League of Legends 2014 All-Star wrap-up, day two

The biggest League of Legends tournament before Worlds kicked off today in Paris, France, and lots of Asian teams are on the scene. Unfortunately, the time difference makes it a little inconvenient to watch some of these games, especially the later ones, in Asia. So in case you missed any of the action, here’s a round-up of all the action from the second day!

Hexakill challenge (Team Ice vs. Team Fire)

That old-time religion: Misaya vs. Toyz in the mid lane.

Today’s challenge match was the polar opposite of yesterday’s Bjergsen-dominated Team Fire stomp; Team Ice came back with a strong side that showed serious teamwork and closed the twelve-man game out in a little over thirty minutes. Bjergsen’s jungle Lee Sin, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved to be a bit more difficult for him than yesterday’s Ezreal, and he went 1-6-4 in the game.

Ice got off to an impressive start, with the Doublelift/Madlife duo in the bot lane looking especially potent, but Shy also had a great start on Jayce for Team Fire and helped keep things relatively close. In the mid-game, things started to snowball in Team Ice’s favor, but because of their melee-heavy team composition, it took them a while to siege down Fire’s towers and close out the game. But with two barons and a kill advantage that eventually extended to 30-10 in favor of Team Ice, ultimately Team Fire was powerless to resist.

GiA MVP: Madlife. To be fair, this could really have gone to any Team Ice player, and my heart wants to give it to Misaya, but with Madlife going 2-0-14 and being pretty much the definition of a clutch support, at the end of the day he gets my vote.

OMG vs. SK Telecom T1 K

This is pretty much how it went once SKT got going.

A strong early game in OMG’s bot lane made it look like SK Telecom T1 K might be headed for a surprising loss, but in the end, there’s no dealing with Faker when he’s on his A game, and he was definitely on fire here. He out-farmed, out-dodged, and out-killed his lane opponent xiyang; at ten minutes Faker had a 30 cs advantage and had gone 3-0-0.

OMG managed to keep the game close for a while, but ultimately two positional mistakes sealed their doom. In the first, Pomelo and Allen got caught out in a risky jungle invade where they were hoping to catch Piglet, and both of them ended up dying. That freed up SKT to take baron. As the second baron was about to respawn, OMG made their second mistake. Diving in without enough vision to try to get a kill on Bengi, they fell right into an SKT trap that ended in a rout and the second (and final) baron also going to SKT.

The Korean team was not flawless; they did show signs of making the kind of individual mistakes that have hurt their performance recently in OGN. Near the end of the game, for example, Faker got a bit overconfident and tried to 1v4 the OMG team, dying without getting a single kill. But the few little mistakes weren’t enough to stop SKT from running away with the game.

Also of note: Allen may have caused a bit of controversy by ignoring SKT when they came for the traditional post-game handshake.

GiA MVP: SKT.Faker. His 9-3-6 KDA is impressive, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. His godlike dodges made the difference in helping him win lane and helping SKT win teamfights. He simply refused to get hit.