Top Esports double down on the gameplay that cost them at Worlds
I first interviewed Hung “Karsa” Haohsuan of the Flash Wolves in what could only be described as a fabric closet at the Mid Season Invitational in 2016. At the close ofDay 1 of Group Stage, the Flash Wolves had taken out G2 Esports, but lost to Counter Logic Gaming.
Flash Wolves often accepted every interview request in those years, and Karsa no doubt had several journalists to talk to that day. He sat down in a plastic chair next to the Riot-provided translator. I don’t remember the exact question I asked, but I remember his answer not addressing the question at all— either due to a translation error or general wariness.
“Mainly I think ganking is like gambling,” Karsa’s translator said. “When you win on a gank, you’re double down, but if you lose on a gank, you lose farm, but I like gambling, and if we win all those gambles, then our team will be up.”
In Demacia Cup in 2020, now a part of LPL team TOP Esports, Karsa chose an early rotation Pantheon in the team’s second match against Fun Plus Phoenix. FPX and TES had banned most of the popular fast clear meta picks like Graves, Olaf, and Lillia, making a more feast or famine ganking jungler palatable and easier to choose. Yet as the tournament wore on, TES’ Pantheon jungle picks increased in boldness. They went so far as to select it in the blind pick game of the semifinals against Vici Gaming and drew Pantheon bans from both VG and their Finals opponent Team WE.
Even though I didn’t ask for the answer about his playstyle that Karsa gave in 2016, I don’t think I’ve encountered a line that describes him better. He’s always been “the gambler” on every team he’s been on, and with fast clear jungling, a lack of rubber band experience, near horrific losses to Fnatic and Suning at Worlds when their junglers got experience leads over Karsa, the Pantheon coming out for TES domestically is the strongest signal of “doubling down” I’ve ever seen.
Historically, the LPL viewer experience often invokes the ever-popular line from Breaking Bad’s Season 5 Episode 12.
Almost every dominant domestic LPL team since 2011 can be reduced to a simple one-dimensional formula. When you watch a Team WE, an Invictus Gaming, an EDward Gaming or a Royal Club (whatever name you choose) match, it’s easy to know what to expect.
In recalling EDward Gaming’s long string of wins form 2014 to 2017, they played heavily around level six spikes, inventing reasons to play out a 3v3 around bottom lane. They invoked globals to force the fight. Tian “meiko” Ye famously considered a game a failure if the bottom lane Tier 1 turret didn’t fall before ten minutes (pre platings). Ming “Clearlove” Kai dutifully cleared his jungle to ensure a level six spike, and EDward Gaming otherwise played a relatively scattered early game.
I remember my constant frustrations as a spectator because EDward Gaming were incredibly easy to read. You could create a strategy to counter them seamlessly. Despite their reliance on bot lane skirmishes and fights, they even intentionally drafted weak lane matchups to bait their opponents into a brawl (hence the 2017 myth that Twitch countered Lucian).
EDward Gaming stick out as the most offensive of the LPL champions historically because of their long dynasty without international success (bar 2015 MSI), but I can levy the same complaint against international victors Invictus Gaming and Fun Plus Pheonix. iG play extremely volatile lanes and rely on getting better top side trades for sacrificing their bottom lane. FPX, like clockwork, will pressure bottom with their jungler then send support and jungle to free the mid lane and dive bottom. When games go south, they let Kim “Doinb” Taesang rotate between mid and one side lane to get two lanes of farm on a hyper carry like Kassadin or Ryze.
It doesn’t really matter what other teams do globally, what champion picks they select, or how their opponents respond. Top LPL teams play a game of chicken and dare their opponents to join the rift with a counter strategy. If a team changes the way they play to answer you, they’ve already lost. There’s no way they can play a counter strategy as well as you’ve played the style you’ve played for seasons.
iG and FPX took away the World Championship title because the global meta swung in a direction already comfortable to them. 2018 Royal Never Give Up played stubbornly around scaling bottom lane hyper carries, but they lost footing in a season that could have been theirs when solo lane flex carries dominated. 2019 Invictus Gaming started their steady nose dive when top lane lost importance, and roaming mid-jungle 2v2s took over the rift to make room for FPX.
In 2020, when the jungle gained power halfway through the season, TOP Esports, a team with a gambler willing to give farm in favor of ganks, managed to win their first LPL title. Domestically, teams didn’t punish Karsa for his heavy lane pressure. Lanes play more volatile than anywhere else in the world, so he almost always came away with a kill bonus, and junglers rarely punished him by counter-jungling his camps.
Even Rainbow7 showed better ability to set a jungler behind for taking risks in ganks that shouldn’t work against LGD Gaming in Play-Ins than TES’ opponents had all summer. Based on the trends of RNG and iG’s rise and fall, TES’ losses to Fnatic and Suning (who bucked the trend by adapting during the tournament) were already expected.
