End of an Era for Russian LoL Royalty

For the role of Jungler Edward suggested Diamondprox, an 1800 Elo player he had seen. Despite 1800 being equivalent to a bit over 2100 Elo in Season 2 numbers this was a low figure for a professional player, and what's more Diamondprox only played two champions at the time: Udyr and Trundle. This is best highlighted by an anecdote he later related about checking a TheOddOne guide on how to play Rammus, a champion he didn't know, during the champion selection screen, then going on to win the match with it.

"At Kiev they did a snowball strat, basically games were pretty boring since we just copied that once we saw it, since we didn't have the playstyle to counter that, which is stall like crazy, so we just did that to them. So if you look at the VODs for that IEM they were just complete stomps, from like maybe 5 mins on from when ppl start taking the enemy buffs over and over."

To suit his needs, Diamond popularized champions like Shyvana and Lee Sin who were both specialized for counter jungling with their fast clear, high mobility and dueling potential. He would also especially be good at knowing when to go into the opposing jungle without facing extraordinary threat of dying. With this aggressive counter jungling added to the fact that junglers would be getting early oracles in S2, Diamond was also able to provide a considerable amount of map control for his team. The enemy jungle was no longer safe for the enemy jungler. This presence across the map allowed for M5 to aggressively seek out objectives and win dominantly.

The final game of the group was one for the ages, with M5 up over 27,000 in gold at one point, but seeing CLG.EU pull of a comeback of truly epic proportions. The game lasted an hour and more than 100,000 viewers witnessed the first instance of CLG.EU's impeccably defensive stall-out style overcoming M5 offline. The online results had not been mere online anomalies to be correct offline, CLG.EU were a real threat for M5 where it mattered. Nevertheless M5 had reached the playoffs, and would face Curse.EU there, another team who had upset them online.

In the final Gambit faced the other Azubu team, Blaze, in a rematch of their group stage game. They had beaten Blaze 2:1 in Vegas in December, but here in Katowice they had suffered a loss to them in the group stage. Gambit once more repeated their miraculous feat from the previous round, 2:0ing Blaze to take their first offline title in around five months. Key to their strategy had been their, correct, analysis that the two Azubu teams relied on two champions for their AD Carries. By banning these champions out they forced the botlanes of the Koreans into disarray, as they played champions which were outside of their comfort zone. Thus did Gambit 4:0 two of Korea's strongest teams to win their fifth offline event.