This 2017 Worlds story is brought to you by Predator.
The GPL’s GIGABYTE Marines steamrolled an unsuspecting Fnatic today at Worlds, and they did it with two of the most obscure picks so far—Nocturne in the jungle and Lulu with Ignite and Heal.
Oh, and it worked perfectly.
GAM is famous for playing with overt aggressiveness through early tower dives, lane swaps, and group ganks. They’ve been dubbed the world’s greatest solo queue team as a joke. No, they aren’t an actual group of five solo queue players; they’re an actual professional team. Their aggressive and unpredictable tactics just mirror that of a high-level solo queue game. And today, they put that name to the test with these two very strange picks.
Nocturne isn’t a terrible jungler, but he’s not nearly as strong as others. He’s usually built as a tanky bruiser, boasting some respectable AD, but relying more heavily on his ultimate ability, fear, and spellshield to disrupt the enemy back line. GAM, however, built him as a pure lethality assassin, and his final score was six kills and three deaths. Every time he ulted, whatever poor victim he flew in towards would blow up in a matter of seconds.
As with any lethality assassin, he only needed to get ahead in the early game to be effective, and he certainly found that early lead.
The support pick was odd, though. GAM locked in Lulu, which is perfectly meta, but then ran Ignite and Heal rather than Flash, something that no one even in solo queue does. Well, not yet, anyway. After Phùng “Nevan” Thiện Nhân’s performance on it today, though, it’s safe to say you might see it pop up more often.
It paired together very well with the obscure assassin Nocturne pick, because it gave GAM’s bot lane tons of dueling power over Fnatic’s bot lane. With such a strong dueling presence, they were able to find the early lead that Nocturne so desperately needed, and the rest was history.
GAM’s next game is tomorrow at around 6am ET/6pm CST, where they’ll hopefully pull out some equally whacky picks against the LCK’s first-seed titans, Longzhu Gaming.
