TSM locks in first in LCS after a clean week 1 using Viego

William Davis Published 08/06/2021

TSM has gotten the best possible start to the 2021 LCS Summer Split with a clean 3-0 weekend that has sent them directly to first place. 

The LCS is back and the teams are already fighting closely on the ladder. With the new format, all teams are starting the split with the same record that they ended the spring split. This means that the fight in the top was intense right from the start, with TSM coming out ahead after the three games this week. With three wins in a row, TSM is now in pole position of the league and a lot of it has to do with the new champion Viego. 

One of the reasons for TSM’s strong start to the split was Viego. After being disabled since his release in January, the Ruined King is finally enabled for competitive play and TSM took advantage of that. Right from the first game against Team Liquid, TSM confidently pulled out Viego in the mid lane where Tristan “PowerOfEvil” Schrage went on an absolute terror. 

Going up against Liquid in the opening game of the split is by no means easy, but TSM managed to pull out the win. After getting knocked out by Liquid at the Mid-Season Showdown, there was a lot of motivation for TSM to win. 

The team did so by throwing off Liquid completely from the draft. With a deadly combo of Viego, Nocturne, Rell, and Rumble, TSM had a scary dive composition that started to turn on at the 20-minute mark. From this point, the fighting strength of TSM was scary and Liquid slowly started to lose grip. In every fight, Liquid had to avoid giving PowerOfEvil the resets on Viego and they couldn’t. Despite a great effort, PowerOfEvil and TSM finally found the right fights where Viego got to show his strength. 

PowerOfEvil finished the game with a 4/3/10 record on Viego but really got to show why he is scary whenever he gets into a favorable position. TSM got to show it once again in its last game of the week against Golden Guardians, where it was Heo “Huni” Seung-hoon’s turn to show it off in the top lane. Even though Huni got punished hard in the lane, he managed to bounce back in the late game and keep a 100% win rate on Viego for the team. 

With Cloud9 having a really slow start to the split, TSM is now sitting in the first place. With only a couple of games between TSM and fifth place, the top of the standings is looking very close entering week 2. 

Immortals starting to climb the LCS ladder

The only other team that managed to pull off a clean week was surprisingly Immortals. The team started the split near the bottom of the standings after a bad spring split but is now already on the rise. With a win over 100 Thieves, Golden Guardians, and CLG respectively, Immortals is looking strong and wants to challenge the top 6. 

Immortals is currently tied with Evil Geniuses at a 10-11 record, a team that didn’t pick up a single win this weekend. If the momentum continues for Immortals next week, it’s possible that the underdogs will finally enter the top 6 which is the place to be. 

For Immortals, it was some more standard picks that helped gain wins this weekend with brilliant performances from jungler Andrei “Xerxe” Dragomir especially. The Romanian jungler got to play his famous Rumble twice and with great success, forcing teams to consider banning Rumble against him in the future. 

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