The EU vs NA rivalry leans towards Europe’s side once again as G2 Esports defeats Evil Geniuses on Day 2 of the 2022 MSI. The North American representative is struggling to secure wins against their European counterpart even if they are able to get good leads during their games.
In their first encounter, Evil Geniuses started off falling behind against a G2 Esports that showed a bit of disrespect in the pick and ban phase. The European team picked Pyke and Anivia very early into the draft, putting EG in a very uncomfortable position from the get-go. Evil Geniuses decided to draft a team composition oriented towards a strong late game. But from what we’ve seen so far in the tournament, this isn’t really the way to secure a victory.
A lot of the winning teams are picking strong early-game champions that are able to secure early leads so they can transition smoothly into teamfights around the mid-game. G2 Esports is one of those teams as they’ve been picking champions like Pyke, Graves, and Galio, allowing them to take fights at any point in the game.
Now if we look at their second encounter, Evil Geniuses had a big opportunity to close out the game in their favor, but they ended up dropping it. The game started heavily in favor of G2 Esports as BrokenBlade, Jankos, and Caps took over the entire map. G2 Esports had a Camille-Galio composition which meant they were able to pick up fights anywhere on the map due to their strong engage. But around the 26-minute mark, they made a crucial mistake.
The European squad decided to go for a baron play where Caps would be split pushing in the bot lane, they considered this a good play because let’s remember that Caps was playing Galio. But what ended up happening was EG picked up a kill on Caps and they still were able to contest the G2 Baron call. It was taking them way too long to kill baron and EG arrived just in time to pick up a few kills and secure the baron for themselves.
But still, this wasn’t enough for Evil Geniuses to close out the game. They managed to destroy G2’s inhibitors but Evil Geniuses struggled a lot to take down the Nexus towers. From the outside, it looked like the game was over for G2, but EG knew it wasn’t as easy. Evil Geniuses had to be extremely careful against G2 Esports’ flanking potential, they had Camille, Kaisa, Galio, and Pyke. G2 Esports had so many tools to punish any mispositioning coming from EG and that’s exactly what happened.
Even after coming back from an 8k gold deficit, Evil Geniuses still weren’t able to pick up a much-needed victory against G2 Esports. This makes it safe to say that G2 Esports will come out of the group stage as the Group C leaders. EG is still in a safe spot as ORDER hasn’t been able to pick up a single victory, meaning they’ll most likely be the team that won’t make it into the next stage.
