The final series of the League of Legends 2019 Mid-Season Invitational play-in knockout stages took place today. The series was between the Vietnamese team Phong Vũ Buffalo and the representatives from the CIS region, Vega Squadron — both teams who lost their first best-of-five series yesterday. Going into today, the analyst desk had a lot of faith in Phong Vũ Buffalo taking the series, predicting either a 3-1 or 3-0 victory.
Phong Vũ Buffalo vs. Vega Squadron
The series started off well for Phong Vũ Buffalo. They began with a dominating performance that won them the first two games of the series. The bot lane of Đặng “BigKoro” Ngọc Tài and Nguyễn “Palette” Hải Trung simply destroyed the Vega Squadron bot lane with the help of their jungle player Hoàng “Meliodas” Tiến Nhật. In the first two games, BigKoro managed to go a combined 12-1-17 for a KDA of 29.
After the early success of Phong Vũ Buffalo, however, things turned around entirely. Vega Squadron figured out what went wrong in the first two matches of the series and switched things up. They picked a much safer bot lane in Ashe and Tahm Kench. This adaptation allowed Vega Squadron’s jungle player Kirill “AHaHaCiK” Skvortsov (Кирилл Скворцов) to take over the map, tracking Meliodas everywhere he went. Both games three and four were won decisively by the Vega Squadron team on the back of AHaHaCik’s performance.
In the final game of the series, it felt like all strategy went out of the window. The entire game was best described as a bloodbath, with players constantly brawling and dying all over the map. Vega Squadron managed to take two Ocean Drakes, two Earth Drakes, the Elder Drake, and the Rift Herald. Meanwhile, PVB only took an Ocean Drake and the Baron for themselves. However, PVB managed to use the Baron buff to close out the series after a missed Command: Shockwave by Lev “Nomanz” Yakshin (Cyrillic: Лев Якшин) on his Orianna in the final team fight.
MSI 2019 Group Stages
With this victory by Phong Vũ Buffalo over Vega Squadron, the PVB team will advance to the next stage of the League of Legends 2019 Mid-Season Invitational. This Friday, May 10, Phong Vũ Buffalo will play their first Mid-Season Invitational group match. They will face off in their group stage matches against Invictus Gaming and Team Liquid.
You can follow along with the action, starting this Friday, on the official Lolesports website. And if you want to keep up with all of the latest League of Legends news and content, keep track on our League of Legends page!
