Gen.G beat LGD Gaming, but can’t seem to keep up with Worlds 2020 meta

 Gen.G looked shaky on its debut at the 2020 World Championship.

Gen.G secured a victory over LGD Gaming, but it wasn’t the stomp that everyone anticipated. On the contrary, Gen.G looked extremely shaky and, despite having a permanent gold advantage, the team failed to close the game on several occasions. 

The issue is not Gen.G’s performance. They are a solid team. But Gen.G’s style doesn’t match the current Worlds meta. 

Gen.G slow on the meta

The current Worlds meta favors carry junglers and roaming supports. While Kim “Clid” Tae-min is a solid jungler, he has become more of an enabler and less of a carry. The LCK team put its trust in the solo laners instead, expecting them to take the team to victory.

Gen.G is a team that plays for objectives, meaning that it only fights when there’s something to take on the map. If no objective is up, Gen.G prefers to farm and complete items. The objective priority has gone significantly down at Worlds. During play-ins, only 45% of the games saw a team completing the dragon soul. In most cases, teams settled for two dragons, preferring to fight and destroy the structures.

In the LCK, teams play a slower game and prefer to scale before going for skirmishes, but only if an objective is on the line. DAMWON Gaming is the only team that plays faster, which allowed the summer champion to adapt to the meta. That fast adaptation turned into a victory over JD Gaming. Gen.G got a victory of its own, but it wasn’t the clean performance the team wanted.

LGD forced Gen.G into pointless fights around the map. Gen.G fell into that trap over and over, wasting time. In the end, the match got decided by the dragon soul, which has a 100% win rate in the main event so far. Despite that win condition, Gen.G won’t be able to keep up against other group B teams if they can’t adapt to the new meta.