It’s finally here, the 2022 League of Legends World Championship has arrived and we cannot be any more excited! It’s been a wild year for all the spectators out there, with many surprises along the way.
Throughout the past couple of weeks, we’ve covered a lot of what we can expect from this year’s most important League of Legends tournament. From meta predictions, to which players will have the biggest impact on their teams. Now we’ll be sharing our esports picks with you. Today we’ll be going over the opening match, Isurus vs Mad Lions, so without further ado, let’s jump right into it!
Can Grell Survive on the International Stage?
Every time we talk about Isurus, it seems that we have to talk about how inconsistent Grell is when putting up a carry performance. Sure, he’s had some great games where he is the main reason for Isurus’ victories, but the opposite happens too. Unless Grell finds some kind of big early-game advantage, he is being constantly picked off alone and causing Isurus to lose pressure around the map.
Now, fortunately for the Argentinian shark, they can rely on someone to carry them through tough times. Seiya, the king of the north, is finally back and he has been a determining factor in every single one of their matches. If we take a look at Isurus’ games in the 2022 LLA Summer finals where they faced off Estral, Seiya was winning every single one of his lanes and that put Isurus in a very comfortable position.
Taliyah, Swain, Azir, Orianna, Galio, LeBlanc, it’s almost as if Seiya can play any champion in the game. This will be Isurus’ biggest advantage heading into this game, especially if we consider that he’ll be going up against Nisqy, a mid laner that doesn’t necessarily play to win lane.
Mad Lions need to play Aggressively in the early game
During the regular season, MAD was the dominant early-game team. They played a very aggressive roaming style with high Jungle Proximity and high Kills and Assists as well as Deaths, though they completely changed how they played/were forced into changing their playstyle, leading to way worse results. It’s safe to say that the Lions’ greatest strength is playing around the early game, where Elyoya can help his team the most.
This early game aggression led to one of the best objective control in the LEC. While MAD did prioritize Herald over Dragons in the early-game, their Regular Season leads let them come back for the highest DRAKE% and good Dragon Soul stats. Interestingly, their numbers still look good in some places in the Playoffs, they still got early Heralds and were able to secure the Dragon Soul in their 3 wins (but lost all games where they did not). Overall the team had a really strong Baron control, even if you account for their early leads and that they got a lot of wins.
The Elyoya-Nisqy-Kaiser triangle is going to be a threat big enough for Grell, to the point where they’ll be able to fully neutralize him in the early game. Even if Unforgiven doesn’t manage to get a huge lead during the early game, it’s safe to say that the rest of his team is going to be able to carry him with ease by playing around the middle of the map. Meanwhile, Armut really doesn’t have to do much other than not die as ADD is a coinflippy player.
Isurus vs Mad Lions Match Information
- Date: Thursday, September 29
- Time: 4:00pm ET
- Isurus vs Mad Lions Live Stream: Twitch.tv
Isurus vs Mad Lions Prediction
Let’s be completely honest, Isurus is not going to have a good time in their 2022 Worlds opening match. They are outclassed not only as a team, but individually too, and by a lot. Unless a miracle happens, we can expect an easy win for Mad Lions here, and even if things start to go wrong, I fully trust Mad Lions to be able to stabilize the game and close it out.
MAD had fairly long games despite large early leads and their overall high early bloodiness (on average) is tampered later in the game. While this might not make a lot of sense, it actually is going to act in favor of Mad Lions, especially against Isurus. MAD usually had low bloodiness in their Wins and relied on Objectives to win games at a below average pace. But in their losses, where they were often not that far behind, the games were very very bloody, they died a lot and lost very quickly.
Isurus is not a team good enough to simply play their game, which means that Mad Lions will be in control of the early game, allowing them to play a slow-paced game and not have a lot of trouble during the mid and late game. If we take everything into consideration, we can expect a game fully controlled by Mad Lions and with a low kill-count.
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