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MSI
MSI 2026
G2 arrived as favourites, fresh from sending T1 home, against a North American side few expected to trouble Europe's best. The gap between that expectation and what followed defined the series. LYON didn't out-mechanic G2 — they out-tempoed them, game after game, until G2 stopped playing their own game entirely.
LYON out-think G2 from start to finish
On this series, LYON threw themselves into almost early skirmish available, looking to rattle the European side, then simply outplayed them in the teamfights that followed — clean, decisive, and repeated. G2's vision was the hole underneath it all: they kept committing to objectives without knowing where LYON actually were. The last teamfight of the game was the proof, Saint's Sylas arriving from a flank G2 never saw coming.
The control started at the river and never left. LYON's jungle-mid pairing moved first on every neutral objective, creative pathing and superior vision handing them the opening move each time. G2 found answers in isolation — a clean top gank, a dragon steal — but nothing that changed the shape of a game. Even when their draft was built for a long front-to-back fight or a scaling win condition, they never got the lane priority or the river control to reach the point where those plans pay off. That control also gave Saint the freedom to shape most of the fights.
The question coming in was whether he could raise his level against the world's best mids, and this series answered much of it. His lane was contested more often than not — except in game two, where he simply crushed it on Viktor: +29 CS, +1831 gold and +2045 XP by 15 minutes. But it was once the map opened that he became decisive, repeatedly finding flanks and timings G2 never managed to account for, the final fight of the series only the clearest example.
The two botlanes stayed close in lane through the series, traded rather than dominated, though LYON's found more value once the fights broke out. Game three was different. Inspired set up every one of his team's win conditions in the early game, and this time it broke G2 for good: Berserker was let loose and finished 11/0/8, a 99 RFT score, the game that ended the series before it needed a fourth. Berserker had told RFT.GG before the series that he considered himself the best ADC in the West:
In the West, of course. I think so.
And he proved it.
The teams' identities pulled in opposite directions. LYON drafted simple and executed it cleanly — heavy frontlines, high-impact junglers, supports who create openings. Their frontline soaked everything: Olaf, Gnar and Renekton kept surviving fights G2 had counted as won, while Berserker dealt damage under no real threat. G2 went the other way, reaching for demanding, signature picks — Yasuo, Pantheon, Anivia — that leave almost no margin. The drafts weren't bad. They were hard, and once the early game slipped they became unplayable.
BrokenBlade's Yasuo into Gnar was the clearest case. It's the counter LYON should have feared. Instead they had read it, funnelled resources into the top lane, and turned an aggressive pick into a lasting weakness. That pattern held across the series: the bot dives, the rotations, the side-lane traps — each acceleration G2 attempted looked anticipated before it started. Inspired always seemed a few seconds ahead, and never let the pace drop.
The 3-0 wasn't a mechanical rout. It was an accumulation: better preparation, better map control, a sharper jungle-support axis, cleaner teamfight execution, and far more lucid decisions in the moments that decided games. Game by game, LYON imposed their conditions and G2 abandoned theirs. Inspired, for his part, saw no reason to dress it up afterwards:
What's next
LYON's reward is the biggest test left: Hanwha Life, dropping into the lower bracket after the upper bracket final, with a place in the grand final against BLG on the line. HLE have looked untouchable in Daejeon, sweeping everything in their path until they met BLG. For a LYON side that has already eliminated Team Secret Whales and G2, the ceiling keeps rising — and this is where it gets tested properly.
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