Day 1 Highlight: EDG execution on Tower dive

   Edward Gaming (EDG)  vs Bangkok Titans (BKT) was the biggest miss-match for day 1 for the League of Legends World Championship. Coming into this tournament, EDG is a very fearsome and is one of the contenders for world championship title. They showed that they are not here to mess around with today’s game against the Bangkok Titians (BKT).

One of the highlight was how beautifully they 2v4 dive against BKT. This dive perfectly illustrate how teams should approach a dive and how to distribute the gold towards the right people. 

The Set up

For preparation for this dive, they predicted BKT’s movement by placing two wards in the enemy jungle. They spotted Reksai coming to aid the maokai and they are given the information that Braum was nowhere close to the Bottom Tier 1 turret due to the vision secured around enemy’s blue side jungle.

In addition, Deft’s jinx was able to manipulate the lane and have one full canon minion wave prep for the tower dive.

The Dive

Jinx started the tower dive by throwing down her flame chompper, limiting both Maokai and Reksai’s movement to the right side of the wall behind the turret.

By throwing down the chomper, it allowed rest of the EDG member from the top side to move in more easily as BKT members had no where to go, they were not allowed to move downwards because it will result them getting rooted by the flame chompers.

At this point, BKT ‘s only choice was to hug the tower and force EDG to dive deeper, once the turret dive happens, they hope to jump on the EDG member that takes the turret shot. If they are able to get kills by locking down EDG members that takes the agro, they will come out of this play positive

     However, EDG gave them no chance. First of all, all EDG member from the top side collapsed onto BKT members simply by walking in. Thresh made the first move to take turret agro by igniting Reksai, then he flayed both BKT members to apply crowd control on them. He flayed Maokai into Jinx flame chompers and then began to walk out of the turret range.

    Reksai responded by flashing onto thresh, and knocked up thresh to ensure he stayed longer for more tower agro. However, Thresh anticipated this and responded by flashing out of the tower range. 

During this time, Maokai that was flayed into the flame chomper was focused by rest of the EDG and its killed by Jinx. The beauty was that when Maokai was below 100hp, every other member of EDG backed off from maokai and let Jinx finalized the kill

Next, after Thresh got out of tower range, he threw down a death sentence to finalize the lock down on reksai. After that death sentence landed on Reksai, every other member move out of tower range and stop doing damage to Reksai, allows jinx to get the kill gold.

The requirement to execute this play

What’s amazing is that this requires very clear communication in between the teams and lots of trust with each other. Tower dives like these are very risky and can end up disastrous if not execute properly. Had Thresh took an extra tower shot, he would have died and make the entire dive worthless. Furthermore, all team members was very clear on how they should distribute the gold. All EDG members was able to calculate how much damage they should do before they back off and hand it to Jinx, as well as calculate how much damage they can take from the dive.  EDG demonstrate that they are one of the contender for the championship title, and they are extremely hungry for it.