Griffin bounced back from their week five loss to KT Rolster with a dominant 2-0 victory against the reigning LCK champions, KINGZONE DragonX.
Last week Griffin’s weaknesses were broadcast for the world to see. Griffin’s tendency to fall behind during the early game was abused by KT, who beat the league’s best team quite handily. KT crushed the early game macro-wise, and made sure to push their lead once the laning phase ended in order to deny Griffin a chance at a comeback.
One of the best early game teams in spring, KINGZONE had the blueprints to victory against Griffin provided to them by KT. All KINGZONE had to do was follow KT’s plan, and make early game macro their focus versus Griffin. Unfortunately for KINGZONE though, they weren’t able to execute such a strategy today.
KINGZONE started both games in this two game series quite promising with their drafts. KINGZONE picked the Nocturne jungle and Swain bot lane, two champions that can create early leads. But just because you have these champions, doesn’t mean those leads are guaranteed.
KINGZONE junglers Moon “Cuzz” Woo-chan and Han “Peanut” Wang-ho were largely unimpressive on the Nocturne pick when they played in their respective games today. Neither Cuzz nor Peanut could find any meaningful ganks with Nocturne’s paranoia ultimate, and instead looked invisible for most of the series.
Without any real pressure from KINGZONE, Griffin reached the mid game largely unscathed. Unlike KINGZONE, Griffin built a composition with more scaling champions like Ezreal and Orianna. That meant that once they made it to the mid game the game was all but over barring any colossal mistakes.
No such mistakes occurred as Griffin played out their win conditions perfectly. Griffin used KINGZONE’s passive approach to gain control of map vision, which in turn allowed them to take uncontested Barons. Once they had the Baron, Griffin became virtually unstoppable.
With KINGZONE defeated, Griffin will gear up for their match against Gen.G on July 26.
