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| Winterfox storms the Team Liquid base. |
Coming into the Spring Split, both of these teams showed a lot of potential. Team Liquid was the only team to come out of Week 1 unscathed with a 2-0 record (no small thanks to KEITH's big plays, but more on him later), and Winterfox headlined Pobelter, the solo queue god who played musical chairs with WildTurtle for the top few spots all of Season 4.
Team Liquid started the game off strong, pushing the bottom lane hard with Quas and establishing a head and shoulders foothold over Avalon. On the other side of the map, Winterfox set up a buffer zone around Altec, who they focused on gaining a clear early CS lead. Winterfox kept up control on dragons--securing their second dragon before 13 minutes; meanwhile Team Liquid focused their efforts on systematically taking down towers, bringing down the last tier 1 tower right just after 14 minutes. The global gold proved invaluable for Team Liquid, allowing them to push their way to Winterfox's tier 2 towers, and affording them a pair of dragons and the Baron just before 30 minutes.
And then hubris set in. A pair of crucial encounters swung the pendulum back to Winterfox, and allowed them to close out the game nicely at 39 minutes.
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| Quas chomps up a tree for First Blood. |
1. The new Fizz is awfully scary. When Deathfire Grasp was removed in 5.2, Fizz saw a complete overhaul that changed his game play significantly. Quas, though, showed us that at least in the top lane Fizz is just as scary as he's always been. After solo killing Avalon with only a Doran's Blade, Winterfox was forced to play tentatively around him. His ability to dive into the back line and escape unscathed makes him an awfully scary threat, especially in the side lanes where he has the ability to suddenly flank a team fight. Overall, Quas had nearly a 100 CS lead over Avalon, and really dominated the split push the whole game.
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| IWDominate draws fire from Winterfox. |
2. IWDominate doesn't go down easily. IWDominate took an impressive 25.9 damage and only managed to die twice--averaging almost 13k damage per death (incidentally, FeniX, KEITH, and Xpecial combined took 25.9k damage, which resulted in 6 deaths between them). Avalon could afford to take a few lessons on tanking from him.
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| Here comes the ROCKET! |
3. And Team Liquid agrees: KEITH is a better fit. Don't get me wrong, Piglet can hold up his end, even when he forgets his masteries. However, I think Piglet fits best in that meticulous Korean style that relies on clockwork precision and objective control. KEITH, on the other hand, is used to the rough-and-tumble, everyone's a hero play style more common in NA and EU. He also has a way of playing ADC with style.
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| Imagine flashes in to stun Team Liquid. |
4. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine started this week in Gleeb's old position, playing a pretty good Annie. Yes, he did miss that Tibbers, but he has a way of slinging spells around team fights that earned him a lot of focus from Team Liquid. He's adjusting pretty nicely to LCS level play (unlike a few other new recruits across NA/EU), dropping 43 wards at an average of 1.1 wards a minute. He'll have a little bit more practice today with Team Dignitas to perfect that vision game.
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| The pack collapses on their prey. |
5. Winterfox lives up to their pack name. Aside from Avalon's first death in the laning phase, Winterfox both killed and died with the pack. When all was said and done, Winterfox averaged 3.9 players at every kill--pretty impressive for the 10-7 kill lead over Team Liquid. I'd also say the "protect and feed Altec" strategy did manage to pay off a bit--aside from FeniX, he had the most Damage to Champions all game.
What could we expect from a rematch? It'd be tough to say with two players getting their feet wet in their first week (well, sort of with KEITH). Team Liquid is now back to that Week 1 team that had a strong foothold early on. Winterfox has been looking better and better as they pick up experience against more established teams. Team Liquid needs a solid contingency plan for how they can recover should a team fight not go as expected (especially twice in a row). Winterfox could use a little more focus on playing strong from the early game so they don't have to rely on two great catches to swing the tide of the game around.
Other interesting statistics:
- IWDominate's tanking ability really shined in numerous statistics. For taking nearly 40% of all the damage Team Liquid took, he only had 20% of the deaths (for a factor of 1.9). 2nd place was Pobelter with 1.3, and 3rd Quas with 1.1.
- Winterfox was extremely efficient with their kills, averaging 3.86k damage per kill--compare that to Team Liquid's 6.46k.
- FeniX wins the award for most damage spread for least amount of return, doing a total of 15.3k damage (the most in the match) for a total of a 1 kill and 1 assist (or about 7.65k per credit). 2nd place was IWDominate at 3.6, followed by Quas at 2.48.
- In the end, Winterfox really won the CS war. Altec had an average of 10.1 CS/minute. 2nd place was Pobelter with 8.97, followed by FeniX at 8.4.
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