Rather than learn their lessons, however, Karsa’s Pantheon in Demacia Cup symbolized a re-commitment to his “gambling” approach of abusing mistakes made by opponent laners to get his teammates ahead. Hopes for Team WE to tip the scales came from a strong support player in Luo “Missing” Yunfeng and jungler Jiang “beishang” Zhipeng who often plays for his lead. This formula helped Fnatic and Suning disrupt TES at Worlds.
But from Game 1 of the Grand Final, the immortal words of Jesse Pinkman echoed once again. Counter to WE’s usual approach, they blinded a Camille-Sejuani top-jungle duo against Karsa’s Graves. Graves should have had the initiative to play more for his own lead in this matchup, but beishang started top to avoid a split map scenario. When Karsa went to invade and counter-jungle, he wasted time on a wolf camp (the camp with the least amount of experience), when beishang could have simply ducked into the bottom of the map and gotten a lead by clearing higher value camps like raptors and krugs. Instead he tried to stop Karsa doing wolves.
Karsa continued to try to execute invades that actually set him behind more than benefitted him throughout the series, picking up low value camps and opening the map for punishes that beishang didn’t take. In Game 2, beishang had more agency as Olaf, but after successfully denying Karsa his blue buff and gromp on the first clear, he kept opting into bottom lane ganks that wasted tempo and went horribly awry as dives onto Viktor with Gravity Field and wave clear. He also fruitlessly attempted to contest the first dragon with top camps up on both sides of the map, foregoing the opportunity for a lead.
Meanwhile, despite not getting a kill top in his first gank, Karsa’s pressure forced opponent top laner Chen “Breathe” Chen to recall in a matchup difficult for Bai “369” Jiahao’s Akali early. That gave 369 a free recall for Mercury’s Treads when Breathe didn’t TP back. Even though Karsa’s gank didn’t result in a kill, it still gave his team more map pressure and better path to their win condition than any of beishang’s tempo wastes for botched kills.
If TES’ greatest domestic rivals respond to the way they play in this manner, they will only receive a reward for digging in their heels. It isn’t that TES should change how they play to match their international rivals, they seem to think, they just need to get better at what they’re already good at — good enough to make it back to Worlds and win.
I imagine the 2016 me interviewing Karsa at MSI becoming incredibly frustrated by this. In fact, only months later, I wrote an article criticizing EDward Gaming after they barely scraped passed Team WE in the LPL Summer Semifinal for failing to change to improve or acknowledge flaws in their meta read.
But time has made me understand that TES attempting to play “correct” League of Legends probably won’t push them over the line and make them champions. It certainly didn’t for Suning, who dropped Le “SofM” Quang Duy’s fascination with tanky Sett for power farming Nidalee — it was enough for them to best the likes of G2 and TES who starved their junglers for volatile laners, but not enough to take down DAMWON.
LPL teams aren’t the only ones at the whims of the ever-changing game. Kim “Canyon” Geonbu’s ability to control the jungle and set up intelligent split-maps often got over-shadowed by Jang “Nuguri” Hagwon’s Kleptomancy abuse in 2019. DAMWON’s downward trend in Spring flipped in Summer with increase in jungle experience on camps.
DAMWON didn’t change or adapt to the meta as one would traditionally think top teams do. Instead, the jungle change finally shed light on the team’s greatest asset. What looked like TES’ year in Spring quickly became DAMWON’s in Summer with a few strokes of the programmer’s keyboard.
Obviously, that’s a very reductionist way to look at it. DAMWON and TES both grinded for monthsto perfect their methods of playing the game. Both teams have flaws abusable by drafts and concentrated practice, and the ever changing state of the game merely makes some strengths shine brighter than most. At the highest level of play, slight advantages tip the scales.
TES’ “early game weaknesses” come down to playing the jungle inefficiently, relying on lower probability plays than what drafts set up with priority lanes and winning jungle matchups. They rely on getting enough to pull it together and fight beautifully with range advantages (another thing not guaranteed to them on the international stage where teams aren’t preoccupied with heavy flanking Renekton comps).
Karsa has remained a gambler, and he dwells now on a team of gamblers who have taken him higher in international standings than he has ever been. It’s stupid, then, to tell him to change now. Don’t double down. Don’t dig in your heels. Don’t retain the qualities that continue to grant you more and more success year after year.
TES probably won’t be an internationally dominant team with their current roster unless Riot Games buffs plates or minions waves, or nerfs jungle again. But they have a better chance of making it than rewriting the way Karsa thinks about the jungle or resetting the way he has finally learned to play like a competent duo with Zhou “Knight” Ding after a full year of play together.
Then there’s always the chance that another adage of Karsa’s is right. As he now famously said on October sixth, after TES’ match against Unicorns of Love on Day Four of Group Stage, “Whoever plays well IS the meta.”
If TES double down hard enough, they can defy a history of trends. Perhaps they can be that much better than their opponents that the state of the game doesn’t matter in 2021, and the team with the best execution of the “meta” doesn’t win.
That’s a gamble I’d love to see play out.
