Despite another win, Victory Five’s weaknesses were highlighted in today’s victory over LNG Esports in the 2022 LPL Summer Split, which also made them the third team to lock in their spot in playoffs.
It’s been a tale of two paths for these supposed superteams in the LPL. For LNG, they sat at 6-5 going into today’s match against V5 and had hoped to steal a victory to gain a firm hold on their playoff seed. As for V5, while they entered the match following a close three-game series loss to Weibo Gaming, the Summer Split has been nearly perfect for the LPL superteam, who have only dropped four regular season games all season. Today’s series against LNG showed some of their faulty mid-game strategies that bit them in their loss to Weibo Gaming.
Game one immediately kicked off how many expected today’s series to go with a dominant V5 early game in which V5’s extra jungler XLB held control of the early game on Trundle to lead the team to a 3K gold lead. The early work put in by V5 was temporarily halted after a strong mid-game engagement and infernal dragon take by LNG, though. Ultimately, V5 regained control of the late-game due to their strong late-game scaling of V5 as Photic’s Kog’maw dominated the team fights.
Photic’s domination continued into the second game, this time on Senna. While V5’s mid game was troublesome once again, the late-game plays from Photic in the teamfights were too strong for LNG to overcome.
For V5, today’s win served as their bounce-back victory, but they should be able to learn a lot from their vulnerable moments throughout the series. V5 will look to build off of this series as the team looks forward to their most important series of the Summer Split against JD Gaming on July 26.
Up against one of the LPL’s top teams in the league, LNG were able to showcase strong resilience in game one while also not allowing V5 to run away with the series in the second game. Unfortunately, a marked improvement in their performance still results in a knock to their regular season standings as they now drop to 6-6, with a flimsy hold on a playoff seed. They will aim to bounce back against EDward Gaming on July 26.
