Yesterday the EU LCS Promotion was deciced and now it’s time for the NA region. We’ve got some exciting matchups coming up as well as a clash of styles. The matchups are:
Enemy – Team Coast
Team 8 – Team Imagine
The bookmakers favour Team Coast in the matchup versus Enemy, but some of the analysts or experts we respect the most, feel it’s the other way around. The analyst of Fnatic, Tim Sevenhuysen, (@mag1clol) as well as Scarra (the former LCS player and Coach) agree that Enemy should be favoured.
We agree. There’s a big difference between Challenger and LCS. The same goes for Team 8 who should be favoured against Team Imagine. We do believe the Enemy-Coast series will be close, and may even be decided in 5 games. Which is optimal for fantasy.
Let’s get to our featured picks:
Jungler:
Thrashy – Enemy ($1053@Vulcun/$7900@AlphaDraft)
Enemy lost 6 games in a row to finish the regular season, but there’s a big difference between facing CLG or TSM and going up against Team Coast. Their win against Team Dragon Knights in week 6, who are on a more comparable level, showed that even though they struggled in the LCS they are still better than most Challenger teams. Even though the team struggled, Thrashy, the jungler of the team performed on a LCS level of play. The Dane was 6th in terms of regular season KDA, while his kill participation of 77% was 3rd among junglers. His 29 regular season kills were 6th, better than Santorin and almost tieing Xmithie of CLG who played 19 games. Thrashy basically held his own and should compare favourably to Shrimp of Coast. Vulcun has Thrashy rated 3rd among jungler while AlphaDraft has him 1st by a decent margin. We like him at both sites but there’s huge value to be had at Vulcun.
Top:
Cris – Coast ($1031@Vulcun/$6600@AlphaDraft)
Team Coast cruised through the Challenger Series and so most of the statistics of each player are somewhat inflated. Regardlees, Cris dominated his top lane opponents on almost every occasion. His KDA of 8.5 was 1st among all CS toplaners by a large margin while it was 4th among all players. Cris’s 488 Damage Per Minute was much better than the LCS average top lane average of 360 and much better than his toplane adversary today, Flarez’ of 325. Where Cris is more of carry toplaner, Flarez peels and supports the rest of the Enemy lineup. As such Flarez was the worst toplaner in pretty much every category. As we stated earlier we expect this to be a close series and Cris should be able to put up more than decent numbers especially in light of the way Enemy leave their toplaner to fend for himself. In our opinion he’s ridiculously undervalued at both Vulcun and AlphaDraft and should be a really good flex play or even fill the top lane position.
ADC:
Nien – Team 8 ($1514@Vulcun/$8000$AlphaDraft)
Nien is just a bit cheaper than Otter of Enemy at both Vulcun and AlphaDraft and it probably comes down to how many games you expect to be played in each series. ADC’s really rack up points in prolonged series and games. Nien joined Team 8 early in the season replacing Maplestreet mainly because of his larger carry potential. Nien is just what you look for in fantasy ADC’s as he’s aggressive and has a high kill count despite the teams inferior level compared to other LCS teams. His 75 regular season kills compares favourably to the likes of WildTurtle of TSM (60) and CoreJJ of Dignitas (65), this even though he played fewer games. Kill participation is 2nd among all NA LCS ADC’s. Facing the duo of Steelback and Baby shouldn’t be much of a challenge compared to LCS botlanes and Steelback especially didn’t exactly impress anyone when on Fnatic’s roster.
Image via Lolesports.com and Twitter
Stats via oracleselixir.com
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