“Their main priority was going to Worlds and winning Worlds. And that completely aligned with what I wanted. I wanted to dominate North America. I wanted to go to Worlds. I wanted to win playoffs. I wanted to dethrone TSM, all of ,that stuff. So, CLG was a pretty perfect fit for me.” -Counter Logic Gaming jungler Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett to Yahoo Esports

It’s fitting that the first words out of CLG support Zaqueri “aphromoo” Black’s mouth following their 2-1 loss to Team SoloMid are, “I think it’s going to be pretty easy for us to finish first this split, get the bye, make sure we have a good seed for playoffs, and once playoffs come around all we need to is get first place for Worlds and that’s all.”

Counter Logic Gaming have always set their sights outside of North America, even when it meant taking risks that backfired magnificently, nearly sending their team to relegations. Their decisions, especially in hindsight, have been heavily criticized, but one aspect of the team that hasn’t changed since Season 1 is that they’ve always reached for a place well beyond expectations.

Since the creation of the League of Legends Championship Series in North America, the region has been first and foremost Team SoloMid and Cloud9 in community discussion and fandom. All other teams, including Season 1 and Season 2 powerhouse Counter Logic Gaming, fell to these two both in popularity and in-game.

When CLG managed to best a rising TSM in the 2016 NA LCS Spring Finals and qualify for the 2016 Mid-Season Invitational, the community thought very little of their upcoming appearance in Shanghai. CLG had visible flaws, and NA as a region was still behind their international counterparts.

They finished in second place overall, falling 3-0 in the 2016 MSI Finals to SK Telecom T1.

Unfortunately, CLG’s precedent of defying expectations goes both ways. At the 2016 World Championship, they failed to make it out of Group A, bested twice by CIS upstart Albus NoX Luna.

Following a disappointing loss to FlyQuest in the 2017 NA LCS Spring Playoffs, it was finally time to make changes to the CLG lineup that had, in many ways, restored hope to the region with their MSI performance. In western League of Legends, it’s rare for a team to stick with one roster so long. CLG stood by their lineup of top laner Darshan “Darshan” Upadhyaha, jungler Jake “Xmithie” Puchero, mid laner Choi “Huhi” Jae-hyun, AD carry Trevor “Stixxay” Hayes, and support aphromoo for nearly a year and a half, since their auspicious debut at IEM San Jose in December 2015.

That change was a trading of junglers with fellow North American organization Immortals: the veteran Xmithie, who had been playing competitively since Season 1’s APictureOfAGoose, and talented newcomer Dardoch, who burst onto the NA scene with Team Liquid in 2016 Spring.

“It will be easy for us to learn how to be a better team,” aphromoo said of integrating Dardoch onto the existing CLG lineup. “We have to teach the foundation of mid-game to Dardoch, because on his teams, they didn’t have mid-games on TL or IMT, I don’t know what was going on so he’s had to learn that. He was also a shotcaller on his old teams too so stuff that I see he might not see but it’s okay, it’s always a learning process.”

Dardoch’s arrival onto CLG was accompanied by a world of speculation and no small amount of doubt. The young jungler has a contentious history with his previous teams of which bits and pieces have been, somewhat strategically, released to the public for instant and extreme reactions.

Building a cohesive, successful unit is tricky. No other team knows this better than CLG.

View photos Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett chats with Choi “Huhi” Jae-hyun (Riot Games/lolesports) More

“As long as the five players are open-minded and have the right personality, I feel like maintaining the team will be better because you do want to fix problems as soon as possible,” Huhi said during 2017 spring. “The only way to do that is to give direct criticism and point out every single mistake until that guy fixes it. Whenever we have a problem, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

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