The US team Cloud 9 made a radical change in League of Legends: They focused on young players from South Korea and systematically sorted out the old veterans. After a disappointing season, they are now taking the exact opposite approach and bringing back experienced players from Europe, including a 27-year-old Dane.
Cloud9 has always been the modern, somewhat different team in League of Legends. With Sneaky, they had a colorful franchise player for years, who liked to try his hand at cross-dressing.
But lately they have been going a bit overboard with the upheavals.
3 completely different identities in 1.5 years
This is what the team looked like a year ago: A year ago, Cloud9 was a team with 3 outstanding players: They had acquired the Croatian Perkz for a lot of money. On the bot lane, the strong Dane Zven raged with his supporter Vulcan, who was considered a huge talent in North America.
Weak points of the team were jungle Blaber and top laner Fudge, who played solidly but not spectacularly.
Blaber once had such a terrible play that Zven apparently snapped and was then banished to the “Academy League,” where he went berserk.
With the team, Cloud9 finished second in the LCS – but that wasn’t enough, so they completely rebuilt the team. They had to, as Perkz escaped back to Europe after the chaotic year.
The perhaps most exciting story in LoL is about a “reformed” troll:
Cloud9 becomes an extension of Korea in the LCS
This is what the team looked like half a year ago: Before the spring split of 2022, the team radically focused on Korea: They had a boot camp in Seoul and hired an innovative coach who had trained in Korea, and relied on a young hungry team filled with Koreans:
- They replaced the experienced Dane Zven on the bot lane with the young Korean Berserker (18)
- on the top lane, Summit (23), another talent from Korea moved in – the Australian Fudge had to switch to the mid lane, where the European and very expensive star player Perkz had disappeared
- as a supporter, Winsome, an American with Korean roots, now played
They were radical overall, wanting to build a “10-man” roster with equal players to enable optimal training.
This is how it turned out: The team had a strong run in the regular season, with the South Korean Summit even being voted the best player in the USA on the top lane. But there were already cracks: the coach left the team early for unspecified reasons.
In the playoffs, Cloud9 fell apart and lost all 6 games.
MVP Summit left the team after only 6 months – just like Winsome. Allegedly, the players were even offered to all other teams in the US LCS for free.
What’s next? Before the summer of 2022, Cloud9 is making a complete turnaround:
- Only Berserker remains from the South Korea offensive.
- The support role will now be played by Zven (24), the trained bot laner with a penchant for penta kills will become the partner of Berserker.
- Mid laner Fudge is moving back to the top lane to replace Summit.
- For mid lane, they are bringing back Jensen, the 27-year-old Dane, who had already played for Cloud9 from 2015 to 2019. He was last released by Team Liquid and was left without a team in spring 2022.
After Cloud9 relied on young Koreans in spring 2022, now older Danes are expected to do the job.
With Jensen, there was already wonder two years ago why he still got so much money – a year later he was replaced by his then team:
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