RheingoldRiver brings match reports and interviews from the LCS floor

After Quantic swept past Complexity in the first best-of-five set of the weekend, all eyes were on Velocity to see if all of the challenger teams were really that strong and on Marn to see if they could hold their LCS spot, a feat that now seemed much more difficult after the results of the first round.  A double kill for Nientonsoh's Tristana at 7 minutes off a Nasus gank, followed by a third kill for Tristana, a dragon, and a solo kill by MegaZero onto Cris in toplane made Marn look very strong in the first game. 

Velocity eSports responded with multiple catches onto Marn's toplaner, though, and the challenger team started to come back in gold, even passing their opponents after a 22-minute dragon.  But Nientonsoh continued to get more and more kills, going 8-1 by 35 minutes.  The fights continued evenly between the two teams, and Velocity even looked to win the game after an incredible Baron steal by Vileroze on Lux.  A 40-minute fight went massively in Marn's favor with Nientonsoh picking up a quadrakill (Velocity's support Evaniskus survived) and letting his team push for the win.

After losing one of the closer games of the weekend, Velocity decided to switch things around a bit and ran a double-ADC, double-support composition with Ezreal jungle and Janna mid.  The composition proved strong, as Ezreal was able to secure his team the bot outer tower before the four-minute mark, and Velocity also took the first blood at about 9 minutes—in addition to the first dragon, off an arcane shift-smite-flash steal by Nk Inc.  Though Marn won the next two fights, Velocity had incredible escapes, with only one member sacrificed each time.  And Velocity just pushed lanes constantly.  The top inhibitor turret fell at 20 minutes, and still Velocity pushed lanes.  Ten minutes later, Ezreal and Elise duod Baron for their team, and at that point it was straightforward for Velocity to push through the Marn base and carrying the set to 1-1.

Marn wanted nothing more to do with Velocity's double-ADC double-support composition, and it was no surprise to see a Janna ban in game 3.  Both teams went for standard team comps, and the game got off to an exciting start with fantastic play by MegaZero pushing Nk Inc's Nasus off the blue buff he was trying to steal for several seconds.  However, not too much happened after the early pressure, as both teams just spent the entirety of the early and midgame posturing around Dragon.  The result of the posturing was a drawn-out and fairly even game, with the gold gap less than 2k at the 40-minute mark and only seven towers pushed down total. 

Velocity started to take the lead shortly after that point, with two barons in a row, but then a fight at 55 minutes went hugely in favor of Marn, leading to what looked like an easy victory push for them—however, Evaniskus on Zyra was barely able to save his team's base and their chances in the game.  It was now Velocity pushing on Marn's base, but Nientonsoh, huge on Corki, waited just outside of the Velocity base to Valkyrie over the wall, take out the remaining health on the only tower that was still standing, and then single-handedly destroy the nexus, another exciting base-race victory for Team Marn.

Potentially one game away from staying in LCS, in game 4 Marn tried a team composition slightly different from what they had been running, with the AoE of MegaZero on Kennen, ecco on Karthus, and ClakeyD on Zac.  Nientonsh stole Ezreal from maplestreet, and Heartbeat opted for Sona instead of Thresh to complete the AoE lineup.  Their teamfight had great potential, but they were never able to utilize it fully, with early lanes turning in favor of the blue team Velocity.  A great early Dragon steal by Nk Inc just before 20 minutes led to a decent gold lead for Velocity, and with Marn unable over and over again to successfully combine their AoE, maplestreet's Tristana just got to be too much for Marn to deal with.  Ultimately Vileroze and Nk Inc were able to take down the nexus with the help of super minions after narrowly winning a last teamfight just after 30 minutes, taking the series to game 5.

Everything was on the line for both teams in game 5, as Velocity's second series went the full length.  With both Elise and Rumble on their team, Velocity looked to be in a great position, also stealing away Nientonsoh's Tristana.  First blood went to the challenger team off a gank from Nk Inc's Nasus in botlane, and though Marn took a kill on their own gank in toplane, it wasn't enough as the toplane fight was 1-1.  A roam to botlane from Vileroze led to two more kills and a dragon for Marn at 8 minutes, and then two minutes later Cris showed why his Elise should be feared, picking up a triple kill for himself in exchange only for Vileroze's life.  Velocity continued through the game on a tear, up 11-4 and over 10k gold by 25 minutes after picking up a free baron.  They picked up their second baron at 30 minutes, took out all three of Marn's inhibitors, and then took out the now former LCS team's nexus, making themselves the second challenger team to earn a spot in the summer split.

After his drawn-out but ultimately victorious series against Marn, I interviewed Velocity's jungler, Nk Inc.

Rhein: Congratulations on finally winning a very long series.

Nk Inc: Thanks.

You played eight games this weekend, which was more than any other team will play.  How do you feel after such a long weekend?

It's really tiring.  After all the games, I had a really bad headache, and it I didn't really know what to do.  I just wanted to sit down and relax, but we had a lot of interviews and stuff to go to, so it was more exhausting afterward.  But I'm glad we won, and it was really an exhausting weekend.

How do you keep yourselves mentally strong throughout?

I think one of the biggest things is you can't let it get to you mentally.  I know I'm really good at controlling my emotions, so if we lose a game or win a game it doesn't affect me too much; you just take the next game and do your best to win it.  But I know a lot of the guys, they're a lot more prone to getting down on themselves or down as a whole team, and what Evan and Vile do is they yell if we make a play or we do something good, they always yell and that gets them back in the game.  So that's probably the biggest thing that we do as a team to keep our mental game up there so that we're not down ourselves and we just give the rest of the games away.

