Bow down: JDG’s Ruler and T1’s Gumayusi force 5 breathtaking games in LPL and LCK’s first meeting at MSI 2023

Korea and China battled on Summoner’s Rift today for the first time at the 2023 League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational when JD Gaming took down T1 3-2 to earn a spot in the grand finals. In only the second full five-game series at the event, both teams treated fans from around the world to an incredible showing of mechanical skills and macro play at the highest level.

Across the five-game series, the story remained firmly in the hands of two of the best AD carries in the world: T1’s Lee “Gumayusi” Min-hyeong and JDG’s Park “Ruler” Jae-hyuk. Both were the centerpieces for their squad as team compositions were mainly built around them to complement and protect them for the later teamfights.

This isn’t to say the other players didn’t shine just as brightly, though. For example, JDG saw heroic efforts from their star mid laner Zhuo “knight” Ding, who was the perfect combination beside his fellow superstar jungler, Seo “Kanavi” Jin-hyeok.

The pair continuously found ways to combo their engages on key targets, making it easy for Ruler to clean up shop with Jinx and Aphelios. The 24-year-old veteran ADC finished the series with a whopping 28 kills and 17 assists, while Knight had 15 kills, 45 assists, and Player of the Series honors to boot.

In fact, it felt like a much more balanced act from JDG, especially in the fourth game where four of the team’s five players had an even spread of damage across the game, whereas most of T1’s damage came from Gumayusi. Every player on the LPL champion’s roster can be a threat, and they showed it throughout the series.

T1, on the other hand, were much more heavily reliant on Gumayusi’s ability to traverse a teamfight and position himself correctly so he wouldn’t get caught out by any possible engage. In the final game, for example, he was right on the precipice of dragging T1 into the finals with a heroic effort, but a surprising mistake by Faker swung the game—and ultimately, the series—back into JDG’s favor.

Many LCK fans will likely be begging head coach Bae “Bengi” Seong-woong to never let Faker play Nautilus again, especially after his final blunder in game five where he inexplicably engaged into JDG’s entire team with T1 in a four-vs-five situation. Across this series and MSI as a whole, Nautilus hasn’t looked nearly as impactful as T1 want it to be, with Faker only winning one match on the champion out of four games.

In the meantime, T1 will have to recalibrate their strategies as they head down to the lower bracket of the tournament, where they will face off against either Bilibili Gaming or Gen.G. You can catch all the action when MSI continues tomorrow at 7am CT.

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