Junglers Juan “Contractz” Garcia and Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett went head to head in a thrilling match between Cloud9 and Immortals in this week’s NA LCS.
With early leads found by Contractz and Dardoch in games two and three, the two junglers displayed just how monstrous Rengar and Lee Sin can be if given a few kills.
For Immortals, who looked to be an upswing after their promising week seven performance, this match was critical to keep their playoff dreams alive. Cloud9, on the other hand, already secured their spot in playoffs and instead set their sights on a playoff buy.
Immortals surprised fans with an impressive game one win. Playing proactively, Immortals top side fostered a lead over the much slower Cloud9 team. Immortals bot lane, one of the more criticised NA LCS duos shocked fans with a solo kill during the laning phase. Cloud9, through mid game rotations of their bot lane caught Immortals off guard and were able to secure a few kills for themselves.
Unfazed by these deaths, Immortals continued to abuse Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi’s slow scaling Kogmaw through constant teamfights. Cloud9, unable to win these fights, fell even further behind, eventually giving up the Baron—Immortals’ vital win condition.
While game one displayed a pretty clean win by Immortals, game two is where the real fun began.
In game two, Contractz went to work. Finding an early first blood onto Dardoch during his red buff clear, he proceeded to take over the game with Rengar.
Finding one successful gank after another, Contractz scored eight kills and four stacks on his bone tooth necklace before the 15 minute mark. Able to solo kill all of Immortals, Contractz simply became too big for anyone to deal with. A Contractz-led Cloud9 ended game two without a single turret lost. Contractz ended game two 15/3/3.
In the post game interview Dardoch revealed that Contractz’s jungle invade was something he learned from Dardoch himself in scrims.
Refusing to let Contractz overshadow him, Dardoch fired back with a dominant performance on Lee Sin in the final game of this best of three. Spured on by the first blood he secured in the bot lane, Dardoch played out the early game aggressively, unafraid to follow through on risky resonating strikes. This risk ultimately paid off for Dardoch, leaving the North American jungler with a scoreline of 9/1/9 by the game’s end.
While Dardoch dismantled Cloud9, the remaining four members of Immortals reaped the rewards of their jungler’s actions. Providing backup whenever Dardoch engaged onto Cloud9, the rest of Immortals were coasting midway through the game. Once Immortals secured the Baron, the game was over. Unable to defend against Immortals game winning push, Cloud9 could only watch as Immortals took the series.
With this upset victory over Cloud9, Immortals are one step closer to clinching a spot in playoffs. Their major competition for the spot is FlyQuest—who have lost their last four matches.
