Good day, everyone. I just returned to the mother Russia after such an amazing tournament and i'm happy to share some inside experience from there with you, friends.
There was a huge break between s3 finals and the moment when we decided to go to the IEM Cologne and try to get the quote for the IEM finals. Before that we were practicing only in soloq and not that much even there. When decision to go there was made, we immediately started our teampractice, but after a few days beautiful EUW servers have shown us their great performance. They took more than a half of a week of practice from us. Things were looking really bad, even though we were doing well in scrims(in my mind there was always a really annoying thought: "does those results, against the guys who are losing as much time of practice as we, really matters?". We knew that we are gonna face C9, who are not suffer that much from their servers).
It wasn’t really hard to get my skill back, because nothing has changed in jungle since s3 finals. I knew exactly which champions are the best and just practiced the shit out of 'em.
So we arrived to Cologne. I always like to travel there, because its really awesome to live on the banks of Rhine, and the weather there is very similar to my own city's weather, which i like as well.
I will not talk about the first game, because there was nothing really interesting about it. But the second one was really epic. The strategy there was to not let them take such op champions like elise or shyvana therefore we should've ban them or firstpick them for me/darien. But the thing which i haven't told you yet was: i've had only 4 champions in my pool, since we've had a lack of practice due to server lags. And when they started to ban my junglers, it could have turned into a big problems. But, fortunately, in the first game they left my Vi open and got raped for that. After that game we realised that C9 are taking nocturne over much more dangerous junglers and it suits us. So we just banned one more jungler to force them to pick nocturne, and that happened. But it took out my last jungler, so i decided to play lee for the 2d time in 2 months. Wasn’t a big deal Even though i messed up with "insec" on rumble once, my overall play wasn’t as bad as i expected. I even won pretty much every smitewar in those two games.
After that, another "best jungler in the world" was beaten for me. It was a great experience to play against them again(we scrimed a lot on s3 finals) and i was very happy with the result, but we should've proceed to the finals against our toughest opponent - Fnatic. By that time we had already lost 6-8 games in a row against them. And we really wanted to get a revenge.
In the finals everything went just as planned. First game was a patient work on two things:
1. disable Rekkles from farming
2. help our malphite to get his DFG to just oneshot Corki, who was refusing to build mres.
...everything, except one little thing: in the second game i by mistake fed fb to ashe. But we've seen that someone lost his flash to get me(as we realised later - it was ahri and ashe), and it turned out into a huge stomp after two easy kills, which couldnt escape from our champions w/o their flashes. I felt sad for Rekkles dying against me again and again, but i had to keep doing it:( Nothing personal, bro.
In the end we finally got our revenge, first place, and i even got another MVP title from IEMs. I cant describe how it was cool to get it all. It was just... AMAAZIIING!
Now we are taking a break for 1 week, because we are going to our Chinese fans in Shanghai. And then we are coming back to hard practicing. We need to take the victory on the Battle of the Atlantic tournament not only for ourselves, but to help the whole our region to be better than NA!
Thank you friends for supporting me through everything, for raising my morale and for a useful advises. *special thank to the guy, who advised me bluepot start on evelynn on my stream, you are awesome!
I'll try to stream before our trip to Shanghai. See you