LCS Recap: Golden Guardians vs FlyQuest Week 1 Day 2

The Golden Guardians finished off FlyQuest in a 30 minute game with less than 10 total kills. They suffocated their opponents and went back to some comfort champions while FlyQuest tried to make waves with a Pyke Top pick that Omran “V1per” Shoura could not execute.

Draft

The Golden Guardians started out with a plan from draft phase, focusing on poke champions and Drakes. They drafted Jayce for Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell and Ezreal for Matthew “Deftly” Chen. They saved their last pick for the old Henrik “Froggen” Hansen pocket pick, Anivia.

FlyQuest went for a standard composition with a surprise Pyke in the top lane for V1per.

Early Game

The game was pretty standard in the first five minutes. No kills occurred, and some weird pathing by Juan “Contractz” Garcia that led to him being three buffed by Lucas “Santorin” Larsen.

The Guardians got the first kill of the game at the seven-minute mark thanks to FlyQuest starting up Drake and getting into a 50-50 Smite fight with Contractz. This led to a skirmish around the pit in which Santorin gave up his life for his sins at Drake. This would be the only kill in the game until around 27 minutes into the game.

The team rotated to the Rift Herald after a quick reset, dropped it in mid the next minute to take the first tower of the game, then went down to take the now respawned Drake.

Image from LoL Esports Flickr

Mid Game

From then on Froggen and company smothered FlyQuest with gold and towers. They took Drake basically the second it spawned all four times, and had no trouble taking towers with the Jayce, Ezreal and Anivia combo.

By the 16-minute mark the Guardians had all outer towers down, totaling in almost 2,000 gold from them, to FlyQuest’s zero towers and 540 gold off of four Tower plates.

By 22 minutes the Guardians were up 5,000 gold and were just waiting for a FlyQuest misstep to take Baron and win the game. FlyQuest decided to wait until the Guardians were at their tier 3 Mid Turret to fight, resulting in a disengage which led to Golden Guardians taking the Middle Inhibitor, Baron and, eight minutes later, the game.

Conclusions

This Pyke pick did not work out at all for FlyQuest. They never even tried to get something going top, which is what is needed to run a Pyke in this composition.

Golden Guardians might have found their formula for success: take Drake on respawn, give Kim “Olleh” Joo-sung Tahm Kench, and let Froggen and Contractz out pressure their enemy counter parts.

Froggen did give an interview after the game and said that this isn’t even the team’s final form.

“I think we have a lot of issues but we haven’t really shown it in the last two games, if we want to be with the top 3 teams we need to work very hard and we need to improve a lot.” Froggen said.