SKT: The supreme regents of Korea
Well, well, well… if it isn't SKTelecom T1, back at Worlds and favored to win it all.
SKT is a team that requires little by way of introduction, thanks in no small part to their outstanding Season 3 World Championship run as well as the man, the myth, the legend anchoring their mid lane, Faker.
The 2015 Season brought reaching changes to the Korean scene, not the least of which being a shift away from the two-team organizational setup and a significant brain drain of the region's best talent. But despite the upheaval, SKT has emerged stronger than ever. Coming off a 17-1 Summer Split, in which they pulled off 14 straight set wins and easily walked off with the region's Championship title, SKT is poised to make history by claiming the Summoner's Cup a second time.
Can anyone stop this team?
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The Play
SKT's success isn't exactly a mystery -- their vision control enables their entire gameplan. They play each match systematically, amassing a gold lead and slowly ramping up to victory. It's a feeling of slow suffocation. Inevitable doom.
And what's more, they don't even need Faker to make the plays. Take, for example, SKT's Game 2 match against KT Rolster in the 2015 LCK Summer Finals. After KT burns everything to drop Faker for First Blood, the rest of SKT responds. Top laner MaRin Teleports in from base to land a critical four-man Unstoppable Force onto KT, and shortly thereafter, the cavalry arrives to polish off the rest of KT.
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The one true God
While in Spring the mid lane champion meta shoved substitute mid laner Easyhoon into the spotlight, Summer has been the return of the king. In the end, all roads lead back to Faker.
While Faker doesn't singlehandedly carry SKT as he sometimes needed to in the past, opposing teams' gameplans usually involve shutting him down, or playing around his aggressive tendencies. For SKT, that means often responding to the inevitable three or four-man gank squads that come his way a few minutes into each match.
The big difference between SKT of old and SKT now is that Faker's supporting cast is up to the challenge, even when he's shut down. MaRin has stepped up and become a gold efficient top laner who makes plays across the map, AD carry Bang has at times looked world class, and jungler Bengi and support Wolf have improved by orders of magnitude.
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Talk of the Rift
The domination that SKTelecom T1 showed during the Summer Season was very apparent when opposing teams, at different times, would refer to the team as "a mountain that [their teams] would have to scale."
"Nagne took the easy Viktor, but Faker...he chose Diana, a champion that can make tough plays," says CJ Entus Frost's former jungler CloudTemplar.
"I feel that [SKT] are the mountain that our team will have to scale."
"They are the strongest team in Korea and therefore, a mountain to climb. If we cannot win against SKT T1 then winning the World Championship is not going to happen, and we will practice very hard to win next time," says Piccaboo, former SKT support.
KT Rolster's Arrow Noh, in an interview conducted after KT's Playoffs victory against the KOO Tigers, alluded to SKT having a great reputation -- referring to the team's insane Summer Season record. KT's top laner, Ssumday, narrowly edged out Faker for the regular Summer Season MVP. He quipped in a previous interview (about defending his lead in the MVP run) that "since Faker is quite good [he got] a little nervous."
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Interested in learning more about the other teams competing at Worlds? Check out the whole lineup, now.
