What is Going on with Rainbow7?
The Mexican Rainbow started the summer split with high expectations after their acquisition of LCK mid laner Baek “Ophelia” Jin-seong, but they have failed to recover from a shaky start. While they secured the 3rd seed, it isn’t that crazy to say that Rainbow7 is one of the weakest teams in the playoffs. All of this isn’t only due to their recent performances, but due to the fact that it’s very clear they are having internal issues as they keep changing their starting players.
It all started in week 5, when Rainbow7 decided to bench Ophelia as he was showing a poor individual level. Some of his teammates said that the main problem was related to their communication, which is an acceptable reason to look for changes. They reacquired Cepted, who played for R7 last split. While the team is looking much better now with Cepted, they are still having quite a lot of issues that aren’t going away even after changing one of their key pieces.
The 2nd change came in week 7, when Slow was benched out of the blue and IgnaVilu1 took his place. This change was the most unexpected one amongst all teams in the whole split. While IgnaVilu has played only 2 games with R7, I don’t think that he is even close to Slow’s level, which is why no one knows what R7 is aiming for with this change. There are rumors saying that Slow lost all his motivation after their bad streak earlier on in the season, but there haven’t been any official statements yet.
Now Rainbow7 is playing with 2 different players from the ones they started the split with. The worrying thing is that they did all of these changes during the 2nd-half of the regular season, which means that they don’t have that much time to adapt. IgnaVilu had a poor showing in his debut and I think these top teams are going to exploit his weaknesses.
The Argentinian Shark is Looking for Revenge
If we take a look back at what happened during the LLA Spring playoffs we can see why this match is a personal one for Isurus. After such a slow start last split, Isurus started to ramp up once playoffs started. Their journey began in the lower bracket, where they took down XTN and Infinity in back-to-back Bo5 series. Rainbow7 was waiting for them in the quarterfinals, but after 5 intense games, Isurus couldn’t handle the pressure and ended up falling down.
Now we could say that these two teams have swapped places. Isurus is now one of the absolute best teams in the LLA with only Estral being the ones capable of overcoming them. Gavotto has had an amazing development throughout the 2022 season. He started as one of the worst ADCs in the league and now he is looking like a strong contender for the best at his role this split.
While Isurus is the favorite team coming into this match, there is one red flag that keeps popping up. Jesús Alberto “Grell” Loya Trujillo is having a very up-and-down season and he’s the one that might cost Isurus the series. While he is fully capable of carrying Isurus on a good day, Grell is also capable of putting his own team in a disadvantageous position due to his over-aggressiveness.
Isurus vs Rainbow7 Game Information
- Date: Sunday, August 7th
- Time: 4:00pm ET
- Isurus vs Rainbow7 Live Stream: LLA – Twitch
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Isurus vs Rainbow7 Predictions
This might end up being the closest series of the first playoffs round, but that’s only if Rainbow7 manages to sort their problems. If we take a look at how this matchup went during the regular season, we can see that Isurus picked up 2 wins over Rainbow7, and those matches were not even close.
The only way I see R7 winning this series is if they found out the right combination of players during their last week of training. Who knows, we might end up seeing Ophelia play this time around, though it is very unlikely. Isurus is the 2nd strongest contender for the league title, that’s why the lol odds are heavily favoring them.
I expect a clean series from Isurus which should cement their form as they head into the semifinals where they are going to face the winner of the Estral vs Aze series. Check out the rest of our esports picks as we’ll be talking about the LLA throughout the entirety of the playoffs.
