Evil Geniuses’ run in the 2022 LCS Spring Split playoffs was something that will go down in the LCS history books. Miracle runs are not something we see often in the North American league and it’s hard to remember any other besides Cloud9’s miracle run back in the 2015 LCS Gauntlet. Evil Geniuses came into the playoffs as 4th seed and no one was expecting much from this team. Maybe a top 4 finish was enough for this team, but we were all wrong, even the lol odds.
Team Liquid was Evil Geniuses’ first opponent heading into the playoffs and it’s safe to say that everybody was expecting a clean sweep from Team Liquid. But what ended up happening was a back-and-forth series which ultimately ended up going in Team Liquid’s favor. Now if Evil Geniuses wanted to compete for the title they would have to win three best-of-5 series in a row.
Evil Geniuses went ahead and accepted the challenge as they took down 3-1 Spring Split’s 5th-place team FlyQuest, but something we didn’t know is that FlyQuest would be the only team to snatch a game away from Evil Geniuses during their miracle run. Evil Geniuses now had to face four-time LCS Champion Cloud9 and they defeated them convincingly in just 3 games. While this happened, Team Liquid would be taken down by 100 Thieves in the upper bracket, meaning that we would have a rematch between EG and TL.
In the semi-finals is where the magic happened for Evil Geniuses. They came off the gates fiercely as they finished the first game in less than 33 minutes. Everybody was expecting a close series but the evil geniuses had other plans in mind knowing that they could take Team Liquid down in just three games, and that’s exactly what happened. Evil Geniuses would go into the finals after winning 3 series in a row and were readier than ever. 100 Thieves didn’t stand a chance against EG and after 3 games, we had the fastest series we’ve ever had in the history of LCS grand finals.
Evil Geniuses Playstyle
Evil Geniuses’ playstyle revolves heavily around skirmishes and teamfighting, which is something really hard to play against per se. You can try and target one of their lanes specifically and play around that, but if Evil Geniuses manages to make it out safely of the early game, it’s going to be extremely hard for the enemy team to outplay them in teamfights.
It’s no surprise that Evil Geniuses plays around his ADC, and let’s best honest, why wouldn’t they? Danny has consistently proven that he is Evil Geniuses’ ultimate weapon when it comes to teamfighting and this is clearly demonstrated in the way EG drafts. In their last series, 100 Thieves tried to target EG’s strengths and banned Jinx but EG made it clear that they don’t rely on only 1 pick. Danny went ahead and played Aphelios and Xayah, both in a pristine way, this shows that he is comfortable playing any ADC suitable for the game and not just Jinx and Aphelios. He has also played Ezreal, Zeri, and even Miss Fortune, clearly demonstrating that targeting him is a tough challenge.
Player to watch: Kyle “Danny” Sakamaki
The North American 18-year-old rookie ADC achieved MVP of the series on his very first LCS grand finals. What Danny has achieved in his career — remember he’s only played 2 LCS splits so far — is nothing short of marvelous. LCS Champion, 2021 Rookie of the year, MVP in 7 regular split games, MVP of the series 3 times, and 4 pentakills in LCS, there are so many highlights in Danny’s career that it is impossible to go over every single one of them.
In the Spring playoffs, Danny scored 8 KDA, 642 DPM, and 71.4% KP, those were the highest amongst all the ADCs that played in the playoffs. Some people will look at Danny’s @15 stats and notice them to be considerably low and think badly of that. For me, that makes Danny’s performance way more impressive, he proves that he doesn’t need to come out on top during the landing phase to deal the highest amount of damage amongst all the ADCs in the LCS.
In this year’s MSI, Danny will be matched against G2 Esports Flakked and ORDER’s Puma. I would say that there are much stronger ADCs in some of the other teams featured in this tournament, but G2 has shown that they are very comfortable playing around his bot lane, we recently did a profile on them talking about this so be sure to check it out. Evil Geniuses is certainly the best team in the group if we are strictly talking about team fighting and this will be their strongest point coming into the 2022 MSI.
We’ll be covering all of the teams participating in this event so be sure to stay tuned as we’ll be posting profiles, news, esports picks, and more, all related to this year’s MSI!
