Spotlight on other Asian teams competing at Worlds

Unlike last year when the Bangkok Titans made the tournament, there are no Wild Card teams from Southeast Asia this season at Worlds. Instead just two teams from Taiwan join three each from China and Korea as the Asian representatives in San Francisco.

 

Flash Wolves

Entering the 2016 League of Legends World Championships as the number one seed from the LMS, the Flash Wolves will be looking to improve on their quarter-final exit in 2015. Even more so than last year, the burden will be placed on Jungler Karsa and Mid laner Maple to carry the Flash Wolves further.

A keynote for the Flash Wolves is that Kindred and Graves are both back in the meta for the Worlds patch, both of which Karsa has been known to play at an incredibly high level.

Unfortunately for the Flash Wolves, they were placed in a very tough group containing Korea’s SK Telecom T1, North America’s Cloud 9 and China’s IMay. SKT are one of the favorites to win the competition, IMay are coming off a superb playoff run, and Cloud 9 have shown increasingly useful form of late. Therefore, even entering the tournament as a number one seed, most favour both SKT and Cloud 9 to qualify from the group, leaving the Flash Wolves falling at the first hurdle.

All is not lost for the Flash Wolves though as it’s entirely possible that the teams around them could play much worse than anticipated. IMay (excluding Top laner AmazingJ) are all rookies on the world stage, SKT still have concerns over the play of Junglers Blank and bengi, and this will be Cloud 9’s first time at a World Championship without Hai shot-calling.

A difficult road to the quarter-finals it may be, but history has demonstrated that it’s usually a poor decision to count out the LMS teams, who always seem to show up when you least expect it.

 

Roster:

 

AHQ

AHQ enter this year’s World Championships on a high after exceeding playoff expectations and qualifying as the second seed out of the LMS. After struggling in the regular season of the Summer Split, AHQ were able to push the eventual league champion Flash Wolves to five games in the semi-finals of the Summer Playoffs and then win the following two best-of-five series in the gauntlet 3-0 to become the second seed. AHQ, however, did dodge what many viewed as the favourite for the second seed when J Team collapsed and lost to Machi in five games, with the latter then being swept by AHQ.

AHQ’s Mid laner Westdoor may be the most recognizable name, but the team’s success almost always revolves around the dominance of Top laner Ziv. Ziv outperformed every single Top laner in the LMS by a large margin, but most believe that when up against stronger competition he will struggle to be as dominant. If Ziv is unable to crush his lane opponent so hard that he becomes ineffective all game then AHQ will more than likely lose.

The group draw and the first round of matches helped AHQ’s chances of reaching the round-of-eight substantially when they were placed in a pool with China’s EDG, Europe’s H2k and International Wildcard INTZ e-Sports. EDG entered as one of the favourites to win the entire tournament, but their loss to INTZ was a stunning result.

INTZ and H2k were considered some of the lowest quality teams that AHQ could have been paired against and they are arguably in the easiest group of the tournament. AHQ’s win over H2k was therefore a useful start in the double round-robin format.

H2k’s strengths lie within their quality talent in each role, coupled by the decision making of first-blood king Jungler Jankos. Who progresses may well come down to how AHQ match up with H2k in their second game. Jankos will be expected to protect Top laner Odoamne from Ziv, requiring someone else on AHQ to carry.

 

Roster:

 

With the popularity of League of Legends growing in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia and the Philippines, the region will have hopes of sending a team to the World Championships next year. For now though, local fans will instead be focused on the eight Asian representatives as they battle it out with teams from North America, Europe, CIS and Brazil.