Game of the Day: Counter Logic Gaming versus Curse

By Helmight

            Despite their seat in sixth place, Curse has refused to take a day off. With a game against the second-place Counter Logic Gaming, no one would have faulted Curse for taking it easy and playing for next season. Instead, Curse came out swinging, taking CLG down early with some aggressive moves and then keeping their advantage with good objective control. With CLG out of sorts and seemingly discombobulated by their early losses, it was a simple matter in the end for Curse to take the win.

            Curse’s commanding lead in the early game is what allowed them to take out CLG. A smart rotation by IWillDominate and Voyboy allowed them to catch dexter as he tried to secure his blue buff. After taking first blood off of CLG’s jungler, Curse’s bottom lane proceeded to pick up a solo kill onto Doublelift thanks to a ballsy Flash-Soul Shackles play by Xpecial. That in turn led Curse to their first dragon of the game – and was then followed by a five-man dive of CLG’s bottom lane that produced two kills and the first tower of the game for Curse. And get this: all of these advantages were gained by Curse within five minutes. Suddenly reeling and finding themselves four thousand gold behind, CLG opted to play exceedingly passively, relying on the power of Link’s Command: Shockwave to protect them under their towers.

However, it wasn’t nearly enough. Without interference from CLG, Curse could take all the objectives they wanted, growing their lead to almost 16k gold. Eventually, Counter Logic Gaming was forced into a desperate fight in front of their inhibitor tower – one in which they lost by a large margin. With their opponents dead and the tower-taking power of their double AD carry composition, it was child’s play for Curse to take home the victory.

            AD Tristana may just become the next hot midlane champion after Voyboy’s second win with her. Thanks to Tristana’s good harass in the early game and high damage on her Explosive Shot, Voyboy was able to bully out Link’s Orianna with no issues at all. Meanwhile, Rocket Jump allowed Voyboy to play aggressively – the huge range was almost guaranteed to keep him safe from ganks. “I think that Tristana’s a really strong pick because you can always play it mid or AD, so it’s just kind of a flex pick that is a bit ambiguous,” said IWillDominate after the game. Xpecial also played marvelously for Curse, making excellent use of his ultimate and Dark Bindings to secure early kills for his team and to dissuade dexter from making an assassination attempt on Cop. Curse’s immaculate objective control was more important than their individual play though – they secured 9 towers, 5 dragons, and 2 Barons throughout the game, which had a huge impact on snowballing their early leads.

            CLG meanwhile looked awful. Even after giving up a ton of gold to Curse in the early game, they continued to play aggressively and look for kills. However, they couldn’t possibly hope to outfight Curse with their disadvantages and gave up additional kills to Voyboy. With the score suddenly 9-1 in Curse’s favor, Counter Logic Gaming decided to play defensively – but went too far with their passive play. They didn’t contest a single dragon or Baron and only moderately tried to defend their inner towers.

This let Curse roam all over the map, taking objectives and farm wherever they pleased to keep CLG from getting back into the game. Though Curse’s squishy comp might have had issues when sieging on the inhibitor towers, their huge gold advantage rendered their squishiness moot and let them shrug off Link’s Shockwave initiation.

Counter Logic Gaming (L)				Curse (W)
Kills	Turrets	Gold		Kills	Turrets			Gold
3	1	44.2k		14	9			63.8k
Lineup
Position	Player	Champion	K/D/A	Position		Player			Champion	K/D/A
Top	Seraph	Dr. Mundo	1/2/1	Top	Quas				Lulu	2/0/7
Jungle	dexter	Rengar	1/4/2	Jungle	IWillDominate				Evelynn	2/2/7
Mid	Link	Orianna	0/2/2	Mid	Voyboy				Tristana	4/0/6
ADC	Doublelift	Jinx	1/4/2	ADC	Cop				Corki	4/0/5
Support	Aphromoo	Braum	0/2/3	Support	Xpecial				Morgana	2/1/5
Bans
Yasuo	Thresh	Gragas		Twitch			Nidalee	Elise

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