RheingoldRiver brings match reports and interviews from the LCS floor

After Dignitas secured their return to the LCS, CLG looked to do the same against Azure Cats.  However, the challenger team would take an early advantage in the first game of their set, from a failed early counter-jungling attempt by Chauster and the first dragon also going to Azure Cats.  But HotshotGG secured his team the game's first blood, at 12 minutes, thanks to a gank from Chauster, and CLG also took the second dragon.  The game remained close until CLG won two fights in a row, the first at Dragon after they secured the objective and the second at Baron, which allowed them to secure the objective.  After those two fights, and with CLG having Baron, Azure Cats realized there was nothing they could do and they surrendered at 32 minutes.

The story of game 2 of CLG vs Azure Cats was Blitzcrank.  Aphromoo pulled Demunlul on a blind hook for first blood before minions spawned and then gave Chauster's Elise a second kill on Janna by the 3-minute mark.  CLG won fight after fight, and despite a few kills onto HotshotGG as the result of Draguner's Rammus ganks, Azure Cats were never able to gather any momentum.  Eventually they weren't even able to devote enough resources to stop Hotshot's Diana, and CLG were able to get the splitpushing that they wanted.  The LCS team methodically took down objectives with Hotshot pushing top and eventually rotating bot, taking baron at 28 minutes and then closing out the game at 32, now just one win away from retaining their LCS spot.

Although Blitzcrank was left open for game 3, CLG did not opt to give Aphromoo that support again, instead picking the Urgot-Taric combo for their botlane.  However, Blitzcrank proved to be unnecessary for a first blood before minions spawned, as this time CLG invaded Azure Cats’ blue buff and caught out Obituarist as he was warding.  Both teams went for 2v1s, and both outer turrets fell just after the 4-minute mark, but CLG were able to dive the inner turret in botlane and secure a double kill, for which Azure Cats had no answer.  The challenger team did take a dragon and got a couple successful ganks off, but they couldn't win teamfights without giving up objectives in the process, and CLG cleanly pushed for the win just after the 30-minute mark, closing out the series 3-0 and becoming the second team of the day to retain their LCS spot.

Rhein: Congratulations on your victory.

Aphromoo: Thank you.

A lot of people were saying that it would be a 3-0 one way or the other but weren't sure which way.  What did you expect?

I was going in expecting nothing really.  Just wanted to play the game and play my best, and whatever outcome happened would happen.  And thankfully, we went 3-0, and that's it.

When in the set did you start to expect the 3-0, if at all?

After game 1, when we won pretty handily, right after that I felt like oh, okay.  I guess I can play whatever I want to and win the game.  Second game I just picked Blitzcrank because I just wanted to stomp them into the ground and make sure that they just felt awful.  That's why I picked Blitz after playing game 1 passive.  That's pretty much how it went, our whole team was super confident that we would go 3-0 at that point.

You played three different champions, as did a number of people on your team, which is not something we've seen that much this weekend.  Why did you decide to switch the picks so much?

Really it's just about picking reactively.  For the first game, all I really wanted to do was play passive, and we weren't going to be a play-making botlane, so I picked Janna because she can help the rest of the map.  No other support can really do that expect Soraka, so I picked Janna because it was really good against their team, really good against Zed, and I can just peel since usually they just want to dive in our backline.  So I picked Janna, and lane went really well.  Really we only pick stuff that's interchangeable with our team.  Nidalee was one of them, and we just picked based on what we wanted to do that game.  Game 1 was passive, just let Hotshot play Nidalee and do whatever he wants up there while we play 4v4 on the bottom side.  And then after game 1, after playing passive and realizing what we could do, then we could pick a little bit more aggressively, and we did that game 3 as well, just to be able to shut them down and get it over with.

The casters onstream predicted that it could be Doublelift playing support Blitzcrank when they saw that pick.  Is that something we might ever see from CLG?

