For weeks, Vitality sat in second place in our LEC power rankings, waiting for a chance to take down first-place G2. For the most part, both teams handled their business against lesser teams, just waiting to face off against each other in week eight.
When they finally loaded on to the Rift, Vitality pounced with a fury that G2 seemed wholly unprepared for. Kill after kill went to the French side and G2’s counters almost all fell flat.
Vitality achieved their lead by identifying a mismatch in the top lane between their own Lucas “Cabochard ” Simon-Meslet and G2’s Martin “Wunder” Hansen. Wunder is a fantastic player—he won games at Worlds last year seemingly on his own.
But Wunder is also a high-resources carry. Vitality bet that they could shut down his lane phase by sending both jungler and mid laner to support Cabochard—and they were right. Wunder was knocked out of the lane as Vitality had their run of the map. Both top lane turrets were down before Baron even spawned.
But in doing so, there was a lane Vitality forgot about: Mid lane. They let G2’s best player, Rasmus “Caps” Winther, scale into an unstoppable monster on Ryze, one of the highest-DPS late game mages in the game. Even as Vitality built a massive lead, there was always the threat of Caps going one-vs-nine to bring G2 back.
That’s exactly what he did. Of course, Vitality made it easier for them by throwing in a series of bad objective calls. This is not the way you beat G2:
Behind Caps’ damage, G2 slowly crawled back into the game. There were plenty of anxious moments for each, times when it seemed like the game could end quickly in either direction. But in the end, they just couldn’t stand up to Caps.
With the win, G2 locked up first place in the 2019 LEC Spring Split. They’re not without flaws, though—jungler Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski was absent for most of the game. But after stumbling a bit over the last two weeks, G2 proved that they can still bring it.
Vitality, on the other hand, need to go back to the drawing board. G2 are once again Europe’s white whale, the team that everyone else is desperately trying to chase down.
