Match Preview: Reason Gaming vs Cloud 9 HyperX EU
Two of the highest ranking teams on the European Challenger circuit face off against each other in what most fans & onlookers think to be a fairly one-sided match-up in Cloud 9’s favour, which is mostly due however, to a lack of knowledge about the Reason Gaming roster. The top-seeded Cloud 9 EU roster who previously ran with the name ‘Apples is Sour’ is the team everyone is keeping an eye on to see if the organisations run-away success in NA can be translated into European success.
Reason Gaming’s new roster however, were only 4 points behind the new Cloud 9 roster in the Challenger rankings and boast a 3-1 advantage over the C9 team in recent games, so this team shouldn’t be immediately written off by any means as they have secured themselves a strong seeding for the upcoming Coke Zero League. Especially with the backing of the steady hand of the Reason Gaming organisation, who have enough success in other areas of competitive gaming, that this League of Legends team will have a platform from which to build and be successful from the onset.
The player match-up to watch will be the two Junglers. The Jungler role in the pre-season Meta has been ear-marked as an influential position, especially in competitive play. So this means I’ll be keeping an eye on Cloud 9 EU’s ‘k0u’ and how he stands up to Reason Gaming’s strong player in ‘Trashy’. Both junglers play & favour Lee-Sin a lot so it’ll be interesting to see if that gets banned out, looking at the strength of the champion in the current meta and over the course of the previous month in competitive play and how good Lee-Sin is to watch, I would hope either team do not ban the champion out. Trashy can play most of the champions that are flavour of the month at the moment, but I do enjoy watching him play Aatrox, especially during Dreamhack Winter 2013, and with the meta currently favouring champions with health-regeneration we might just get to see Trashy play the Darkin Blade.
Now for a prediction on the match-up, for me there’s no clear winner here yet – regardless of the hype C9 might be getting. Both teams are well balanced, with Reason Gaming’s Jungler Jonas ‘Trashy’ Andersen and Captain & Marksman Kristoffer ‘Krislund’ Pedersen being the two that stand out for me in the current Meta for Reason Gaming. With the tank-top-lane focus in recent weeks, I would look to the Jungle and Bot-lane to have the most impact on the game. Having watched both the players in their endeavours in the DreamHack Winter 2013 tournament I was impressed by their play.
I’m always a fan of a community-perceived ‘upset’ as well, so I’ll be choosing Reason Gaming to beat Cloud 9 EU and take the Best of 3 match, 2 games to 1.
