Gen G seek to reclaim glory in 2021 World Championship

Park “Ruler” Jae-hyuk is the only one left of the 2017 Samsung Galaxy roster that defied all odds from the Regional Qualifier into lifting the Summoner’s Cup that year. After some mixed results throughout the season, Gen G seeks to prove itself on the biggest stage.

Gen G is a bit of a peculiar case – this team has consistently gotten good results in the regular season, but they seem to not do much in the matches that matter the most. This team has played only three best of fives all year, and two of those were losses. Maybe the LCK playoff format is partly to blame for that.

There are several issues for this team – it is understandable that a team should be rewarded for its good performance in the regular season, but the way that they usually won in the regular season was through drafting scaling champions for their carries, Gwak “Bdd” Bo-seong and Ruler. As a result, most of their early game prowess relies on Kim “Clid” Tae-min. Because of the style of play that they default to, another question arises about their champion pools, how adaptable they are and how adaptable they can be in a tournament that will almost certainly feature different champions at the forefront of the meta. 

Because of the team’s inclination to play for scaling towards the later stages of the game, their laning phases are more or less muted — Bdd is a great player, as we know him to be, but there is only so much one can do on champions like Orianna and Azir; Rascal is often on team fighting tanks or bruisers such as Renekton, but has shown a capability to lean towards split pushing options like the Camille if the need arises; while Clid has shown that he can play the more scaling-oriented AP junglers. His most played is the Volibear, which is more focused towards ganking the lanes; Ruler and Kim “Life” Jeong-min, as a bottom lane, seem to be out of sorts for most of the summer season during the laning phase, but they still back it up with their team fight performances. 

In general, it seemed like the team was stuck in a more passive style, not because of the players’ talent, but the combination of these five players may just gravitate towards that. To remedy this, Gen G tried swapping out some players in the summer split. Noh “Burdol” Tae-yoon was subbed in for the top lane, probably with the hopes of bringing in some of that rookie aggression, and it worked out to a certain extent. The team also tried bringing in Ko “Youngjae” Yeong-jae, but this move was met with less success. Ultimately, the team decided to stick to their veteran roster. Whether or not we will be seeing the rookies in the Worlds stage is still unknown at the moment. 

Right now, Gen G is not one of the favorites to win the whole thing, but if they are able to unleash the potential of all of their experienced players consistently, they can become a threat in this tournament. 

 

(Header image via INVEN Esports)