The second week of the European League of Legends Championship Series brought best-of-threes between the projected top two in each group. Fnatic stood victorious above a fresh-from-vacaton G2 Esports, and Unicorns of Love clawed their way over H2K-Gaming.

Aside from the teams in the highlight series of the week, Splyce made the most surprising gains with wins over Team Vitality and Mysterious Monkeys. There’s a lot to pour over, including the evolution of picks and the impact of Doran’s Shield.

What is Animal Style: Fnatic’s win over G2 Esports

Despite accepting their “animal style” only reluctantly and promising to adopt a more methodical “macro style” in the coming split, Fnatic have remained consistent in the first two weeks of Summer. They still favor Kennen and Shen, and still seek to pile on the bottom lane. Side lane AD carry picks remain the dominant choice.

But defining Fnatic’s animal style becomes tricky. What makes it run so contrary to macro play?

In a typical Fnatic game, Mads “Broxah” Brock-Pedersen will look to either create a Teleport advantage with a top lane gank or look for an earlier play bottom. The goal of each, of course, is to ensure that the bottom 2v2 can get ahead. With that lead secure, Rasmus “Caps” Winther will use mid lane advantages to roam bottom and continue the snowball. Then, Fnatic will opt to trade turrets to get these advantages or simply keep bot up to pressure the lead.

When turrets do fall, however, Fnatic tend to default to 1-3-1 compositions with a side laning AD carry pick, striving to keep pressure in all three lanes. If they can get a flank with their jungler on a side lane, they get picks and transition to objectives.

Generally speaking, macro strategy in League of Legends refers to map movement, or the ability to control the most resources across the map. This means distributing farm, not wasting minion waves, defending turrets, and securing objectives.

At its core, Fnatic’s preference for 1-3-1 play is an efficient macro strategy because it emphasizes distributing gold to every carry. It also has the basic framework for transitioning to objectives. Fnatic’s early game vision and wave control is also strong, able to stack the bottom minion wave to create dive opportunities. Following those advantages, they play lane swaps well in the event the enemy has a Teleport advantage.

Issues working against them include the occasional over-grouping on the bottom side early, though they rarely do that without mid lane roam priority. They will, however, sacrifice Broxah’s jungle camp experience and gold.

Sometimes Fnatic tunnel too hard on getting picks. In their playoff series against G2, they gave up control of top side to pinch the bottom lane, and sometimes this cost them a Baron. During Game 2 of the series this week, their side lane AD carry cost them when looking to secure vision at their jungle entrance without river control against Thresh and Twitch. G2 picked off Broxah and Caps to take a 20 minute Baron.

View photos Rekkles is the AD carry for Fnatic (lolesports) More

Just because Fnatic all-in doesn’t necessarily make their approach to map control fundamentally bad. They just make mistakes, perhaps in part because they don’t diligently prep waves or secure vision before plays. But in looking to force enemy mistakes, the tradeoff is often opening yourself up to make more of your own.

That said, Fnatic’s approach actually became more effective after the midseason patches. While many have sung the praises of Doran’s Shield in allowing a free laning phase for scaling champions, it does have a flip side. The sustain from Doran’s Shield makes taking minion aggro less punishing during all-ins and heals back damage dealt from poke lanes. This means melee and heavy engage picks can have just as easy a laning phase as a Kog’Maw or a Twitch.

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