the playoff tiebreaker. Now, it will be heading to the World Championship in favor of J Team.

In 2016, J Team was the best team in the LMS and couldn’t deal with a meta change, while in 2017, J Team’s overall talent level was too low to compete with the league’s best. 2018 proved to be a year where J Team struggled to find any level of cohesion with what appeared to be a near All-Star roster. Even adding FireFox late in the season couldn’t save them. Granted, he had little time to do so.

J Team’s failure to qualify burns the most when one thinks of FoFo’s failed qualification as one of the best players to ever appear in the Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau region, but if there’s any silver lining to J Team’s season — it’s that they still have competent players and a strong head coach in FireFox. J Team’s player scouting is decent, but it’s time for the management to put together a roster that is more than names on a page. JT doesn’t need to be blown up to succeed, it just needs to be adjusted. It’s hard to know where that begins, but J Team has its stars and that’s where great teams start.

Photo: Garena Esports