??MLG Anaheim kicked off with a match between old rivals, TSM and Dignitas. After announcing a swap of roles between Dyrus and Reginald, TSM hoped to throw Dignitas into confusion. While it was a convincing maneuver, Dignitas had their own strategy by choosing unusual champions during picks and bans. With Qtpie on Ashe and Scarra on Master Yi, Dignitas came into the game forcing confusion on the members of TSM.
Dignitas had the game in the palms of their hand starting from the first team fight at 7 minutes into the game with Scarra and Crumbzz making big plays happen in the first 4v4 of the game. Dignitas came out ahead of the first fight with just a tad more kills, however as soon as the fight at top ended another 1v1 broke out at botlane. Dyrus dove Kiwikid and they managed to take each other out underneath the tower. At 9 minutes into the game both teams combined for 9 kills and no towers were under half health.
Things changed after this point as Scarra would showcase AP Yi in the LCS before his imminent remake. 12 Minutes in Scarra is 4/3/1. Scarra would continue to snowball for the rest of the game obtaining a double kills in every team fight and ending the game with over half the teams kills. Dignitas would win the first game with a 31 to 11 kill difference.
Velocity and Curse are the two bottom ranked teams of the LCS and this match was nothing short of exciting. For the first few minutes the game was rather plain and nothing really out of the ordinary happened, however, 9 minutes in, NK inc managed to come in and steal Saint's blue. The tradeoff in exchange of the blue was that Curse was able to catch Cris for a kill and a free dragon immediately afterwards.
Velocity would then take control of the game shortly afterwards pressuring down Curses tower at mid. With Curse being pressed hard against their tower, Cop took a page from Doublelift and splitpushed all the way to Velocity's bottom inhibitor while Voyboy similarly pushed top. With towers falling left and right for Velocity they were forced to stop their pressure and returned to defend their base. Curse would look at this and start to apply pressure themselves.
With Velocity against the wall of defeat, Curse did what would eventually throw the game for them and attempted to grab baron. Nk inc would play the hero for Velocity and smite steal Baron from Curse, and pushed against Curse once again in this back and forth game. With both teams thinking that they could win, Curse had Voyboy splitpush into Velocity's base while Velocity 5 man pushed into Curse's base. This baserace would end in an extremely close race to destroy the nexus, Velocity however took the victory with pure manpower.
CLG is the team of Season 3 to look out for in the NA scene as you never know what will happen with them. Vulcun however is a team that is not easily predictable as well. The third game of the night would start off with CLG invading Vulcuns blue, Vulcun would then turn the tide and counter steal CLG's blue. Vulcun started the game fairly dominant shutting down Link, but CLG countered with Nientonsoh playing extremely well and Doublelift farming heavily as Tristana. With CLG they always want to draw out a game to their advantage, with plenty of farm and items at late game CLG can excel with that as their main focus.
Vulcun would hold the map control against CLG, leaving CLG to focus on farming close to their base, however that is exactly what CLG hoped for. With over 400 farm Doublelift became one of the strongest ADC in the game as a level 18 Tristana, Link would become one of the strongest bursting champions with his Xerath. CLG played the waiting game once again and prevailed, moving them to 2nd place in the LCS rankings.
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The last game of the night was between Team Coast against Cloud 9. Cloud 9 would once again focus on their comfort picks while banning out champions that they did not wish to deal with. Coast would focus upon a composition of champions that revolved around heavy AOE ultimates. With normal plays from both teams, C9 started the game with one thing in mind, push, push, push. At 3:30 the first tower fell for C9 at top lane, around 3:49 CST would do the same and push down C9's bot tower. The difference in the two teams is that C9 pushed harder, by the time CST pushed down the tower C9 were already at the second tower and chippping away at it.
The difference in the two teams soon became apparent as C9 would use every advantage they had to great effects pushing their lead to a 4k gold difference at 12 min. At 18 minutes into the game C9 further proved their domination by jumping up to a 10k gold difference, 5 more towers destoryed, and 3 kills ahead. With C9 just jumping farther and farther ahead, CST eventually fell just to not being able to keep up. 25 minutes into the game the gold difference between the two teams were 44.1k to 30k. Cloud 9 dominantly came into MLG weekend strong, and ended the first day with a bang.
