Despite being the off-season, it has been a busy week for professional League of Legends. Not only is the Mid-Season Cup pitting top LPL and LCK teams against each other (like an elite Rift Rivals), but multiple player signings have recently gone through (featuring Smeb, Huni, Dardoch, V1per, and more), and Riot Games is running a global Mid-Season Streamathon. 

To cap it all off, the final NA event in the Mid-Season Streamathon will give League of Legends Championship Series fans a taste of what is to come this Summer Split, starting in a couple weeks on June 12th. The 2020 Spring Finalists, Cloud9, will face the reconstructed TSM roster giving us the first look of Yiliang "Peter" "Doublelift" Peng back on the team.

TSM and Cloud9 have a historical rivalry, with TSM getting the better of Cloud9 just about every time. This past season, however, TSM fell flat, falling to 5th right before the Playoffs, and failing to climb through the Losers' Bracket to meet Cloud9 in the Finals. Cloud9 went on to win the title, beating FlyQuest 3-0 in the Finals, only dropping a single game in the Playoffs to go 27-2 across the whole Split. Their run made history, as they tied the best LCS record for a regular season, and then beat the record for the Playoffs. 

Cloud9 didn't just make history with their record, each player was voted First All Pro Team, Robert "Blaber" Huang won the MVP, and Bok "Reapered" Han-gyu won Coach of the Split. The last time Doublelift and Vincent "Biofrost" Wang  were on TSM, they won split after split, but this Cloud9 squad is a force to be reckoned with.

Since TSM's knockout in the Spring Playoffs, they've made two roster changes, re-signing Doublelift, the winningest player in the LCS, winning multiple titles with the org in the past, and promoting Academy Jungler Mingyi "Spica" Lu, who also played for the team on the LCS stage last Summer Split. Both Spica and Doublelift have played with multiple players on this TSM roster, but living up to Cloud9's squad is going to require strong synergy and mastery of the current meta.

Though the Summer Split doesn't start for another two weeks, and the teams likely have a lot of remaining work to do to develop further, this match will be a gift to hungry fans eagerly waiting for June 12th to come. And as an appetizer to this Grand Finale, various LCS and Academy players will compete in two different Off-Role Matches, where each player fills in a different role than their typical professional position. The NA action all starts at 3pm PST on Sunday, May 31st on Riot Games' Twitch and YouTube. Don't miss it!

UPDATE: 5/30

Though the graphic implies C9 and TSM will be playing in their main roles, a clip from a recent Doublelift stream states this may not be the case, though he admits to not knowing specifics. "I don't think we're playing our main roles in the showmatch.. Any tryharding and I don't think we would've wanted to do it." 

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