League of Legends: The Fantastic Four of LCS Quarterfinals

North America’s League Championship Series (LCS) moved into playoffs last weekend, with TSM beating Echo Fox 3-1 and FlyQuest winning 3-2 over Golden Guardians. These exciting series showed some strong performances out of several players. Here are the Fantastic Four of quarterfinals 2019.

The Fantastic Four recognizes four different players from different teams that exhibited different strengths in their gameplay. To review the qualifications for these awards, read week one’s piece.

Image from LoL Esports Flickr

The Thing – GGS Hauntzer

Hauntzer was one of five players to play a unique champion in each game of their quarterfinals series. Pobelter was the only other player to go five champs for five games with him. Even more impressive, Hauntzer’s five champions offer fairly diverse playstyles and roles within the team. Kennen is a lane bully with huge engage potential. Yorick mainly split-pushes with an exposed laning phase. Poppy is kind of in the middle, with more powerful disengage built in. Aatrox prefers skirmishes and a bruiser playstyle, while Ornn wants to hard-engage team fights and tank damage.

While Golden Guardians did not win the series, Hauntzer held steady in his role in all five games. He never seemed to back down against FlyQuest, even when fighting from behind. GGS even gave him counterpick in four of the five games, which may not have been the best choice. Contractz and Froggen had less consistency, so changing draft order may have helped.

Image from LoL Esports Flickr

Mr. Fantastic – FLY Wildturtle

FlyQuest’s bottom laner wins most improved from week nine of the regular season to quarterfinals in playoffs. Wildturtle went from 2.0 to 4.6 in KDA between the two weekends. Although the Kog’Maw game left much to be desired, the other four games played out really well. Wildturtle and JayJ definitely stepped up in the best-of-five, allowing Santorin and Pobelter to shine even more against Contractz and Froggen.

Wildturtle also showed his veteran status throughout the series, in direct contrast to Deftly. In a few games, Deftly hesitated to get within auto-attack range or too willingly entered. Meanwhile, Wildturtle did not seem affected by nerves at all. He played several different champions, with Varus turning out to be a hot pick.

Image from LoL Esports Flickr

Human Torch – TSM Zven

TSM had an overall great showing in quarterfinals, and each member contributed in his own way. Zven comes away as the Human Torch of the weekend, because he played all four matches extremely well. He averaged less than one death per match, coming away with a massive 21.5 KDA. Zven played four different ADCs against four different ADCs over four games, and averaged ahead in gold, CS and XP at 15 minutes.

Luckily, Zven has strong players surrounding him. Arguments could be made for any of TSM’s members to win this award, but Zven felt like a true carry in contrast to Apollo. He demonstrated Ezreal, Kalista, Kai’Sa and Lucian’s unique strengths and playstyles in a way most LCS bottom laners cannot. Look for Zven to make a difference up against Cloud9 in semifinals.

Image from LoL Esports Flickr

Invisible Woman – FOX Solo

Solo has not received much credit for his contributions to Echo Fox in Spring Split, but he came to play in quarterfinals. Don’t let the team’s failures distract from Solo’s personal performance. He had the most kills on his team in three of the four games, and the most damage per minute of all quarterfinals top laners. All the while, TSM chose Broken Blade’s champion after Solo’s in three of their four matches.

Unfortunately, Echo Fox was not able to get much going across the series. Rush made some questionable early game decisions in games two through four, which put FOX’s laners in poor situations for the mid game. Despite the setbacks, Solo looked for flanks and dove TSM’s backline as best he could. The team just could not convert on Solo’s attempts.

CREDITS

Images from LoL Esports Flickr

Statistics from Games of Legends and Gamepedia

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