Machi Esports comfortably swept PSG Talon in the Pacific Championship Series’ Summer Split grand final today. This title means that Machi have secured the first seed from the region heading into the League of Legends World Championship later this year.
Each time these two organizations have met in a playoffs match over the years, the series has gone to five full games, meaning the teams have built quite the serious rivalry. So for Machi, a team that lost the Spring Split final to PSG, the revenge of winning this much more important title in Summer must feel oh so sweet.
Unfortunately for fans and players alike, the entertaining storylines were heavily marred by the technical issues that plagued some of Riot’s Asian servers throughout the night. As easy and quick as it was for Machi to dispatch PSG in-game, the broadcast consisted of seven grueling hours of non-play.
PSG won’t be able to blame their surprising loss on the stop and start nature of the series, however, as it was evident from get-go that Machi had their number.
The first game saw PSG looking to play aggressively, pro-actively forcing trades in lane. Despite their regular season dominance, however, the team actually has the lowest first-blood rate in the league. This change of pace had them looking uncomfortable as Machi, a team much more at ease with a high tempo, were able to overpower PSG in these scrappy engages.
This was the story of all three matches. Typically, PSG look to draft mid lane champions like Corki that love to farm and have good scaling for late-game fights. In this series, they preferred to draft champs like Zoe, which garnered criticism from the PCS analysts and fans alike.
Both sides drafted what were essentially the same team compositions for the second game. Unified, described as being the franchise played for PSG, struggled to find any value in teamfights because of the enemy’s ability to control space beyond Kalista’s range with the abilities from Orianna.
Machi took game one in such dominant fashion that it may have been easy to see it as a foreshadowing of what was still yet to come.
Despite losing the draft again in match two, through some kind of sheer brilliance, PSG found repeated picks on Machi players that led to the securing of Infernal Soul and all three Barons. But the losing draft proved to be a ticking time bomb for PSG, who, when it mattered most, found themselves without the crowd control, engage tools, or beefy front line that Machi had. With one clean ace, Machi found themselves up two matches.
The third match was much of the same. PSG found early objective pressure, but failed to translate that into any meaningful map pressure because they couldn’t handle the high tempo that Machi was imposing in the mid-game.
The casters went as far as to say that “Machi just trashed PSG in the draft, enough said.” The player of the series was without question Machi’s jungler Gemini, who finished with a combined KDA of 14/1/20 in an astounding display of raw mechanics and intelligent decision-making on Lee Sin.
Both of these teams have already secured spots at Worlds later this year. Machi will be seeded straight into the group stage, while PSG will have to play their way through the play-ins if they want to make it to the main stage.
Worlds 2020 kicks off in Shanghai on Sept. 25.
