Week 1 has concluded in Los Angeles, which means its time for power rankings.
Now that everyone's gotten to watch every match in week 1 of LTA North, lets go through and see how wrong we were ahead of the season, and answer this weeks important question: What's the biggest surprise for each team so far?
Let's get this out of the way: Dignitas is one of 3 teams who don't have their full roster playing in LA.
Jungler Sheiden had visa issues, so instead playing is Lira. You may remember Lira from the Clutch Gaming team (100T before 100T was in the LCS) that won the finals in 2019, which coincidentally is the last time Lira played competitively.
Regardless, having the proper jungler would not have helped. Every lane got slammed in game 1, and game 2 was not much better. This team isn't filling anyone with any confidence, and it's not expected they're going to start anytime soon.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Srtty was good against Impact! In no way was he good enough to actually carry Dignitas to a win against Team Liquid, but not many top laners would have been able to. Specifically, he got very close to solo killing Impact's Renekton in the second game as Aurora. There were flashes of brilliance.
Lyon are the second team to play without everyone in LA: Lyonz (yes, his full name in game is actually Lyon Lyonz) is playing remotely in Mexico City with visa issues. Unfortunately, similarly to Dignitas, having Lyonz on-site would not have helped.
They looked helpless against Cloud9. Everything that we pointed out in the pre-season ranking as a way for Lyon to look decent just didn’t come true. Saint looked like an academy player against Loki even though everyone said that Saint was a more hyped prospect during the offseason. Even Licorice wasn’t able to stabilize the lane against Thanatos.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Oddie looked like exactly like he should have. This reads as the opposite of a surprise, but with Oddie coming in from the LLA, there were concerns about how he’d stack up against NA junglers (who are surprisingly strong!). Those concerns shouldn’t exist anymore, Oddie was strong from the draft until the second nexus fell.
This is more of a vibe ranking. In our staff rankings, Disguised was ranked as 8th, 6th and 5th, which shows more of the close level between teams towards the bottom than anything else.
Unlike the other teams, there were real bright spots for Disguised. Other then Exyu being too busy yapping in chat to play the game, he played as well of a jungle game as DSG was going to get. Huhi pulled out some more “weird” picks with Elise support in the first game.
Unfortunately, this team just got beat by 100T. That’s all it comes down to. There is a real upside here for this team, they just didn’t show it on Sunday, especially with their rookie AD carry ScaryJerry getting targeted throughout the entire game by River.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Castle was the best player for DSG across the series. A lot of people had some reservations about Castle, especially since he came from Immortals last season. The bit is, Castle was good on that team and he was very good at neutralizing Sniper over the entire series. To think about beating 100T, you need to try and take Sniper out of the game. Castle did that as well as anyone could have, even winning straight up in the Rumble v Aurora matchup in the second game.
Shopify gets a bit of a pass this week for a couple reasons. First, they’re currently playing Zeyzal in support because of visa issues with Ceos. Secondly, while both Shopify and Dignitas played everyones unanimous number one and number two teams, only one of them showed some vague amount of fight.
There were flashes of what we loved from the 2023 LCS Summer Championship winning NRG team with Palafox and Contractz. After that... it really just felt like there was nothing Shopify could do to win against FlyQuest.
Shopify plays Lyon Gaming in week two; that's the real test to see how Shopify really compares to the other bottom half teams.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Is there really a surprise for this team? Every team up against FlyQuest would have looked just like this. Every single player lost lane to their counterpart. They just happened to play better then the other teams below them.
100 Theives comes in at number four this week because they had what felt like the closest win in the first week. They did play well in game one against DSG but game two felt like it could have gone the other way... until it didn't.
FBI does seem to be a legitimate upgrade over Meech/Tomo from last season. Quid and River have continued to play lights out games. This team seems like it started off strong and can only hope that they improve at the same pace or quicker then every team below them.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
FBI coming into 100T and looking like he had been there for the last 2 years was a surprise. After 100T had DoubleLift for a year and then the Meech/Tomo combination last year, it feels like 100T may have found a missing piece in a player they can trust in the bot lane. If you're looking to try and watch a game and learn, his poke Varus game against Ezreal and Elise is worth watching.
The only "lower" seeded team to win this weekend (TL, FLY, 100T and Lyon were all seeded in the top half because they played at Worlds), Cloud9 set off right where we all probably expected them to: a convincing best of three win.
The easiest place to start is Loki: regardless of Jojopyun's out of server issues, there were some large shoes to fill in mid lane after he moved across the pond. Loki seemed, at least in the first best of three, to fill those shoes and beat Saint, the other highly rated mid laner coming from LCK Challengers.
Everyone else on this team looked like we expected them to, dominant against an opponent that they should have stomped.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Zven played as an AD carry in summer last year on Dignitas and before that was a support for a couple of years. From our one game sample size, we're willing to say that Zven is back to his C9 carry days. After having 72% kill participation in game one and 92% in game two, it feels like he hasn't lost a step.
Team Liquid and FlyQuest feel less like ranks two and one and more like 1A and 1B: they're both really good and until they (theoretically) play each other in week three, we won't really know where they stand against each other.
TL had a very good game against Dignitas, but if there is any game you're expected to win this split, it's the one against DIG (though they're expected to win basically every game).
This team looks like the team that went to Worlds, and even with Spawn not standing behind the team, they're continuing to win. And hey, they still have more wins then SK Gaming!
What was the teams biggest surprise?
CoreJJ instantly going deep into his champion pool. It took all of one game for Core to start not play meta supports, as he picked Pantheon second on red side for game two. Every time Core starts cooking with support picks, it reminds us of this game against Cloud9 in 2021 where he played Shen, having just 0.4% duo proximity with Tactical's Ziggs.
FlyQuest played one best of three and looked like they hadn't lost a step since Worlds. The only thing you can really knock them down for is that Bwipo looked just OK in top lane, though he does seem to have maybe leaked the script a bit on the top lane champ pool.
What was the teams biggest surprise?
Fearless really suits this team. OK, maybe that's really not that big of a surprise, but both Bwipo and Inspired have incredibly large champion pools, and Quad seems to have been able to play just about anything at this point.
Do you agree with our rankings? Go yell at us in the comment section below and tell us how you would have ranked the teams this week.