After a poor start to the LCK’s Spring Split, Hanwha Life Esports have taken a different approach towards the end of the League of Legends spring season—and it has seemingly paid off in today’s match against the leader of the LCK standings, Gen.G.
Hanwha Life gave 110 percent effort today against GenG. Lee “CuVee” Seong-jin’s and Kang “Haru” Min-seung’s gameplay today was reminiscent of their times on Samsung, where they won the 2017 World Championship.
The series began with an easy win for Gen.G, but the tides turned quickly in game two. After Hanwha Life tied the series, they won the third game to complete the reverse sweep against Gen.G.
CuVee served as the decisive factor for Hanwha Life’s win in the second game of the series. He was given the hyper-scaling champion Kayle, who has an extremely weak early game but comes online after level six and becomes much stronger as the game goes by.
Hanwha Life had a huge advantage with the third dragon being Ocean. With the team killing the first drakes, they were closer to the Dragon Soul compared to Gen.G. Once Hanwha Life obtained the Ocean Dragon Soul, they were unstoppable with CuVee on Kayle and obtained an easy win to tie up the series 1-1.
After a decisive loss in the second game to the Ocean Dragon Soul, Gen.G failed to learn from their mistakes and ignored the early dragons again. Hanwha Life put all of their eggs into the drake-shaped basket, and the Ocean Dragon spawned again as the third drake. With Gen.G realizing that they’ll lose the game if they don’t secure the Dragon Soul, they started committing a lot of mistakes which gave their opponents the advantage.
Hanwha Life secured vision and came to the drake one minute before it spawned, sacrificing side lane minion experience and gold for every single dragon. Once they got the Ocean Dragon Soul, they became unstoppable like in the second game and were looking to close it out. Gen.G were resilient and did not give up, but a play around the Elder Dragon sealed their fate.
With this win, Hanwha Life are out of the relegation zone and the former World Championship participants, Griffin, will have to fight a Challengers Korea team for a chance in the next season of the LCK.
Gen.G look quite shaky going into the playoffs. Even though they are still first in the standings, they should look into fixing their mistakes before they get taken advantage of in the playoffs.