We had brought that up before, that we could do that, and the team is really fine with doing that too.  But I didn't want to do that because I've been just so angry recently—not in a bad way, but the motivational kind of way, where a fire just explodes inside of you.  So I wanted to play Blitzcrank, wanted to go mid and just shut down their jungler and get us an early lead to snowball the game.

In the second game, you seemed really willing to leave Doublelift alone and go into the bottom jungle with Chauster.  That's something that differs from "let's protect Doublelift."  Do you think you're starting to change as a team, or was that just situational?

In scrims, we practiced 2v1 middle, and normally when anyone 2v1s middle, the support should always leave the AD carry to 1v1 an AP because when you have an AD lane middle, they almost always beat the AP carry early, because usually the AP carry early doesn't do as much damage as they do later.  Especially Ezreal; he can just 1v1 anyone.  So I leave and go contest their jungle, and in doing that, that prevents the jungler from ganking the other two lanes, so we're just holding them up and the other two lanes are just by themselves and they can just do whatever they want.  They should be able to win off that.  Especially Blitzcrank, because you can pull buffs over walls and pull people into you.

You had some pretty fantastic pulls.  What's your secret to landing such amazing Blitzcrank pulls?

My secret...I don't really have a secret when I play Blitzcrank really.  All I think of is, when I was little, and I used to play catch with my dad, he would say, "You touch the ball, you catch the ball."  So when I play Blitzcrank, when they're in my range I'm gonna grab you because that's it, and I just relate that to real life and I play Blitzcrank that way.

How did you know to grab to the side of the bush for the first blood?

Every AD stands in that spot because it's the fastest way to escape the brush if you do see them, you can just run right out.  There's no reason for you to stand in the middle of the brush, but that would be next-level if someone did that.  So usually you grab right there, and luckily he was there and we got first blood.

You went for three support picks that aren't the Sona/Lulu/Thresh that were sort of the only viable supports for a while.  Do you think that people have been too narrow-minded about only playing those three supports?  Or were those picks very situational?

Like I said, we always pick reactively.  I pick my support reactively.  But usually people just get so hyped over supports that are just good in the meta right now, like Sona/Lulu/Thresh.  Normally, people will just play what they think is good but usually there’re still other supports in the game, and they all have different things you can do if you have a certain strategy for it.  So you play Blitzcrank, you don't really play him to 2v2 bottom lane because it's terrible and you'll lose.  So you play Blitz to go 2v1 mid and mess up their jungler.  Janna is just really good at peeling against Zed.  No one really knows that, and no one really plays Janna against Zed, they just play Lulu for the effective health ulti.  But I think melee supports are going to come back into play again. 

Usually the support meta just shifts—oh, let's go to ranged, oh, let's go to melee supports based on how the other map plays.  So before in LCS, normally everyone just plays the OPs, and it was Elise, Jayce, etc., middle was like Diana, and ranged supports are very good for that because they can initiate and then you can follow up with huge CC from range, you don't really want to get in there.  Now that everyone's running globals and AoE-centric comps, everyone's going to stack up on top of each other, and Sona's really good for that, but there's also Alistar—you can 5-man pulverize and still be all right, and that's good too.  So melee supports are good too; you can dominate lane, and melee supports are decent in 2v1 as long as your jungler comes.  Everyone's 2v1ing right now and I think that melee supports are really good in 2v1 because they can dive.  The third game we showed that with Taric-Urgot.  We could dive many times because melee supports are so tanky, and if you were a ranged support you couldn't do that because most ranged supports don't have hard CC.

So will we get to see your Leona in the summer split?

Maybe.  The only reason I don't play Leona is that Thresh is a direct counter to Leona.  I E in, and he flays, and it's over.  So Leona can't really do much against that.  The bad side of picking a melee support is they can just 2v1 and run away from you.  Usually I don't pick Leona just because of that.  And you can miss the skill shot; that's why I pick Taric, because it's just a point stun, and you can't miss it.

Any final comments or shoutouts?

Shoutout to my sponsors, Razer, XMG, Azubu.tv.  And we have an announcement in the coming weeks of a new sponsor.

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