International Wildcard Regional Survival Guide

PEX is another team that seems to favor the late-game. In the Copa LatinoAmerica, Latin America’s International Wildcard qualifiers), their mid Uri was almost always on an extremely late-game scaling champion like Ryze or Orianna. Additionally, the team seemed intent on avoiding teamfights and simply rotating around objectives until they had enough teamfight strength. As a result, their games weren’t nearly as much of a bloodbath as many of the other matches within the LATAM region.

When PEX’s games were kill-heavy, though, it was typically thanks to one lane snowballing out of control, as opposed to early teamfights. Their top laner, MANTARRAYA, consistently outperformed his opponents in both CS and team-fighting presence.

On the other hand, PEX’s ADC, MegaJp, seemed to always fall behind in CS, even when he was ahead in kills. Given the extreme ADC talent on the international stage, it will be interesting to see how their bot lane matches up against the likes of Rekkles and other top-tier ADCs. And in the event that the bot lane duos collapse, how well the rest of the team can compensate.

Kabum really knows how to handle a range advantage. Their mid-lane ADC combo is almost always extremely high ranged, with Tinowns and MinervaTT showing preferences for champions like Ziggs, Xerath, Kog’Maw, and Jinx. They seemed extremely comfortable on such compositions, using the range of those champions as a weapon against any strategy.

Against dive compositions, Kabum simply backed off and avoided engages, poking the enemy team down over time. Against poke comps, they were too far away even to be poked. They locked down mobily teams at range, and used ranged CC to make picks on immobile teams. With range coming into a premium in other leagues recently, thanks to the rise of champions like Kog’Maw and Xerath, the meta may just be perfectly poised for Brazil to make a Cinderella run.

Oh and as an aside, if there’s something the League of Legends scene can take away from the Brazilian scene, it’s excitement. Listen to how the casters and the crowd get behind the first teamfight of the grand finals!

Dark Passage steamrolled through their own finals in the Turkish Grand Finals tournament, running the same composition in both of their blue side games. Their jungler, Crystal M, just seemed to be a step ahead of the opposing team at every step, going a combined 14-4-46 en route to the team’s 3-0 finals sweep.

Their team compositions seemed very reminiscent of a certain Cloud9’s 2014 Spring Splits, with great top-jungle synergy. If Dark Passage got Jax, the early-mid game gank potential of Elise allowed him to snowball, while the later pick potential made his split-pushing extremely dangerous. On the other hand, on red side, when they missed out on the opportunity to secure Jax, they simply ran the old worklizard Renekton, picking up Evelynn for more teamfight presence.

Of note, Dark Passage had a clear preference for running one single-target burst champion and one AoE burst champion. With Ziggs, they paired Lucian; with LeBlanc, they picked up Graves. The strategy was nothing less than potent. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the adversity of the most competitive stage in League of Legends.

At Gamescom, Dark Passage further proved themselves to be a team capable of competing on the international stage. Check out our full rundown of the team’s Finals match against Oceania’s Legacy eSports for more on how Dark Passage qualified to Worlds.