Failure in Execution - A C9 Story

In the longest game of the Day 2 of the League of Legends World Championship, Cloud9 defeated Hong Kong Attitude in a nail-biting 47 minute game. Cloud9 came in as the heavy favourite, and had a gold advantage for almost the entire game, but failed to decisively win the game. Analyst and fans are now worried, why did C9 look so shaky? In my humble opinion, the problem was not the draft, or any micro errors in the players, but a failure to understand and utilize the comp Reaperd drafted for them.

To understand this game, it's better to subdivide it into three phases. We have the early game, the mid game and the late game, broken up by the plays that happen at 19 minutes and 37 minutes. During the early C9 used their teamcomp and pushing lanes to get an advantage, taking 9 turret plates to HKA's 1 and having destroyed 3 towers while losing only one of theirs. During the late game, after a risky Baron Nashor and teamfight, they retake control of the game. A miss-play in the top inhibitor prolongs the game, but after a fight in the midlane they get a second Baron, an Elder Dragon and win the game. Looking at the gold graph, we have to ask, why did the mid game go so poorly for C9?
The problem, was a lack of understanding in what their comp was good at, and what the HKA comp was good at. Cloud9's composition strengths lie in that it wins lane early and get a sizable advantage out of pushing lanes while Svenskeren's Elise took over the jungle. Despite Crash's success in stopping the top lane dive, he wasn't able to gank mid or turn around any of the lanes, in part due to C9's good warding and preparation for the strat. On the flipside, HKA's comp was very strong in front to back teamfights, and was extremely hard to pick off or dive. With Yuumi, Gragas and Tristana, they had multiple elements to disengage a fight and keep the distance from divers. In order to stall out the game, they had the advantage that they could facecheck with Garen with a high degree of safety.
The path to victory for C9 then, is obvious. Once they had reach a certain point in the game, they should have turn to splitpush and menace the Baron. In particular, their comp was great at tanking and taking down the baron quickly, one of Heimerdinger's contribution to the comp. Last year, G2 used this very strat to force a Heimer ban every game against them. C9, did not do that. Instead, they continuously tried to force a teamfight through picks. These fights were always doomed to failure, as they did not have the sustained DPS required to kill Garen before the long range damage of HKA and the threat of Akali forced them to disengage.

This playstyle is characteristic of C9, as they have won many games in the LCS thought the use of superior pick potential, proactive engages and front to back teamfights. In this game however, this is a mistake. They should have, instead, forced a teamfight in Baron, where the enemy team was forced to dive them and leave their backline exposed. This finally happened at minute 37, when C9 realized that without the Baron buff they could not win. Due to the lost time and gold, this fight was unnecessarily close and relied on M1ssion making a mistake with his position to win.

Overall, Cloud 9 played well at a micro level, and at the early game and in the micro. I am sure that with a VOD review session with Reapered they will not make this mistake again. But it does show how stubborn C9 shotcalling can be when a strat doesn't work for 18 minutes. Maybe they should pivot towards comfort and a more traditional pick comp in the games against G2 and Griffin.