This past Sunday we witnessed Evil Geniuses winning an LCS title for the first time in the history of the organization. They are the 5th team to ever win an LCS title, but success is nothing new for this organization as they have a lot of achievements under their belts. Evil Geniuses is notoriously known for their Dota 2 team as they are currently one of the best in the world and they won The International in 2015. We’ll go over the grand finals and Evil Geniuses run during the spring split and why they weren’t considered a strong contender at the start of the season.
It all started at the 2022 LCS Lock In tournament, where Evil Geniuses came 2nd after getting 3-0’d by Team Liquid in the finals. Even after placing 2nd, the team wasn’t considered really strong because we have to keep in mind that a lot of teams didn’t use their main roster in the tournament, so it wasn’t a huge feat to get 2nd place. Evil Geniuses did use their main 5 players and we had a peek at what this team could achieve in the spring split, but we didn’t see any exceptional performances and nothing really stood out.
Evil Genius’s run during the spring split was a rollercoaster, they had a decent start but it all went south really fast. They were hovering in 5th and 6th place for the very first couple of weeks, but in week 3 they fell down to the 7th place and that was very alarming considering that the team was supposed to do better than that. By week 6 the team started to pick up important wins and as the split was ending they got their hands on the 4th place just barely.
When playoffs started that’s where the Evil Geniuses showed their true potential. In the first round of the playoffs they had to play LCS first place, Team Liquid, but they fell short by 1 game. The series was extremely close but Evil Geniuses wasn’t ready enough yet, so they dropped down to the losers’ bracket and defeated FlyQuest quite convincingly after 4 games. No one thought much of this series as FlyQuest wasn’t considered a strong team compared to the likes of 100 Thieves and Team Liquid. But in the 2nd round of the losers’ bracket Evil Geniuses completely rolled over Cloud9 and that’s when they turned heads.
Now Evil Geniuses had to play against Team Liquid once again, and the result was very unexpected. TL got obliterated by EG in one of the fastest best-of-5s we’ve seen in a playoffs semifinals and it wasn’t even close. The miracle run was a huge possibility for the Evil Geniuses and they knew it, they were not going to throw this opportunity away. On the next day, Evil Geniuses would go on to do one of the biggest upsets we’ve seen in the history of the LCS and defeat 100 Thieves in just three games. They went from being a middle-of-the-pack team to being the absolute best in the region.
Evil Geniuses demonstrated that you can put trust in North American rookie players like they did with Jojopyun and Danny. Jojopyun is only 17 years old and already won an LCS title in the first split he competed in. Danny is 18 years old and is already considered one of the best ADCs to ever play in the North American region. Evil Geniuses gave NA fans hope once again and now everybody is going to keep an eye on them during the 2022 MSI coming in May.
