We're through Day 1 of the Mid-Season Invitational, and nothing has changed since Worlds last season. SK Telecom T1 have continued their absolute wrecking of teams to start this tournament. In fact, it's almost so much similar to last season, Faker is still playing Ryze, and no one knows what to do about it. Faker's dominance is unquestionable, but his ability to change an entire team's idea of what to do going into a match is unmatched. Faker's played Ryze in both matches in day 1, going a combined 14-0-12.
Nobody is sure how far SKT is ahead of everyone, but what is sure is it's scary. They've won a world championship, replaced their jungle and top lane, and now look just as good as they did last November. Faker got double target-banned against G2, as G2 took out Zilean and Azir. Then, they have a few options. They can ban Ryze as their third ban, which would be silly to use all their resource onto Faker, they can pick Ryze, in which Faker would just play Casseopia to counter, or they can give up Ryze, and Faker dominates.
"I think for today we had some luck during our games and overall we did pretty well," said Faker.
Taking Advantage Of Situations
One of the things SKT is incredible at is taking advantages and just snowballing a match in their favor. Below is a great example.
This screen shot taken directly after SKT won a team fight in which they secured four kills helped push a gigantic gold swing. Prior to the fight, SKT had a 28K to 25K gold lead, a respectable 3,000 gold difference. Directly after the fight they hit dragon, then took all three tier-3 turrets. This pushed their gold lead to 34K.
SKT finds ways to create little advantages that eventually you look up at the mountain you have to climb to beat them. This game had an 8 thousand gold difference at 17 minutes.
Tonight, SK Telecom and RNG face off in arguably the best matchup of MSI. Both teams are the top-2, and while it would be surprising to see SKT lose this, we'll get a better glimpse of just how good SKT is compared to the rest of the pack.
Day 1 Highlights
