This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　While people were skeptical of Fnatic, after their Battle of the Atlantic loss to Cloud 9 and their loss to Gambit at IEM Cologne, the team established themselves atop the leaderboards after starting the season undefeated for seven games in a row. However, after a tough loss to Gambit, they went in a downward spiral of losses, losing eight in a row before finally getting a victory against the team who started their losing streak, Gambit. This strange trend of first beating every team then falling to every one, caused motivation to study the events, analyzing what exactly happened with Fnatic.

　　When Fnatic was on their undefeated streak, they were looked up at by every team. They had the highest KDA, highest team GPM, and overall their stats made them look like the best team in the West. There was however more to this story as their wins weren’t flawless dominations. Many of their victories were either close games or took Fnatic a long time to close out. Their average game time was 41:50 minutes, over 2 minutes higher than the average and the 2nd highest of any team. Even though they had a 7-0 record and seemed to be at the top of the league, Deficio said that he felt that Gambit could still take a game from Fnatic. This proved true as that game started the chain reaction that shook their confidence, causing them to no longer be able to pull out those close victories. In the first 7 games they averaged a gold lead at 15 minutes in 86% of their games, in their following 8 losses they only got an early lead in 38% of games. However, the early game was only the start of their troubles.

　　

Mid game struggles & Dragons

After they started losing games, their flaws became revealed to others. The biggest of them was their mid game pressure and rotations and control of dragon. Throughout their eight straight losses they only got dragon three times, while their opponents scored 32 dragons. Even games where they had the early kill lead and gold lead, like their week five match against Millenium, they still did not get a single dragon. Fnatic is to this date last in total dragons killed, with 25 compared to Copenhagen Wolve’s 47 dragons, almost doubling that of Fnatic’s. In their wins they had more dragons than their opponent in 67.5% of the games, while they never had the most dragons in any game during the losses. The lack of dragon control often left them to fall behind fast during the mid game. During their losses mid game (10-25 minutes) they averaged a team GPM of 1,527, compared to their opponents who averaged 1,847. Overall, dragons have been Fnatic’s weakness, so far both in wins and losses. Once the other LCS teams caught wind of this, they could exploit Fnatic’s mid game.

　　

Double AP Compositions

Fnatic has almost always been known for their double AP compositions, even dating back to season one where they starred Shushei and xPeke on one team. However, Fnatic has recently been under fire because of their use of double AP in the current meta, dominated by tank top laners like Mundo, Shyvana, and Renekton. While this topic has been over-discussed, when analyzing these Fnatic losses, it is necessary to include their unsuccessful double AP compositions. Half of their eight losses come from running a “double AP” where top lane played either Lulu, Rumble, LeBlanc, or Gragas. sOAZ’s KDA and GPM with non AP champs is 4.68 and 340 respectively, while with AP champs his KDA and GPM are 3.54 and 304. And while Fnatic did silence their haters a bit when they won against Gambit, ending their losing streak with double AP, it is still a major red flag as to what changed between the Fnatic seen in the first seven games compared to the Fnatic of the next 9.

　　

Player spotlight - Cyanide

Through the ups and downs of this team, one player’s performance has been particularly interesting, Cyanide. His playstyle is very interesting compared to the current meta, he continues to play a “selfless” style jungler, getting significantly less gold and farm than other junglers such as Diamondprox or Jankos. Those two junglers have a minion kill per minute (MKPM) rate of over 4.3, compared to Cyanide who has only been getting 2.81 MKPM. As illustrated to the right, Cyanide starts to fall behind in minions as early as 10 minutes, and essentially stops farming at 30 minutes and beyond. This forces Fnatic’s playstyle to be more solo lane focused as they are essentially playing with a double support composition. It might also be a reason why their team suffers when sOAZ doesn’t play a tanky top, since Cyanide can’t fill that role due to his lack of farm. However, while Cyanide doesn’t farm, what he does well is ganks, and Fnatic plays to these strengths very well. As seen on the right, Cyanide converts over half of his ganks to kills, which is a very high ratio. Comparing them to the XDG article posted last week, Xmithie and Zuna only had a kill conversion rate of under 40 %. Cyanide’s extremely successful ganks show true in another stat, which is that Fnatic leads the league in first bloods, getting 12 FBs in 16 games. Most of these first bloods are due to Cyanide’s extremely efficient ganks, scoring successful ganks on junglers such as wukong pre-6. Overall, Cyanide is an oddly shaped rock for the Fnatic team. His ganks often can get Fnatic going, but his rotations are sometimes misguided leading to free dragons for the opposing teams. This high risk gank playstyle has been ingrained in Fnatic so far though, and it is one reason why confidence plays such an important role to their team.

　　Coming into superweek it is going to be extremely important that Fnatic brings their A game if they want to seal up one of those top 2 seeds going into the LCS playoffs. However, they still have consistency issues and need to work on their dragon control if we are going to see them return to the success they found earlier in the season.

　　Design by Benson "SarcasmAppreciated" Li

　　Stats Collection help by Kathix, Jake, Kent, Steven, and James.