This article is part of our LoL Previews series.
Worlds is now but a short time away, and most of the teams that will be attending already have their tickets punched and are making their plans for the biggest event in the League of Legends season. It's been a season of surprises: SKT finally fell before their long-time rival the ROX Tigers over in Korea, Europe's H2k will finally have their chance to prove themselves on the world stage, Edward Gaming took back the crown that the upstart Royal Never Give Up took from them in Spring, and for seemingly the first time in the game's history, serious bets are being made on the viability of NA's juggernaut Team SoloMid. On the other hand, some things haven't changed at all: The Flash Wolves will once again represent the LMS region for seemingly the umpteenth time, Counter-Logic Gaming will again return to defend NA's legacy, and while they come not as the champions of their region, SKT T1 will be in attendance to attempt to defend their crown.
For the first look at how the big event will go down, we focus on five teams: NA's Team SoloMid, EU's G2 eSports, China's Edward Gaming, Korea's ROX Tigers, and Hong Kong's Flash Wolves; each the respective winner of their team's Summer Split. The teams will be presented in order of their margin of victory, and bear in mind that this is a short look into each team. Each of these teams has an incredibly exhaustive history (excluding the relative newcomers, G2 eSports, though their short history is certainly a colorful one) that could be discussed until long after the matches themselves ended.
As they earned the most conclusive win of all of the regional champions, we'll start off with China's own Edward Gaming.
Edward Gaming: Another Shot at the Gold
After being perhaps the most hyped team at the 2015 Worlds thanks to their historic defeat of SKT T1 at the Mid-Season Invitational -- the first that the organization had ever suffered on the international stage -- Edward Gaming crashed and burned so spectacularly that many viewers' interest in Chinese League of Legends died immediately. After a poor group stage, they found themselves on the receiving end of one of the greatest storylines to come out of the event: the historic run of Fnatic, a team they had casually beaten earlier in the year in order to make it to their historic upset of SKT. For better or worse, EDG immediately obtained a reputation for choking, one that only got worse after Royal Never Give Up took the LPL title they seemed destined for in Spring of 2016.
But this team is not the same as that one. Gone are Heo "PaWn" Won-seok and Tong "Koro1" Yang, replaced by new blood in the form of Lee "Scout" Ye-Chan and Chen "Mouse" Tu-Hao, indisputably the best rookies of the split. Instead of a half-hearted fight against Royal -- like the one that shattered their hopes of retaining their MSI title in Spring -- this version of EDG completely slaughtered the upstart former LPL champions in perhaps the most brutal display to ever take place on the LPL finals stage, wrapping up the series 3-0 in less than three hours of total game time.
Scout was the real standout of that series, and he made Li "Xiaohu" Yuan-Hao -- the first player to solo kill Faker in SKT T1's last international showing -- look the fool. Now he'll be looking to upstage the man he trained under on SKT, and he couldn't ask for a better cast of supporting players. Ming "Clearlove" Kai will be out to take his second international title, and looks poised to do so against a field filled with junglers that should be known quantities to the Chinese legend. Kin "Deft" Hyuk-kyu has had an absolutely stellar season, and will be looking to knock Bae "Bang" Jun-sik off his pedestal as the best ADC in the world. Tian "Meiko" Ye has proven once again that he's the best support that China has to offer after helping Deft emasculate the formidable duo of Jian "Uzi" Zi-Hao and Cho "Mata" Se-hyoung in the finals. Mouse, a player almost unknown to the world only a year ago, has proven to be amongst the premiere top laners in the world after taking on Looper and coming out ahead, an amazing feat for a player that has only just swapped into the role.
For Edward Gaming, anything less than total victory would be a disappointment, and their amazing record going into this tournament makes that victory look closer than it's ever been for a region that's often viewed as some sort of ugly step-child to Korea.
Flash Wolves: Preserving a Legacy
As one half of the seemingly duopoly between LMS's perennial top teams, the Flash Wolves have quite a lot of fan expectations to live up to, especially after their rather unexpected rout of regular season titan J Team. For Flash Wolves, this event will be about living up to their own legacy and proving that this aging roster still has fight left in them.
Led by two of the greatest players to ever grace the LMS, Hung "Karsa" Hau-Hsuan and Huang "Maple" Yi-Tang, the team has consistently proven to be a hard one to nail down. If anything, they're best known for an unorthodox play style that gives them some incredible spoiler power in international events such as this one. Last year they turned heads with picks like the ADC Varus that flummoxed the then GE Tigers during their meeting in the group stage. Hsiung "NL" Wen-An is not alone in forging new picks for the team, though, as Hu "SwordArt" Shuo-Jie is well known for his popularization of support Trundle and other bizarre picks, picks that leave his opponents constantly on their back feet in drafts.
Ultimately, Flash Wolves enter this event with an advantage that should be familiar to them: they are viewed as underdogs in the most competitive event of the season. However, the fact that this is the team that just four months ago usurped Europe's seeding for Worlds should be all the proof needed that this team cannot be underestimated. While FW winning the event outright would be one of the most unexpected events to ever happen in the history of League of Legends, the fact that one can go into the League of Legends store and buy a Taipei Assassins commemorative skin and not an Edward Gaming or a Team SoloMid one demonstrates that the LMS region has much more potential packed into it than it's often given credit for.
Team SoloMid: Catching up to the Hype
Being the top seeded North American team is a mixed blessing, one filled with both unprecedented fan support and unreasonable expectations rolled into one. The reality is that North America remains the most unrepresented region in terms of international victories, with only a few scattered IEM victories to call their own, and no finals appearances at Worlds in the game's history. Their fanbase is just as rabid as any, however, and every year they peddle their favorite team's as a worlds contender despite demonstrable evidence to the contrary.
