SK Telecom T1 K has been the most dominant team in the history of competitive League of Legends. They were the first repeat winners of Korea's premier tournament, OGN's Champions, as well as being the Season 3 World Champions. No other team has shown SKT K's long term level of consistency and control.

Despite PoohManDu stepping down from the Support role in the off-season, SKT K still seemed incredibly strong going into Champions Spring 2014. After splitting a 1-1 series with their sister team SKT S, all SKT K had to do was win a single game against KT Rolster A in order to advance out of the group stage. This seemed like an inevitability as SKT S had just 2-0'd KT A in their Champions match the prior week. Pulling off an incredible upset, KT A routed SKT K in both games and all but eliminated the defending champions before they could even reach the bracket stage*. There is a lot to break down in these two games so let's take a closer look at exactly what went down.

One of the initial surprises with this series was the return of PoohManDu to Support. SKT K has been playing with Casper in both Champions and Masters, so bringing back PoohManDu on such short noticed surprised many people. There was no official announcement as to why this decisions was made, so it can be speculated it was made on fairly short notice. PoohManDu hasn't played the game competitively in months and he looked rusty in both games. Even so, he was far from the only reason that SKT K lost both games.

Game 1 got off to an interesting start during the pick and ban phase. KT A pulled out the Jungle Nocturne pick as well as the increasingly popular Twitch/Thresh lane. Rounded out with LeBlanc and Shen, KT A made it clear they were running a hardcore pick composition. In what was probably the strangest decision of the draft, and somehow overshadowing Piglet's Corki pick, Faker decided to pick Karthus into LeBlanc. Mind you, this is the player whose breakout game was on LeBlanc where he forced a 20 minute surrender against a Karthus. SKT K's draft felt like it lacked focus, especially compared to KT A's.

One of the biggest issues with running a pick composition is that if the team running it falls behind it becomes virtually useless. Luckily, KT A never fell behind as they took an early lead picking up the first two kills of the game at the three minute mark. This was all KT A needed to get the ball rolling and their Bot lane just smashed Piglet and PoohManDu after this point.

Hachani takes Arrow for a lantern ride

Both Faker and Impact were actually both winning their lanes in terms of CS, but gave up free kills that allowed their opponents to stay relevant. Faker's death was especially rough as he just didn't respect Rookie and gave up the 1v1 kill for free. The rest of the game was incredibly one sided with KT A playing their comp to perfection just picking off members of SKT K left and right. Faker farmed well but died too much and just didn't do enough damage with Requiem to clean up fights. For KT A, it was one down, one to go.

Game 2's draft was a little more tame than the first, but it wasn't without it's own interesting choices. For SKT K, they decided to pick Shen as a lane counter to Renekton. This is a move that has been popularized recently by the KT organization, so they are more than familiar with the match-up, but we haven't seen Impact on Shen in quite a while. The biggest surprise for KT A was they opted to go for Twitch when Draven was left open. Although they had just won with Twitch, Arrow is famous for his Draven play and it is feared and respected by many Korean teams. There’s a reason it is almost always banned against him, so it’s not often that it goes unpicked for him when a team is bold enough to leave it open..

Game 2 got off to a much slower start than the prior game. KT A managed to grab first blood off of an early roam from Rookie, but ended up trading 1-1 overall. Faker was left alone in the Mid lane and established a CS lead over Rookie. Much like the first game, Bengi had almost no impact on Eve. There were multiple occasions where he ran into lane to try and gank and didn't even burn the enemy's Flash. This hurt SKT K a lot as Eve never got rolling and couldn't contribute much to team fights. Impact also had a pretty poor performance on Shen, with multiple questionable uses of Stand United. He would randomly burn the ult and STK K lost map pressure every time.

With SKT K making multiple mistakes, KT A was able to out rotate them and take the lead through superior objective control. Faker tried his best to keep SKT K in the game with several clutch retribution kills when KT A focused on killing him, but it simply wasn't enough.

Things Faker does

Just like the first game, once KT A established their lead, they roamed around the map picking off key members of SKT K and just never giving them a chance to catch up. SKT K isn't used to losing games, and they experienced two of the biggest stomps of their career back-to-back.

Is this the end of SKT K's dominance in Korea? Maybe, but it might be a little early to start the doomsday prophecies just yet. The end result was a perfect storm of SKT K under performing and KT A playing out of their minds. STK K is still an incredibly strong team even though they won't make it out of the group stage, but such is the nature of Champions when three strong teams end up in the same group. Still, KT A proved that not only can gods bleed, but they can also be slain.

(*SKT K can still technically tie with SKT S, but that requires SKT S getting 2-0'd by last place Optimus Prime which would be an even bigger upset than KT A over SKT K.)