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Gaming
Peanut is our MVP of the Mid Season Invitational
SKT’s jungler proved that he belongs in the company of world champions over at MSI in Brazil.
Peanut prepares for the final game of MSI
© Riot Games
Last year it was North America that fell to SK telecom T1 in the Mid Season Invitational final and this year it was Europe’s turn to feel the full force of the South Korean powerhouse in an international final.
In a nice change of pace G2 did manage to go one better than CLG by actually taking a game off SKT, but the outcome was unsurprisingly the same, with Faker and crew taking home the trophy and getting their championship medals from football legend Ronaldo.
While the outcome may have been the same as last year, 2017’s MSI was very different to 2016.
An expanded format saw more teams than ever compete at the event and these extra teams meant an entire month was dedicated to the competition. With more matches and more teams came a larger prize pool, thanks to the introduction of crowdfunding, which further enhanced the prestige of the competition.
All-round this was a great event, and one of the most enjoyable international competitions we’ve seen in a while.
SKT’s dominance in League of Legends is now just accepted, with few teams in the world able to realistically challenge them in a best of five.
Faker continues to be the best player in the history of the game and his performance at MSI further established this. But we expect that level of play from Faker these days, and what we didn’t expect was Han 'Peanut' Wang-ho to be the star of the show.
Peanut’s performance at MSI was perhaps the best we've ever seen from the young player and was more than enough to earn our MVP award.
For anyone that only watched the final few days of the competition this may come as a bit of a surprise, as while Peanut was good, he was very much just another cog in the unbelievably strong SKT roster. His plays weren’t that amazing and outside of a couple of impressive games in the final he didn’t do all that much. But look further back into the group stage and that is where he managed to rack up some style points.
The first thing we should flag is that game against the GIGABYTE Marines where he played the most impressive Lee Sin we have ever seen. He ended that match at 15-2-5 but 14 of those kills came in the first 12 minutes. This was more than enough to smash the record for most kills in a pro game before 15 minutes, and unsurprisingly easily won SKT the game.
While SKT were probably never in much danger of losing that match, Peanut’s amazing performance was a message to the other teams out there. Anyone that watched that should have instantly banned Lee Sin whenever they came up against SKT, but for some reason most teams didn’t do that, which lead to more and more wins when Peanut was given the champion. Throughout MSI he was undefeated on Lee Sin, winning all six games. SKT’s three losses came when the played Graves twice, and Ivern.
Peanut's Lee Sin was certainly the most impressive part of his MSI performance, but another area that helped him towards this award was his early game movements and timings. Obviously not every game was as busy as his performance against GIGABYTE Marines, but throughout the entire event he managed to show up at the right time to help secure first blood or at least some early kills. One of the best examples of this was in the last game of the final against G2 ( Twitch link).
Peanut and Faker celebrate victory
© Riot Games
Here Peanut makes his way to the bottom lane at a crucial time. After some poor trades his team-mates are potentially at risk should G2 go aggressive or get some help of their own. But to make this timing even more impressive he manages to show up just moments before the G2 bot lane duo manage to hit level six. If they had just a little bit more experience then this fight could have turned out very different, especially when the players are forced to tower dive. But Peanut timed this to perfection securing an early lead for SKT that they never lost. He ended this game at 9-0-6, not bad for one of the most important matches in his LoL career.
Peanut also had an uncanny ability to just stay alive at MSI, whereas other players might throw their lives away to try and trade it seemed like Peanut always knew the exact possibilities of his hero. In the SKT loss to WE he died five times, but if you discount that then the most deaths he had in a game was three. In fact throughout the whole tournament he only died 24 times in 17 games, which is certainly a very good record.
It is safe to say that anything other than an SKT win at MSI would have been a massive surprise, but we were surprised by just how good they looked. This is quite the different team to the one that dominated at Worlds last year, and Peanut is one of the new additions. However, this past few weeks it looked like Peanut in SKT was a natural fit: his team play was some of the best we’ve ever seen, his mechanical skill is just as good as anyone else in the pro scene and his decision making is impressive to say the least.
At just 19 years old Peanut is still a very young talent, and undoubtedly has many more international tournament wins coming his way if he keeps up this level of play – especially if he sticks with this team. At the start of the season questions were raised about this new look SKT, but now those questions have been answers emphatically, and SKT will now undoubtedly look to become world champions once again.
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