At this point, I think most here have seen G2’s post about their scrim results.

This post is mostly to give those results more context using various interviews.

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First, and what I think is most relevant, is MikyX’s interview from October 20th.

In the article, he says –

We’ve been doing what we’ve been doing for the whole year. Whatever we think is good, we tried it and it worked. Maybe we learned some stuff from the top teams, but I think most teams are not very good at drafting for the meta. I don’t think they have the best read. We have a pretty decent one. I wouldn’t really say that we learned much from the Asian teams in terms of meta, I think more likely they learned from us. We had a pretty good read. Maybe not the top-top teams — I think they have their own thing that works for them.

Based on G2’s scrim schedule, at the time this interview was posted, G2 was 6-1 against BLG, 5-1 against LNG, 4-3 against JDG, 3-3 against KT, 5-7 against GenG and 1-9 against T1.

Some more relevant interviews from around that time –

Regarding Brokenblade, BLG’s Bin on October 19th said –

He exhibits an extremely aggressive style and has a unique champion pool. He’s not hesitant to try champions like Yasuo on stage. With these champions, it’s super easy to create a snowball effect, so we can’t afford mistakes against him. That definitely adds some pressure

JDG’s Kanavi on October 16th –

I don’t know which western teams are really good, but G2 is very unique. In our scrims against G2, they abnormally stood out.

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Speculation –

Judging from the various interviews, I think what happened was that G2 was playing very unique stuff in scrims and catching LPL/LCK teams off guard. Perhaps it was not just champion picks, but the style of play those champions dictate, too. As MikyX said, “whatever we think is good, we tried it and it worked.”

When swiss stage started, Kalista was blue-side banned by every team until G2 let it through against DK. DK responded by red-side banning it. G2 picked Draven first phase, DK ended up with Varus Alistar against Draven Renata, and DK lost the match. The next time we saw G2, it was against WBG, who banned Kalista and Draven on red-side against them. The Caedrel incident happened and G2 still ended up getting a comeback win.

Next, GenG, a team that is good with the match prep and has experience from 2 scrim blocks against G2, also bans out Kalista and Draven against them, and G2 comes crashing back down to earth. From here on out, Kalista and Draven would always be banned against G2.

I don’t think teams were banning those picks in scrims because it’s scrims. First, I don’t know how much research teams do before scrims so I don’t know how tailored their bans can be. They might know to ban Kalista because other teams are playing it, but judging from DK (who didn’t scrim G2) letting Draven through, I doubt many teams knew to ban Draven, too. Second, I don’t know if teams would even want to ban certain picks because they might want to play against it and see what it’s about.

Chances are, all the LCK/LPL teams were mostly just playing super standard team-fighting drafts against each other with safe, scaling ADCs which goes poorly against G2’s aggressive bot picks (aside from T1, which I credit to Gumayusi and Keria being in form). G2 thinks it’s a meta read when it’s just Kalista and Draven and a snow-ball style. And, because G2 were so high on themselves from their good scrim results, they didn’t or at worst couldn’t adapt because they just didn’t practice the real meta picks and style enough.