LCS Week 1: Clean Dive Comps Can Reign Supreme When Done Right

What a start we had to the 2019 LCS season. I’m not going to recap each game since let’s be honest, you can get the full experience just watching VODs on Twitch of each game. What I’ll be doing week by week, along with Overwatch League games, is taking a deeper dive into a key game that caught my eye and shows why you should take a closer look at particular teams as the season goes on.

We just saw one of the cleanest versions of a dive composition a team could have in today’s matchup with FlyQuest vs. Golden Guardians. Here are each player and their champion.

FlyQuest:

• V1per on Sion
• Santorin on Camille
• Pobelter on Galio
• WildTurtle on Ezreal
• JayJ on Ornn

Golden Guardians:

• Hauntzer on Vladamir
• Contractz on Olaf
• Froggen on Urgot
• Deftly on Lucian
• Olleh on Morgana

This game was honestly won solely on the draft alone. Galio has plenty of tools to utilize to deliver huge knock ups and protection with his ult while Sion, Camille, Ornn, and even Ezreal dive on in not having to worry about dying too soon. Admittedly, the Golden Guardians have a more star-studded roster, but FlyQuest didn’t care with the execution of the dive comp to pure perfection. Golden Guardians didn’t prepare this draft to really peel off the hard engage. Sure you have a Morgana shield to block one form of crowd control, but what are you going to do about the other huge tanks diving into you?

Each champion on Golden Guardians have their own respective escape and protection tools, but it’s not enough for the team fights which FlyQuest dominated in. Golden Guardians really had to wait out till late game and avoid the 5v5 fights, but they kept getting caught out every few minutes. While they had small CS leads, Golden Guardians couldn’t figure out how to translate that into skirmish wins. I really wish we would have seen a bit more protective champs, like having Hauntzer on Shen instead to provide taunt crowd control and massive shielding across the map. Play after play, V1per, Santorin, and JayJ were able to find powerful engages to bring Galio into the fight. Golden Guardians simply couldn’t answer, ultimately falling to FlyQuest 17 to 6. We’ll see if FlyQuest can carry this momentum throughout the season. Their team fight game has got to be the strongest I’ve seen today of all the teams.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of these same champions across each team throughout the day. Hopefully, we’ll be able to see more teams be willing to get out of these meta champions and find value in other champs to create new strategies to win. I’m honestly praying for Neeko to make regular appearances. I’ve seen a few professional mid laners play her in solo queue recently, so it might be time to bring out the curious chameleon in the coming weeks.