Edward Gaming - LPL's Comeback Artists
Consider a team with a massive amount of early pressure. Their mid laner roams bottom to find kills. Their jungler always gets off the right ganks to transition into quick towers and dragons. They can pick up a five thousand gold lead in ten minutes.
Consider another team that can find a way to get a foot in the door and completely reverse a game, no matter how battered and beleaguered they are. Even ten thousand gold behind, they only need one good fight to turn the tides.
Which of these teams is better?
Edward Gaming is one of the latter teams. Though their early game play constantly raises eyebrows, their late game coordination often wins the day, and they've managed an LPL record of 18 wins and 6 losses, putting them in second place by a comfortable margin.
PATIENCE REALLY IS A VIRTUE
If there's an obvious flaw in the way EDG plays, it's their early game warding. They have made some strides in this effort, but many fans remember the first game EDG played in LPL against Invictus Gaming. IG's jungler, illuSion was able to quietly solo Dragon twice seemingly before EDG could get a ward on the bottom half of the map. Though they no longer give up dragons so easily and have made considerable strides in the vision department, a lack of early game wards often forces EDG to play a cautious game.
EDG are forced to find ways to compensate for losing towers and objectives due to a lack of vision in the early game. At first, Clearlove was considered a farming jungler, but his ganks in top or bottom almost always result in kills. By farming it out and finding small advantages in kills, EDG prepares for the next phase.
HALTING THE ADVANCE
How does Edward Gaming manage to stall so effectively? There have been at least three games this split where EDG has fallen behind by around ten thousand gold and an inhibitor or two but managed to pull out a miracle comeback. The key seems to be in champion picks and the way the team moves around the map. While EDG struggle with early game warding, they compensate by composing heavy wave clear teams. Then late game, they pepper the map with pink wards. While some teams split up, EDG stays constantly grouped when they venture from their dilapidated base, starving out vision in their own jungle to prevent surprise advances.
Part of the reason EDG lost to PE this week was their Nidalee pick. While U has played Nidalee well in the past, Nidalee provides no safe wave clear for her team to stall when they fall behind. Ziggs, on the other hand, is one of the best wave clearing mid laners in the game, and he has the highest win rate for EDG—tied with Kha'Zix and Morgana—at five wins and one loss. U has the highest KDA ratio for his team at 6.9 and is ranked second for MVP points in LPL behind OMG's xiyang. It's hard to dispute how fundamental he has been to the team's comebacks, as his Ziggs has been able to both stall out games and flatten enemy HP with five-man Mega Inferno Bombs.
GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE
With pink wards around the map and enough items to make gold differences less significant, EDG looks for opportunities to pick team-fights. Most of these fights occur around Baron, as securing the objective will make future fights even more potent and help to further close the gold gap. EDG might not win every single late game engagement, but they almost always manage to win the right ones.
EDG's secret to success has to do with more than just vision. Fzzf will often start fights onto carries, and each member of his team will follow through. Koro1 is consistently capable of zoning out multiple targets, U's spells will send the enemies into disarray, and ClearLove assassinates high priority targets while NaMei cleans up. EDG executes this strategy time-and-again, almost seamlessly. Constant practice makes them capable of turning almost any game around in a single fight.
The exception to this style occurred in the games against OMG, which may be the only team more coordinated than EDG in LPL: though one cannot overstate how close the gold totals were for most of the game. Even in their loss to PE, however, EDG played their stall and engage game to great effect. They fell behind by around eight thousand gold before finding a key fight around Baron. Despite falling so far behind at the start, EDG only narrowly lost by a single nexus turret in a base race after a 54 minute game.
There are many theoretical statements one can make about what makes a team better than another. One might say that EDG gives up too many free kills and objectives in the early game to be "good." Ultimately, however, the best team is the team that keeps winning, no matter what. With the level of coordination and late game control EDG exhibits, we expect them to keep winning.
