This week marks the first Super Week for LCO 2022, and also marks the start of Snowball’s predictions for the year. With day one of three out of the way, the Super Week continues tonight with two pre-season heavyweights going toe-to-toe.
By Monday’s close, the LCO ladder will start to stack up for Split 1 2022. Each team will have played each other once, which will give us a good gauge of each team’s strengths and weaknesses and who are the contenders and the pretenders in this league.
Chiefs, Order & Pentanet all picked up wins last night, while league leaders Peace suffered the first loss of their Split 1 campaign to Kanga.
Peace will be out for blood in tonight’s opener against Mammoth, followed later by Dire Wolves v Gravitas — both are looking to right their seasons after a slow opening third.
Chiefs will take on Order in what should be a true test for both sides near the top of the ladder, but Perry’s match of the round? Pentanet v Kanga?
Perry’s Pick of the Week: Kanga (2-5) v Pentanet (4-3)
With apologies to those who came to this expecting to read about The Chiefs and Order, but this is the game I wanted to talk about.
This should be a blowout on paper, were it not for PGG being slow as molasses out of the gates. Mark “Praedyth” Lewis and Jake “Rogue” Sharwood are just as clunky together as I remember them, Cha “Yuri” Hee-min looks asleep at the wheel at times, and Kim “Winterer” Dong-geun looks better after wins than he does during them.
It’s not a good look. But at least you can see what it’s meant to look like. Choi “BalKhan” Hyun-Jin is a bona fide menace on his Jarvan IV – and when he does get the Aphelios, Praedyth is still dangerous. If they can expand their good games beyond these picks, then they become a real threat in the league.
But until they warm up to that, they feel highly beatable. And that’s not normal to say about the LCO-era PGG team. The aura of invincibility has gone and that can’t feel good for their fans.
Oh, hang on, they’re playing Kanga. That’s a waste of 150 words.
- Read More: LCO 2022 Split 1 Sliding Doors Week 4
Or at least, it was until yesterday. A remarkable victory over Peace has surged new interest into this matchup. Now, I still think Kanga have shown significant flaws and as good as their win was, it doesn’t cure all their ills. But it was an excellent start.
To cast an eye on Kanga’s shortcomings; they seem not to come into games with an understanding of their plan, and they don’t adjust well to curveballs during the game.
To wit, their game against Mammoth: Jerome “Chungy” Chung, despite an otherwise invisible game, suppressed Zed early and kept him irrelevant through the laning phase. But in a rare poor outing, Jordan “Only” Middleton flubbed multiple engagements, and Kanga got nothing from it. So, Zed was released from the pinch long enough for Mammoth to finally work out to get him in a sidelane – Kanga was doomed from then on.
Mammoth shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that. Their R5 ace in the hole failed and then it was let off the hook.
Against lowly Gravitas they somehow gave up Yuumi and then on top of that ended up with a comp that featured both fewer globals and absolutely no control over where fights happened. They couldn’t press forward better than Gravitas could go backward, and they couldn’t kite back better than Gravitas went forwards because Lulu had too much to do.
Broadly speaking, they are not being given enough of a chance to succeed coming into the game. And I don’t mean just in draft – it’s not just picks, it’s the game plan to execute them. They need to get on the same page with Coach Drak, because the way that they’re playing does not fit the way they’re being sent into the server.
This is not, by any stretch, to let the players off the hook. They’re rudderless in the game except when Only is carrying the game – a problem which hopefully the addition of Gian “styled” Leon can address, at least in part.
The bot duo is just making up the numbers to five right now, while before yesterday Chungy was playing below replacement-level and he is frankly just better than that. Tristan “Lived” Fulcher is hit and miss, and he was the player I had the highest hopes for.
With a couple of tweaks Kanga showed — especially yesterday — that they can make significant strides.
On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that yesterday’s Boing-Boing was all just Dead Cat Bounce.
My pick: PGG in a rout.
Perry’s Week 4 Day 2 Predictions
PEACE def. Mammoth
Pentanet.gg def. Kanga
Gravitas def. Dire Wolves
Chiefs def. ORDER
LCO 2022 Split 1’s first Super Week continues tonight with PEACE vs Mammoth at 6pm AEDT. Catch up on all the split details in our ultimate coverage hub.