The most interesting part of the series was probably the second game where you went for double ADC and double support.  That's not something you can practice in solo queue.  How did you get to practice that comp?

We came up with that strategy when Pr0lly was still on the team, and what we would do was if we trusted the team we would play it against them.  If we know that a team would not leak the strategy, like Dignitas or TSM or whoever you can trust, whatever LCS team you can trust, that's who you play the strategy against to practice it to see how well it does, what counters it, just the entire strategy itself.  You just hide it in scrims and practice it in scrims, and do your best to hide it.  That's the only real way to get a strategy like that and have it be successful.

How much practice did you get with that strategy?

I think we played anywhere from ten to fifteen.  So we had a decent amount of games, we knew what countered it, we knew how to win with it.  We knew everything about that comp to most extents.

Why didn't you use the game straight off the bat in the first game?

The biggest problem is if you're on purple side, the ban order can screw that strategy up, because you have to pick Ezreal or Janna and then that leaves them two picks to counter it.  So when you're on blue side, you get first pick, two picks, and then your last two picks, and your last two picks are Ezreal-Janna.  Your first three picks, you can pick whatever you want for top, support, and AD carry.  And you don't give away any part of that comp by picking those three, and you can back out based on what their next two picks are, so when you get those last two picks, you pick Ezreal-Janna.  They can only counter it with one pick, and usually you can play through that one pick.  If they have two or three heroes that counter that composition, like Diana or Kha'zix or a hard-engage hero like Amumu, you have a really hard time.  So you need to avoid that, and it's really easy to avoid that on blue side and not so much on purple side.

You have played on Meat Playground and Dirtnap Gaming prior to this.  How did that previous experience help you out?

Having played on LAN before, it's a lot better playing on LAN again.  You're not really nervous, and you don't make as many mistakes.  I know, when you're first on LAN, you can just be jittery and buy the wrong items or just not play how you normally would play.  So having prior LAN experience is really a big thing coming into a LAN.

Do you think that was an issue for any members of your team?

I know Vile had never played in a LAN before, so the first day was really rough for him because he didn't have any experience.  The monitor size was different for him, he didn't have his mouse pad, he had a whole bunch of different factors that wouldn't have been factors at his house that he had to play around.

You shotcall with Vileroze.  How have you gotten used to shotcalling with a new midlaner?

Vile's main job, I think, is he keeps the team really hyped.  That's one of his go-tos is if someone makes a play somewhere on the map, he does a really good job of keeping them up: "Oh man, I made a really good play," "That was awesome," or whatever.  He does a good job with that.  I make a lot of the calls, like "do Dragon," "do towers," do this, do that, this is how we win the game.  I make those calls, and Vile reinforces that, and if he has an idea he puts his input in, so we get both of our ideas out there and do what the best thing is.

In five of your eight games, you played Nasus.  Why is Nasus a favored jungle pick for you?

Against Marn, Nien is one of their best players, and Wither basically shuts him out of the game completely.  So I would be a fool not to pick Nasus against Marn because if I can shut Nien out of the game completely by picking Nasus, and forcing him to take Cleanse and get a QSS, and do all this extraneous stuff to prevent me from making him useless, then that's worth it to me.  If that one pick does all of that to their team, it's great.  The other factor is if I go bottom to 2v2 with Cris, if he's on Renekton or Elise or something like that, we can just straight-up fight their bottom lane and kill them or zone them or tower-dive them, and they can't really do anything.  The whole time that's happening, our toplane is just pushing and getting the tower, so we get a huge advantage off Nasus's ability to shut down the AD carry.

If you're playing a team where you don't think the AD carry is such a big threat, what jungle picks could we see from you?

Basically it would just be a team comp thing.  If we want Rumble, I would probably pick Jarvan with that, or Amumu or some AoE character like that.  If we're running a more poke-oriented comp, it would be Cho'gath or Hecarim.  It's just whatever fits with the team comp basically.

One question about your item builds.  A lot of the time in those games, Shen built a Bulwark, which means that your team doesn't have the Bulwark while you're ulting in.  When do you think it's ok to build the Bulwark on Shen, and when would you have to build it on someone else?

I think the biggest thing is just the ease of getting it.  Our support didn't want to get Bulwark because it's too expensive for a support player, and for our toplaner, it reduces his damage and his ability to fight someone.  So really the only option you're left with is your jungler, and most of the time, Shen is grouped for a lot of the fighting, and as soon as he gets in with the ult, you're good to go.  A lot of teams use Shen wrong, in that they ult in after a fight starts.  The best way to use Shen in my opinion is you ult someone and start the fight right there because that's unexpected, and then if they try to focus that guy he's usually the tank, like Renekton or even Kha'zix, who can go invisible, something like that.  You should get Bulwark if you're using Shen properly in my opinion.

We're running a bit long, so any final shoutouts you want to make?

I want to give a shoutout to Gungho, LoLHQ.net, and Game4Glory, and I want to say thank you to everyone who's a fan of Velocity eSports.  I want to thank all my friends and family, because I know, as soon as the games were over, they sent me a lot of text messages, congratulations and what-not, and that was a really good feeling.  I want to thank all of them for that.

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