G2 Esports have become the masters of the gold funnel strategy in the EU LCS, and even one of the better teams at utilizing the strat in the world.
In today’s game against Vitality, having an insanely beefy frontline in Gragas, Alistar, and Shen certainly helped to keep the danger away from Luka “Perkz” Perković’s Taliyah, but that’s not the only reason G2 keeps winning with this strat.
Vitality’s first-year mid laner Daniele “Jiizuke” di Mauro, also known as the Italian Stallion, even returned to form from his stellar Spring Split—he was able to beat Perkz and Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski in one-on-two mid lane skirmishes. It just wasn’t enough, though.
As most EU LCS teams painfully know, if you go even against a gold funnel comp, they’ll eventually beat you to scaling and end the game. Well, that’s exactly what happened in this match.
Vitality held on, and they even won some really big fights around the mid-game to slow down G2’s ascent. The only issue, though, was that they could never get their hands on Perkz, so his dual-stream gold income was barely ever slowed down. By the time late-game rolled around, half of Perkz’s Q could level a Vitality carry, be it Jiizuke or Amadeu “Attila” Carvalho. There just wasn’t much of a chance for Vitality at that point.
G2 definitely struggled at times to maintain their footing, though, which shows that EU teams are starting to figure out how to beat this strategy. Vitality tried a level one invade, which mostly worked, and putting Jiizuke on a high-damage carry definitely slowed Perkz down at least a little. As more teams start to figure it out, G2’s days in the sun as a gold funnel main may be numbered.
G2’s next game is tomorrow at 2pm CT against ROCCAT.
