Cloud9 LCS Summer 2022 Preview

June 16, 2022

Cloud9 is coming into the Summer with a more familiar roster, here are our expectations of this team.

Spring 2022’s Cloud9, or the Korea9 as the fans affectionately dubbed them, was a project with big promises. In his announcement video, the head coach Nick ‘LS’ De Cesare said if they don’t win the Spring and Summer it would be a failure. But as we all know the reign of LS and his new implementations among the team were short-lived. LS was dropped from the team just before Week 3 started and the reasons are still unknown to the public.

Without LS, the team didn’t just fall down and died, they had a good run for most of the split, slowing down just before the playoffs. Most of their wins came from the back of the regular season MVP Park ‘Summit’ Woo-tae’s back. But unlike his MVP performance in the regular season, Summit had a not-so-great playoffs. He couldn’t get the leads he used to get, his champion picks weren’t all too great and he was heavily criticized for not adapting to his opponents.

With the bad results, changes had to come, and they did, king-sized changes in that. The biggest one was the return of Nicolaj ‘Jensen’ Jensen. C9 was the team Jensen started his career on, and despite not winning here this is the team he made his name a household one. After he was benched from Liquid he didn’t have a team during Spring, much to the surprise of everyone. Now that he is back to the mid lane for C9, Ibrahim ‘Fudge’ Allami is going back top, replacing Summit. Fudge had shown great improvement in the top lane since he started out in C9, so far so that he was one of their best player in Summer 2021.

jensenbackc9

Bot lane also isn’t without big changes. Kim ‘Winsome’ Dong-keon is no more on the team with Jesper ‘Zven’ Svenningsen. Zven won the LCS twice while playing ADC for C9 and he is now role-swapping to support for his third one. Although role-swaps are always hard, Zven is a player known for working hard and he will be playing with one of the best ADCs in LCS, Kim ‘Berserker’ Min-cheol.

Now, we put Cloud9 fourth in our power rankings, but this doesn’t mean they won’t be making worlds at the end of Summer. I believe this team has the potential to be top two, or even outright win it all, if they manage to get over the initial struggles of these many changes. The talent on this team is enough for it as I manage to write this much without having to mention their two-time MVP jungler Robert ‘Blaber’ Huang.