After beating number one team 100 Thieves on Friday in quite easy fashion, Dignitas failed to continue their strong performance throughout week seven, losing their next two games against Golden Guardians and Evil Geniuses.
In very similar fashion to their week five performance, Dignitas followed a big win with two unacceptable losses to end their weeks 1-2. In week five that big win came against TSM while this week it came to 100 Thieves, both teams were in first place at the time of DIG beating them. With their 1-2 weekend, DIG now fall below .500 with an 18-19 record. Despite this, the team still sits in sixth place with a two-game lead ahead of Immortals. Here are three takeaways from the week seven performance of Dignitas:
1. Jungle Meta Works Well For Akaadian
Another week goes by with Jungler Matthew “Akaadian” Higginbotham in the starting lineup for Dignitas and he is beginning to look stronger and stronger. In the team’s upset victory against 100 Thieves on Friday, he played a big role, securing 76.9% KP and getting a quadra kill on Kayn to help DIG end the game. Despite the team’s struggles the rest of the weekend, one positive note you could really pull out was that the current jungle meta is one that works really well for Akaadian.
With the huge role enchanters played early in the season and the strength behind items such as Goredrinker and Stridebreaker, the current pro jungle meta is one really centered around bruisers and skirmishers. These types of junglers want to gank early, gain prio either in their lanes or themselves through kills and then use these early leads to win games. This works perfectly for DIG as this is very similar to their playstyle. In the remaining games, Akaadian should continue playing these types of champs and continue attempting to gain early leads for the team.
2. EG Game = Yikes
It is hard to fully cherish Dignitias’s great win this past weekend against 100 Thieves due to the literal embarrassment of a game they played on Sunday against Evil Geniuses. After securing a kill before laning phase due to Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen overextending, Dignitas just looked like they were purposely trying to lose the game. The sequence which quite literally ended the game was Evil Geniuses Top Laner Jeong “Impact” Eon-yeong solo killing Aaron “FakeGod” Lee then solo killing David “Yusui” Bloomquist then EG AD Carry Kyle “Danny” Sakamaki solo killing Toàn “Neo” Trần. After this lead, EG was completely in the driver seat, but instead of playing it slow and attempting to potentially come back, DIG continued to seek out fights despite being behind and lost all of them. The gold lead eventually became about 10,000 for EG at around ten minutes and it was very much over from there. As to whose fault it is for this collapse would be anyone’s guest but as the team’s leader Zaqueri “Aphromoo” Black must make sure this young team keeps their composure under pressure situations similar to this one going forward. If not, this DIG team will not last long come playoff time.
3. Need to Lock in For Final Six Games
Another 1-2 weekend for Dignitas in week seven is something the team desperately did not need. The good thing, however, is that this past weekend was quite possibly the hardest one DIG has faced this season. The team is now quite out of reach from third place but in these last six games they must not lose their current sixth place position. The way the LCS playoffs are set up, the top eight teams make it, so DIG are in a comfortable position to secure a seed. The bottom two teams however, start off in the lower bracket and face single elimination. Immortals is now two games behind DIG for that sixth spot after this weekend. Another bad performance like this and DIG can very well lose this spot, they must avoid this at all costs.
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