Coming into this weekend, no one really expected Cloud 9 (C9) to be where they are.
Yet they are set to face Korea’s Gen.G in the 2021 League of Legends world championship quarterfinal on Monday.
Their path to this point is historic, with C9 being only the second team ever to accomplish what is seen as a near impossible feat.
The North American side joins Fnatic from the 2017 world championship as the only two teams to advance out of the group stage after losing their first three games.
If that was already impressive enough, the fact C9 performed this in the theoretical Group of Death just makes the feat more incredible.
Placed together with 2019 and 2020 World Champions FunPlus Phoenix (FPX) and Damwon Gaming KIA (DK), respectively, they managed to defeat the former in their fourth match and then took down the final member of the group Rogue. Even with their loss to DK, things fell into place, causing a three-way tie for second and initiating a tiebreaker gauntlet that C9 won to advance.
This now has them facing off again Gen.G, the first seed from Group D.
One of the key matchups in this Best-of-5 series is going to be the battle of the mid laners between Luka “Perkz” Perković and Gwak “Bdd” Bo-seong. Both players have been influential and pivotal in their team’s successes up to this point and whoever can provide a better performance over the course of the series will impact the outcome.
There will also one person looking to turn things around heading into this series.
Canadian Philippe “Vulcan” Laflamme has had a bit of an up and down tournament thus far, with a mixture of standout plays and equally poor or more egregious blunders. He is hoping to steady the ship and have a string of consistent and impactful performances.
His play, along with the contributions of Ibrahim “Fudge” Allami and Robert “Blaber” Huang, will be keys to victory for Cloud 9.
The series will take place Monday Oct. 25 from the Laugardalshöll Indoor Sporting Arena in Reykjavík, Iceland. Start time is set for 8 a.m. ET.