A tale of two wins: KT Rolster’s first match as a superteam

The 2017 roster of the LCK’s KT Rolster is, without a doubt, the most hyped League of Legends team in the world. Between the five of them, they’ve won every single League of Legends tournament available to Korean players. At one point or another, every one of them has been considered at the top of their respective roles for much of their careers.

In short, KT is the very definition of a superteam.

Their first match of 2017 came against ROX Tigers, a team that was gutted after their incredibly impressive 2016 season. It was expected to be an easy win for KT – and it was.

But they weren’t perfect. This is clearly a team that needs some time to come together. Against the lesser teams in the LCK, they can win on pure skill, but once they hit the likes of SK Telecom T1, there are a few things they need to fix.

Win conditions

Most of KT’s weaknesses were evident in the first game of their series. Whether it was first game jitters or genuine lack of cohesion, KT seemed to lose sight of their win condition against ROX.

With a small mid game lead from Heo “PawN” Won-seok on Ryze and Song “Smeb” Kyung-ho on Maokai (with Teleport), the correct course of action would be to set up for a split push and get ready to collapse. With no one on ROX able to duel the fed Ryze and or quickly kill the super tanky Maokai, a simple 1-3-1 split would have been have been effective to quickly close out the game.

Except they never committed to the strategy. They continuously shoved lanes, then grouped to roam the jungle, looking for picks. While they did have Go “Score” Dong-bin’s Elise for single-target lockdown, their composition in Game 1 wasn’t exactly designed to find picks.

ROX’s composition was, however. With an Ashe/Malzahar bot lane, Syndra in mid, and Poppy up top, the Tigers had an insane amount of crowd control to lock down and wipe out anyone they ran into in the jungle.

For a while, it looked like KT had a chance to lose the game due to their tendency to get caught over and over again. It wasn’t until Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu’s late game teamfighting heroics on Ezreal that they were able to close things out.

Going forward, KT needs to remember what makes their team composition strong. Whether it’s designed to split push, teamfight, or look for picks, they need to respect that their comp is strong at certain things but weak at others. Deft won’t always be able to 1v5 and win the game single-handedly.

Early vision

KT Rolster support Cho “Mata” Se-hyeong has always been known for his vision control. He lives to gain information for his team and take it away from his opponents. While he doesn’t have the highest wards cleared stats out of the world’s best supports, he’s capable of using the wards that he does place to suss out his opponent’s’ exact intentions.

In Game 1, that didn’t really happen. Whether it was him feeling rusty after the offseason or simply hesitant to roam with a squishy support with little CC like Miss Fortune, his early game vision control was lacking. That shows in the endgame stats, where he only killed off 17 of the ROX Tigers’ wards – 9 fewer than Score and 14 fewer than his ROX support counterpart, Kim “Key” Han-gi.

When playing against a team composition that wants to find individual kills, vision control is vital. For KT to come out of the early game with any sort of lead, they needed to ensure their safety when wandering through the jungle.

In the future, Mata and Score are going to have to work together to improve their vision control, particularly in the early game. While playing with a double Tear of the Goddess composition, they let themselves get caught with their eyes shut, almost giving away a lead too big to come back from.

Again, they won’t be able to outplay everyone. It’s time to settle down and play smart.

The second win

The truly scary thing about KT, though, is that they managed to fix a lot of their problems in the course of a single break between games. Game 2 saw them gain leads for their solo laners once again, but this time instead of grouping up and forcing fights, KT sent the pair to their side lanes, allowing them to split. From there, they were able to slowly but safely choke out ROX.

They still had vision problems in the early game, but this was less of an issue thanks to all three lanes constantly pressuring, making it very difficult for ROX to punish them properly. In their first match of the season, they were able to outskill their opponents to such an immense degree that vision didn’t really matter.

Eventually, they’ll realize that they can’t rely on outplays for long. Once that happens, expect this team to come together and play as one of the smartest teams in the world. They have the brains to play standard, the mechanical skill to play creatively, and the experience to know when to do each.

Every player on KT Rolster is a longtime veteran, having demonstrated the ability to win on just about any roster. If they continue to fix their initial problems, it’s going to be easy to consider them the best in the world.

Taylor Cocke is downright terrified of this KT Rolster team. Follow him on Twitter @taylorcocke.