Clean sweeps
Both H2K and Giants 3 - 0'd their opponents before advancing to the fourth round. Before that, they also performed extremely convincingly - H2K haven't even dropped a single game, whereas Giants have dropped one, although they have played an extra series.
H2K is made up of parts of the former European C9 Challenger Series squad - Odoamne, Febiven and Hjärnan. They recently picked up Loulex and Voidle as well, and were definitely one of the favourite teams going into this tournament, and they have lived up to that hype.However, what caused them to lose their previous LCS qualifier tournaments was the fact that they tend to choke on stage rather easily. They seem to have learned from their earlier mistakes, which could be seen during the series versus N!Faculty, where they didn't seem to have too much trouble closing out the series without a single loss in front of a crowd.
Febiven has said himself that if he can get into the LCS and get some proper practice versus better teams, he finds himself potent to be just as good as the likes of Froggen and Xpeke. We will see if he can live up to his own statement, or if it will follow his career forever in regret. Hjärnan has some tendencies to go too aggressive sometimes, and Odoamne can be a bit inconsistent - he went 1/5 as Lissandra in game one versus N!Faculty, followed by a 8/1 score in the next. If he can make sure to perform consistently and Hjärnan knows his limits and the team in general doesn't repeat history with a choke on - stage, we might just see a H2K as our 9th LCS team over here in Europe.
Giants is an organization that has actually participated in the LCS before, during the very first LCS split - the spring split of 2013. The Spanish organization did well in the qualifier tournaments, and made their way into the very first professional league for LoL E - Sports. However, their performance was definitely not stellar during the split - they finished 7th with a record of 8 - 20, where they lost the qualifier tournament back into the LCS with a 3 - 2 record to Team ALTERNATE.
Following this, Giants did not renew the contracts of their players, and the team vanished from professional League of Legends for an extended amount of time. Aproximately ten months later, Giants announced their comeback, and got a new roster together. On November 14th, they picked up Rydle, a very promising support player who used to play for Gamers2, the former SK midlaner Ocelote played on, who Giants later on during the expansion tournament, beat during the first rounds.
One of Giants advantages are currently that all of the five players are native Spanish, easing up communication, where as H2K is made up of a several nationalities, such as Swedish and Russian. Pepinero and Rydle definitely were the shining stars of their team, which will be needed in the upcoming best - of - five.
So, who will come out victorious?
In my opinion, I feel H2K has the upper hand here. They have several hyped players, two former NALCS players as coaches and some of the players have played together for almost a year, promoting some very strong synergy. While Giants have the advantage of speaking the same language, I feel that H2K's raw mechanical prowess will outclass that of their opponents.
Regardless, we have some interesting games to look forward to. Tune in at lolesports.com to check it out.
PS. I have started doing some commentary on youtube to try out shoutcasting for fun. Link in my bio.
