How Winterfox lost the game against C9 in first 7 minutes

Hello everyone. Last night we had some good games in NA LCS and C9 vs WFX match particularly got my interest because of how one sided it was and how it showed us that WFX doesn`t know how to play a lane swap scenario and how to react on certain situations. Cloud 9 invade wasn`t the best either, but they response to the current situation was very good.  

Level 1 strategies

Cloud 9 had stronger level 1 and wanted to invade WFX red buff to potentially catch someone or to deep ward to see if WFX want to lane swap. They were stopped by a ward from Helios.

By placing ward this early, Helios gave C9 two options, to invade while being seen by ward or to wait for ward to expire and then late invade without WFX knowing about it. Second option is less likely to happen because if they late invaded WFX red buff, they would force their bot lane to go top. What Helios should do is wait at the entrance to his red buff while being safe from Morgana`s binding and then ward at 1:00 so he could see possible late invade. 

The issue here is that Pobelter didn`t placed his ward in the middle of the lane like Hai did. By placing the ward in the middle of the lane you gain more vision while not being exposed to any danger, you could go from the lane making pressure on enemy team and possibly get knowledge about their movement. 

Here is crucial part for a red team that lane swap. If they do it correctly, they will be even with enemy team or gain advantage over enemy jungler by delaying his buffs, jungle clear and experience. If they don`t do it correctly, they will lose a lot of experience, vision and gank pressure, gold and give enemy jungler 3 buff start. Red team in lane swap must always start from enemy blue buff because they will have more players on that side of the map, unless blue team also decide to lane swap. They must never start from red because they risk of blue jungler taking his blue buff, his red buff and red side blue buff. Red jungler can`t go to his blue buff in lane swap scenario because now blue side have more players in that bottom part of the map. 

Meteos did a very good thing here by warding over the wall to see if WFX will invade and come from top side. If they invaded from bottom, he would still be safe by running toward top tribush. But he also did a very dangerous mistake here. Since C9 had only 1 ward in WFX red buff jungle side, he did not know the movement of the WFX players so he didn`t know if they invaded his blue buff and yet he still went alone to his own not warded blue buff. That could easily be turned into first blood and huge advantage if WFX reacted properly. 

The advantage of C9 here is that Maokai can take a jungle camp solo and not share that crucial starting experience with Meteos, allowing him and Meteos to get more experience and faster to level 2 because Gnar on the WFX side must go and share xp with jungler.

I will just write what Rivington said: “Winterfox uses that advantage on top side to 3 man crab, while Cloud 9 uses that advantage to 2 man Dragon”. You know enemy team have an advantage of controlling Dragon area and you can at least assume they will use it so you can go and try to stop them and maybe kill them if they are low. Instead of it, you are gifting enemy team a Dragon because you are killing crab that will give you useless vision for a lane that is already safe. 

Later Hai used his 3 level advantage spike over WFX Gnar, Jarvan and Thresh to shadow ulty Jarvan in 1v3 and kill him. With 2 kills, 1 dragon, 1 tower, more then 2k gold advantage and control of Dragon area C9 created a very huge advantage over WFX. 

So you saw an example of how bad execution of level 1 strategy and not knowing how to react in given situation can cost you a game that early.