After a thriller to open up Day 1 of the 2022 Mid-Season Invitational, G2 Esports brought fans another banger with their second win of the day, this time against Royal Never Give Up. G2 end Day 1 of the Rumble stage undefeated with wins against the two best teams in the entire event.
With back-to-back upsets, G2 are now the only undefeated team left at MSI 2022
RNG came into MSI 2022 as the reigning MSI champions. After going 9-0 in their group, 6-0 officially, RNG walked into their opening match of the Rumble stages as favorites not only against G2 but against nearly every other team. Although RNG didn’t ban the Yasuo/Diana combo that won G2 their match against T1, G2 didn’t draft it. Instead, they put mid laner Rasmus “caPs” Winther on Zoe. G2 picked a standard team composition with the only off-meta pick being top laner Sergen “BrokenBlade” Çelik on Vladimir. RNG picked a standard meta team composition,
No team jumped out to a huge lead in the early game. However, G2 did have a small gold lead for the majority of the early game. At about 23 minutes in, G2 held a 3K gold lead over RNG. But after a team fight in the mid lane in G2’s favor, the team turned to Baron.
With the buff, they ballooned their gold lead to 5K. That gold lead held for 10 minutes before another fight broke out at Baron, again in G2’s favor, which allowed G2 to reach their end game, and in 37 minutes, the team slew the other only undefeated team at MSI 2022.
CaPs had another spectacular performance on Zoe with a 6/1/12 KDA (kills/deaths/assists), and the mid laner is playing like the best player in the tournament. G2’s rookie bot lane of Victor “Flakked” Lirola Tortosa and Raphaël “Targamas” Crabbé can’t be overlooked, though, and showed up big against one of the best bot lanes in the world. Flakked led the entire game in kills on Kai’Sa with nine. Targamas had many clutch hooks on Nautilus to cut off RNG’s comeback as well.
The win brings G2’s win streak to 22 games dating back to the 2022 LEC spring playoffs. With wins against the two best teams at the event, G2 now looks like the current favorite to win MSI 2022. But will have to maintain their streak on Saturday, May 21 as they go up against Evil Geniuses and Saigon Buffalo.