Yet, the fortunes of League's weakest major reason may well be turning around this split, as they look to match the "European Renaissance" that was the major storyline of 2015 with one of their own. At the forefront of this fight is the eternal darlings of North America, and one of the oldest teams in League of Legends: Team SoloMid. The team needs no introduction. They've carried the standard for NA into nearly every major tournament in the history of the game, failing to appear only at this year's MSI after a harrowing defeat to the surging CLG in one of the greatest upsets in NA history. This split, however, TSM came to win: they dropped only a single match over the course of the split against an opponent, the ailing Phoenix1, that they likely spent no time at all preparing for. Their run through the playoffs was no less crushing, and the fact that Cloud9 managed to win a single game of the finals was considered borderline miraculous at the time thanks to the strength of this newest iteration of TSM's lineup.
At the center of this new lineup is the sole player who is new to the team: Vincent "Biofrost" Wang. Once considered nothing but a middling challenger player, the team's new support player seems to have allowed them to achieve a level of cohesion that was notably lacking during their Spring Split. United, this team is all but unstoppable, especially for North American teams. The challenge will be translating that onto the international stage: something that has never gone well for any of NA's hottest teams. Still, with names like Soren "Bjergsen" Bjerg, Peter "Doublelift" Peng, and Kevin "Hauntzer" Yarnell it's difficult to go wrong, and thus TSM finds themselves in a position much like Fnatic did last year. In both cases it was difficult to imagine a better team coming together in the region, and each of the teams seemed to have destiny on their side in the run up to worlds. For the sake of the constantly disappointed North American community, we can only hope that TSM's destiny -- and their penchant for extraordinary amounts of preparation and practice -- can carry them to heights even greater than the former European super-team.
G2 eSports: Restoring Faith
If anyone has reason to fear fan retribution, it's G2 eSports. Thanks to their "Vacation Time" right before the Mid-Season Invitational, they had a disastrous performance that barely saw them outpace the totally doomed wildcard team. That infamous performance earned G2 the enmity of their own fanbase and ceded Europe's premier seeding to LMS, ensuring that all of the European teams will have to fight that much harder in order to make it out of the group stage this year.
It's difficult to be optimistic about G2's chances. While their acquisition of Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen and Alfonso "Mithy" Aguirre Rodriguez certainly makes the roster much more appealing than it otherwise would be, there's little data to work with when trying to figure out how G2 will stack up internationally. If you excuse their abysmal MSI performance -- the team is just too new to have any other data points. Their style has largely revolved around individual performance, though, which was a fine strategy in a European LCS that's overall seen it's quality of play drop dramatically from last year, but utterly failed them on the world stage. The fact of the matter is that G2 often just goes on stage and plays standard League of Legends, and while Europe might not have many teams capable of exploiting that fact, that's not true internationally where boogeymen like the ROX Tigers can just smash those sorts of setups, or Edward Gaming can likely just do it better than you.
Of all the teams at Worlds, it's quite possible that G2 have the most to prove. While Luka "Perkz" Perkovic may have smashed Fabian "Febiven" Diepstraten on the home field, and Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen and Alfonso "Mithy" Aguirre Rodriguez done likewise with Bora "Yellowstar" Kim and Martin "Rekkles" Larsson, whether or not they'll be able to live up to the legacy of those now legendary members of one of Europe's best teams in the region's history remains to be seen. For better or worse, G2 will be judged against the success of Fnatic and Origen, and whether that's a bar they can exceed will be the story of this tournament for them, win or lose.
ROX Tigers: Victory at last
For the ROX Tigers, the LCK crown must seem a poor fit. After taking a back seat to SKT both domestically and internationally, the famously friendly team now find themselves in the spotlight despite never defeating their rivals at all. Instead, KT Rolster took down SKT in the semifinals, only to lose in turn to the Tigers in the finals. So while the Tigers earned the title that has for so long eluded them, they did so in a fashion that may well have cheapened the victory.
There's no questions the Tigers are amongst the best teams in the world. They may well be the best team in the world right now, but that has never been the problem with the Tigers, as no matter how much success they have found in the past, they've always lingered in the shadow of SKT in their own imagination, and this mental block has proven their undoing when facing them in the past.
It's not hard to imagine the ROX Tigers winning Worlds this year. They may well be the outright favorites to do so. Lee "Kuro" Seo-haeng is easily one of the best players in the world when he's not laning against Faker, and the team's solo lane excellence is rounded out by the most decorated individual player in the history of the LCK, Song "Smeb" Kyung-ho. Kang "Gorilla" Beom-hyeon and Kim "PraY" Jong-in round out the bottom lane, and they're sure to enjoy the chance to prove themselves not only against their rivals in the form of Bang and Wolf, but also other hyped All-Star bottom lanes, especially the two juggernaut lanes coming in from China's two top teams, Edward's Meiko and Deft along with Royal's Mata and Uzi. Finally, Han "Peanut" Wang-ho will have the chance to prove himself on the world stage once more, as Bae "Bengi" Seong-ung shut down his ambitions in spectacular fashion the last time he took to the international stage.
For the Tigers, Worlds is all about doing better than SKT. No matter how many accolades are heaped upon their heads, you can be sure that they will all ring hollow if Tigers fail to defeat SKT, whether due to losing to them directly or due to another team taking them down first. The Tigers don't need to beat the best in the world, they only need to beat SKT. Nothing else matters.
