?The first game of the night would be the classic onslaught between Fnatic and Ninjas in Pyjamas. Unfortunately, NiP has had a rough start ever since the second split and that would continue to happen in this game. Fnatic came in objective focused and managed to invade a blue-side execute wonderfully.
The second midgame started, Fnatic's focus onto objectives would help them indirectly score kill leads as well. Managing to take towers and dragons would leave NiP gold starved while Fnatic were able to shove their lanes and assist one another. A near-turning point would occur while contesting objectives, allowing NiP to pick up some kills.
Despite their hardest attempts, Fnatic wouldn't even let them drop a tower and would show their prominence in the fields of justice right off the bat. NiP were essentially crushed and lacked any amount of control to the game, starting the weekend off strongly for Fnatic. Even with sOAZ not showing the strongest performance, the rest performed exquisitely.
Evil Geniuses vs. MeetYourMakers Drafts
The purple side aggression would continue into the next game with MeetYourMakers putting themselves where they don't belong. Straight away, the red buff was taken away from Evil Geniuses. EG would make the first aggressive kill of the game where Snoopeh would run top in attempts to kill off Kubon, but despite the jungle assistance, Kubon gets a 1 for 1 trade out in a 1v2 scenario.
Evil Geniuses' tactics would not prove to be optimal as they would continue to have a rough start heading into the second week of the LCS. Evil Geniuses wouldn't take long to find out that they would embarass themselves in front of the Russian audience. MeetYourMakers would prove to be incredibly strong and consistent at that.
The game would close out with not much fight out of EG and MYM finding advantaged and methods of dominating at every turn. While Evil Geniuses attempted to turtle it out until later, they were just too far behind and the Polish squadron demolished Evil Geniuses.
Gambit Gaming vs. Team ALTERNATE Drafts
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The last game of the night would feature the home team everyone wanted to see within the beautiful venue in Moscow. Gambit Gaming would fight their best in an attempt to dethrone Alternate -- or at least ruin their undefeated streak. Gambit Gaming would pull out some of their roots in a really awkward metagame for it to rumble in. Meanwhile, ALTERNATE rolled with what was best.
Both AD's would take a unique approach early on, with Creaton rolling out the Blade of the Ruined King rush Ezreal, and even more strangely, Genja with no attack speed items on Ashe and running Bloodthirster into Muramana. Diamondprox showed obvious signs of practicing on the latest patch as his playstyle showed today by going Godlike and beyond, starting off 6-0-7 before finding his first near-death experience on Xin Xhao.
Both teams traded evenly for awhile until the monstrosity of CC combinations in Gambit's repertoire would start paying off in the late game fighting over objectives. With constant bouts of crowd control shifting battles in the favor of Gambit Gaming, they would bring ALTERNATE to their knees and display a fine level of skill and sportsmanship, pleasing their local audience immensily to end day 1 of the 2nd week of LCS.
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