The first two weeks of LCS brought a lot of excitement. Fnatic and G2 are struggling to find success, Roccat, Vitality, and Giants found their success early on. Even though the initial doubts of the analysts and experts of the league the team that stood out the most was, team Vitality. Going into their last game of the week Vitality was expected to finish with a 4:0 record. However, #THEHERD thought a little bit differently about that.  

The French team Vitality wraps up week 2 with a 3:1 record. Definitely, it is better than most fans and viewers of the region expected. The team is performing thanks to their early strategy and on point coordination and behind all that success we also have a newborn star in the mid lane called Jiizuke.

To everyone’s surprise, Vitality has taken the stage by storm with fast a paced early game strategy. In three out of four games Vitality opts to set up a gank around 4 minutes on one of their sidelanes. For that, both solo lanes push in their waves into the turret so they can get vision on the top side of the map and are able to go for a gank.

Taking a look at Vitality’s match against H2K they set up to prepare at 2:45 by setting up the vision on top side river. Shortly after Santorin exposes himself by using his blue buffs scryers bloom that should be visible to Vitality because of their river vision and creates the opening for the Vitality play. Gilius sees the opportunity and starts moving up to the top lane through the jungle. Not only did they clear the river vision but could know from a late lane showing from Gnar and Jizuke’s ward in the narrow path between mid lane and blue buff that Kha Zix most likely isn’t going to stick around the top side.

He moves patiently, drops a ward over the group and waits for Jizuke to be ready to teleport and the wave to get to the turret.

A cleanly executed dive to secure first blood and force Gnar into losing a big wave of experience. To follow that up as soon as both top laners are back on the lane and Cabochard was able to set up the next wave and Jizuke to time a second dive to snowball on SmittyJ.

Vitality plays in a system they have been developing throughout the year under the wings of former head coach Guilhoto. They set up a play in the early game to set up their tempo and snowball out of it. It worked to snowball through the mid lane against Fnatic and win the game from there.

Definitely, the team is showing a good control as soon as they get off by playing a lead by snowballing a lane and leading the game from there. They play from their playbook, patiently preparing the next play before even pressing the go button.

However, the Misfits stopped their early game plans and Vitality didn’t show the same class. They might have performed well as a team so far but definitely showed that they have difficulties when playing from behind.

Maxlore stopped Vitality’s gank pattern by ganking top lane at the 2:45 minutes mark

He used the blasting cone to be their early and stopping Cabochard while shoving up the wave. With that Vitality was stopped from snowballing out of their early game.

Misfits had a clear win condition, scale, and team fight. Vitality could have won through splitpushing, but as soon as Misfits could capitalize on their lead at the 22-minute mark, Misfits found that one fight to snowball their lead out of control. Literally hitting the nail on Vitality’s coffin in that game as they couldn’t find ways of coming back into the game.

The team is young and it is normal to struggle when playing from behind. Even more against a team that is really good into punishing opponents mistakes like Misfits.

Despite showing prowess in shotcalling when ahead in a game it is the complete different style of communication when playing from behind.

It breaks from passing on information and coordinating waves to set up a play to predictions and constant looking out for an opening to get back into the game. Against a team that is also good in playing out advantages, there won’t be many. Even more if the leading team has an advantage in teamfighting, like in the case of this match Misfits had a clear advantage there, making it even harder for Vitality to maintain splitpushing and any kind of wave control.

Even if Misfits was the first team to find a way to beat Vitality, is that all Vitality got?

As newer teams usually enter the main stage they can run out of gas soon. Vitality came in as a surprise to most people and have shown their capability to play a coordinated game of League of Legends. Although the team’s struggling when playing from behind in the only game a team was able to stop their early game strategy, we’ve only seen four games of this team. It might be a fairly early conclusion, but the other teams might start figuring out how to play against Vitality fairly soon. Stop their early aggression, break their patterns and outscale them. Even if Vitality has a powerful individual roster, they seemed to rely a lot on their solo laners success to win the games. In the end, it will be on Yamatocannon to push this group of players to the next level and refill their tank.

(Photo Credit : lolesports Flickr)

Disclaimer: The following article was written freely based on the author's opinion, and it may not necessarily represent Inven Global's editorial stance. 

About the Author: 
Hello guys, Alexandre Weber also known under the ID: DrPuppet. I'm a Brazilian professional Coach and content creator since 2015, mostly focused on League of Legends. I worked with many teams throughout the years in major and minor regions, but my most known work was with Kaos Latin Gamers from Chile in 2015, where we played the International Wildcard Finals against Pain Gaming. Since then I have been studying Cinema in Hamburg and creating content on youtube and twitch, besides writing for respected sites in Esports. You can find me on the social networks under @drpuppetlp and on Twitch under DrPuppet.
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