Golden Guardians achieved a convincing victory over Cloud 9 on the second day of the 2022 LCS Spring Split, bouncing back from the team’s loss to FlyQuest yesterday, all thanks to beautiful play from a former Cloud 9 player Licorice.
The now veteran top laner, pulled out Kayle in her first appearance of the LCS Summer Split 2022, successfully breaking an extremely long 0-13 record against his former team, sadly with Cloud 9 still unable to set up their full roster. This marks the second loss in a row for Cloud 9, who are still trying to find their footing without Berserker and Zven playing as regulars within their roster.
After losing one early game trade/play in the bot lane, Cloud 9 decided to focus their attention to the mid lane, where they hoped to once again make Jensen their win condition through jungler and mid laner pressure. Unfortunately for the former LCS champion, the Yone matchup into LeBlanc made it difficult for him to hit nearly any of his combo dashes or ultimates. Even if he actually did it, he was just met with a burst of damage from Ablazeolive, which Blaber could not quickly respond to from the jungle position.
Within the top lane, Licorice chose to bring Kayle into play, a champion that has been seeing increasing pick rate and is valuable in professional play around the world thanks to recent durability changes. As the game progressed, he slowly became one of the biggest threats on Golden Guardians, as Kayle when left unchecked became an absolute Goddess. The pure damage per second between him and Stixxay’s Aphelios gave Golden Guardians the Baron at just 21 minutes, which began what would be a triumphant march to victory for the team after a quick snowball rotation.
Nevertheless the game was not finished yet, a second Baron and efficient push down the mid lane earned Golden Guardians the opportunity to destroy Cloud 9’s nexus for the first time in a while, as well as any players attempting to defend it. Thanks to his scaling on Kayle, Licorice ended as the player of the game with a 2/0/4 KDA and 85.7 percent kill participation (quite high for a top laner).
In the interview with LeTigress, Licorice explained that he’s looking forward to playing against the full Cloud 9 roster later in the split, where he can fully redeem himself after the disastrous 13 game loss streak against his former squad, despite the win yesterday. It is currently unknown when Cloud 9 will be able to field their full intended roster, consisting of Berserker as their ADC and Zven in his new role as support.
Golden Guardians moved up in the standings with this victory now having a 1-1 record, and will look to finish the weekend positively with another win tomorrow against CLG. C9 will end the weekend in hopefully a closer match against Team Liquid.
