After a recent rash of poor publicity, the name XDG brings few positive associations. In a shocking vindication of their roster decisions, however, XDG lived up to its name and found glory from its suffering in a hard-fought win against Cloud 9. Despite losing in both solo lanes and several times dropping behind from the occasional misplay, XDG delivered an all-around solid performance with none of the expected rust or poor morale following their roster changes. Sheep in particular is to be commended for living up to BloodWater’s legacy, winning Bot lane with smart play and landing numerous bullseye skillshots as Leona throughout the game. Also, though their individual play was impressive, XDG truly excelled at using their compositional advantage to take control after a closely contested early and mid game.

XDG elected for a tanky dive draft of Shyvana, Pantheon, Lulu, Caitlyn, and Leona, while C9 picked an AP burst team of Gragas, Lee Sin, LeBlanc, Lucian, and Annie. C9’s draft, though blessed with a powerful laning phase and excellent pick potential afterwards, had clear weaknesses in its lack of bulk and its reliance on magic damage. These flaws meant that they were playing against the clock, needing to snowball by 30 minutes, else XDG’s tanky lineup would become nigh-unkillable. C9 understood this risk and worked hard to establish an early lead, using Lee Sin and Gragas’ power to pressure Mid and control XDG’s jungle. This effort allowed Hai to surge to a 2-0 start and rush DFG, while Balls maintained a CS lead and even managed to kill Benny 1v1 despite roaming out of the lane. Unfortunately for C9, XDG kept up thanks to Zuna and Sheep handily winning Bot lane, and Hai’s attempt to turn the momentum with a gank only put his teammates further behind when Sheep denied his engage with a flawless Solar Flare, opening an opportunity for Xmithie to Man-Drop and kill LemonNation. Despite this this failure, C9 was still in a strong position and continued attempting picks and controlling Dragon, but an overconfident engage by Hai resulted in Mancloud easily winning a 1v1, resulting in a key reversal in which XDG took Mid tower as well as the Dragon off a single kill.

Although C9 regained control with a string of unanswered kills, XDG kept up in turrets and limited the gold lead to 1.7k at 24 minutes. At that point, having just killed Pantheon and Lulu and aware that they needed to seize a decisive advantage very soon in order to be competitive in the late game, C9 elected to rush down Baron. This bold strategy did not pay off, as Benny’s BotRK-first Shyvana had now bulked up defensively. A 2v4 contest by Benny and Sheep killed the wounded Hai and bought time for Xmithie to Grand Skyfall in, additionally bagging Balls and LemonNation.



This fight equalized the gold lead and crucially put much of the kill gold on Benny and Xmithie, the offensive core of XDG’s dive. From here on out, C9’s only hope in winning fights was to either open by bursting someone down or isolating someone with Explosive Cask. C9 understood this and committed heavily for potential kills; after drawing in XDG with a second Baron attempt, they turned and chased all the way to the Blue camp. Hai Flashed to try and kill Sheep, but Sheep turned on C9 with a Solar Flare and set up XDG’s Wild Growth Shyvana + Grand Skyfall followup combo to drive C9 away with a 1-1 Support trade.

Though not as punished by misplays as C9’s feast-or-famine pick comp, XDG needed to be wary of uncoordinated dives that opened up their backline to C9’s burst. This kind of error led to a 4-2 loss 31 minutes in. Mancloud was quickly dropped by Balls in a spread out fight that gave C9 room to maneuver around Benny and focus on the rest of his team. That gave C9 access to Baron and another lease on life in the late game; XDG was forced to wait out the buff and to look for opportunities to engage.

Opportunity inevitably arose, and XDG scored consecutive teamfight wins that must have left C9 frustrated at how little their composition could do against a giant Shyvana who could tank their entire team, backed up by tanky Leona and Pantheon who could engage on them at will, and a Lulu who negated their Solo laners’ burst.



The extent of XDG’s relative compositional strength at this point was most evident in the game-ending teamfight. Sheep engaged far ahead of his team, completely missed Solar Flare, but survived thanks to Lulu while Pantheon and Shyvana jumped and wiped out C9’s bot lane and force the survivors to watch from the fountain as XDG took their Nexus.



This is not to say that C9’s comp was poor by any means. It was well crafted for its intended strategy of snowballing the Solo lanes into a quick win, but the excellence of XDG’s Bot lane, especially Sheep, and Hai’s critical death which gave up a Mid tower and Dragon denied them the opportunity to ever get the early lead that they needed. Despite one substantial misstep along the way that delayed what could have been a 40 minute game by more than ten minutes, XDG largely held the upper hand following their dramatic turnaround at C9’s first Baron attempt. C9’s "go for broke" effort at that Baron certainly sped up their loss, but make no mistake - a merely even result would still have given XDG the room they needed to scale to a victory, and this game stands as an exciting clash of draft strategies that saw the plucky underdogs stay abreast of the former NA champions long enough for their late game team to surge to a memorable win.

Link has gotten a lot of attention as of late. With back-to-back MVP performances in Week 6 and 7, he has shown he can put the team on his back and helped unlock CLG's full potential. Nowhere was this illustrated better than in CLG's Week 7 game against Curse. The game was incredibly back and forth, but Curse managed to swing the game in their favor and looked as though they may be able to close it out. Although the situation looked grim for CLG, all it took was one heads up play from Link to change to course of the game and secure CLG the victory.




Link dove into the center of Curse, deleted Voyboy, and managed to escape with his life. Voyboy was only able to get off Unleashed Power and died with both Flash and Ignite available. This play was successful largely in part to Link catching Curse off guard. He started the play way off screen using Distortion to get an angle on the grouped up Curse team. He followed up with a Flash and Mimic Distortion to land right on top of Voyboy. En route, he also threw out Deathfire Grasp and Sigil of Silence which accounted for a lot the burst. It's hard to tell if Ethereal Chains was used or not, but it's worth mentioning Link didn't bring it up in his post-game interview.

With this play, Link demonstrated the value of being able to instantly kill an enemy and turn the ensuing team fight into a 4v5. This was a big part of why the assassin meta was so huge late in Season 3. While other popular assassins suffered nerfs, LeBlanc remained untouched and has surged in popularity this season. This is an example of just what LeBlanc can bring to the table, especially at full item build. Link also showed good decision making by focusing Voyboy. At this point in the game, every member of Curse had a Banshee's Veil except for Voyboy. His major MR item was incomplete and he didn't have the spell blocking shield; this made him a prime target for LeBlanc's burst. All in all, Link made a great play and perfectly utilized the strengths of the champion he was on. CLG has been on the rise, and Link's recent performance has certainly helped.

Week 8 marks the return of the Super Week to the NA LCS. With each team playing four games this week, there is a lot of potential for massive shakeups in the standings. Coast and CLG look to continue their hot streaks and Cloud 9 and TSM hope to reestablish their dominance over the league. Although, recent reports have stated that Bjergsen will not being playing with TSM again due to his visa, so Reginald will had to step up his game to prevent TSM from having a disastrous Super Week. At the bottom of the standings, Curse, EG, and XDG need to show signs of life in order to avoid relegation. There is a lot of League of Legends to be played in the upcoming week and it promises to give the fans something to cheer about.