The dream-like illusion of the opening three-match winning streak vanished completely after two crushing defeats at the hands of FPX.
Fortunately, WE's fans were relatively laid-back, and not many suffered a complete mental breakdown. After all, it was just a best-of-three, even if watching it had sent their blood pressure through the roof...
Yet, online, a chorus of mocking voices directed at WE had multiplied. In the current public opinion environment, this was entirely normal. As a legacy team that had not achieved any notable results since 2017, WE had suddenly kicked off the summer split with three consecutive wins, pacing alongside several top-tier LPL powerhouses. Now that WE had been thoroughly battered, fans of those elite teams naturally seized the opportunity to kick them while they were down.
"Who do you think you are, sharing the same ranking as us?"
"Just a washed-up club."
"And WeiXiao, how did you manage to get so furious just watching a live stream of the match?"
While the wave of public opinion inevitably impacted the club, the crucial issue remained figuring out how to resolve the team's current problems.
Inside the base's training room, sask was feeling rather dizzy.
When discussing tactics with Li Yao before the match, he had known this best-of-three would be exceptionally hard to win. He simply hadn't expected the defeat to be so ugly. Especially during the post-match interview, when Doinb had confidently declared, "I knew from the start that playing normally would secure the win."
Judging by the results, Doinb wasn't wrong at all. Moreover, according to custom, as long as they won, Doinb would immediately start streaming. With his fans broadcasting the sentiment further, public opinion settled right where it was.
Yet, how was the problem supposed to be solved?
It was worth noting that the player receiving the most flak wasn't Mole in the mid lane, but Beishang in the jungle. Yet sask could tell that Beishang himself was already tilting. Two games, and not a single objective controlled. For a jungler, that certainly sounded absurd, leaving the viewers to hurl endless abuse while Beishang could do nothing but tilt, entirely unable to refute it.
However, as the strategist behind the scenes, sask knew clearly that this really couldn't be blamed on Beishang.
The logic was simple: as the weaker side—and a team with a preference for fighting—trying to play the late game against FPX, whose macro play had ranked in the top three of the LPL for years, was clearly impossible. There was a substantial gap in operational capability, and that had to be admitted. Therefore, WE's tactical focus could only tilt toward early-to-mid-game strength.
In the current patch, Gwen was the absolute T0 top lane carry, and FPX simply refused to let her through. With champion strength lacking, gaining an advantage required snowballing quickly, and rapid snowballing required assistance from the jungler, which was why Beishang kept camping the top lane early on. Yet every time he showed his face top, without priority in the mid lane, control of the Dragon was inevitably surrendered.
It was a closed-loop problem.
Of course, WE could have chosen not to help the top lane and instead focused on securing objectives, leaving Breathe—who had been performing exceptionally well this season—to absorb pressure on an island. But doing that would mean WE adopting an unfamiliar macro style, gambling that they could smoothly secure four consecutive dragons without giving FPX any openings along the way.
Could they afford to gamble like that?
They couldn't.
Right now, what sask worried about most was actually the matches ahead. Losing 0-2 to FPX meant much more to WE than merely dropping a single match. The most fatal part was that FPX had provided a textbook demonstration to every other team watching of how to dismantle WE.
They had exposed WE's biggest weakness.
That weakness was that WE's bot lane could not play utility champions, nor could they practice them. WE needed Elk to carry the late game. If Elk failed to carry late, the team couldn't win.
Watching sask sit there in a daze after the meeting, Li Yao felt a deep sense of sympathy. But unfortunately, he couldn't offer any suitable advice.
If a team wanted to reach the top tier, tactical execution was only one necessary element. Without a foundation of solid, robust individual skill, a team could at best flash brightly for a brief moment before vanishing, utterly incapable of breaking into the elite ranks.
The game patch was constantly changing; the players' individual prowess remained the core element. Some teams had the talent, but coaching standards fell short, leaving them clueless about how to unleash their players' potential. While such teams might suffer a sudden collapse in crucial matches, whenever fans and neutral viewers spoke of them, deep down they knew those teams had a shot at a comeback.
Other teams, however, brought fans a sense of surprise when they won, yet as soon as the next opponent loomed, those same fans would still feel genuinely nervous before the match. Match after match, season after season, the team still failed to provide any reassuring presence.
WE was firmly in the latter category.
More than half of June had already passed. WE's final opponent of the month awaited them at the end of June: they were set to face RA.
Among all LPL teams, RA had played the most matches so far. They had already completed five, and the showdown with WE would be their sixth. Of those five encounters, RA had won four, their only defeat coming at the hands of EDG. Worth noting was that their previous series had just seen them defeat TES—the very team that had nearly beaten WE like a sack of potatoes in scrims.
Sask didn't need to overthink to realize this was going to be a grueling battle.
Ever since the FPX match concluded, sask, in his capacity as coach, had prepared two adjustments. First, he shifted the starting lineup from Mole playing every scrim to splitting practice time evenly between Mole and Shanks. Second, he adjusted their tactics.
Seeking change was a vital indicator that a team refused to rot away.
In the first game against RA, their opponents' drafting seemed almost identical to FPX's, seemingly confirming that RA's coaching staff had done their homework thoroughly. WE's tactical shift was simple: they put Beishang on Olaf, a champion with a slower early gank tempo but exceptional jungle clearing and neutral objective control. Moreover, Olaf was particularly formidable in the mid game, capable of shouldering part of the team's output pressure.
Following that, they gave Mole the mainstream assassin Akali to restrict the opponent's backline. As the relativity of the Rift dictated, restricting one of the enemy's damage dealers was equivalent to adding a damage dealer to one's own side. Elk remained unchanged, while Breathe received the utility top laner Gnar, striving to help create an angle for Akali to dive during team fights. Gnar didn't fear most matchups in lane and required no assistance from his teammates.
Even Li Yao had to admit that sask, as a former pro player, still possessed solid drafting fundamentals, stronger at least than the majority of domestic coaches.
Yet only those within the industry looked at the process. For the fans, they cared only about the result.
And the result of the first game against RA was evidently far from ideal. RA's mid laner, FoFo, played with exceptional steadiness. Although he didn't exert massive pressure on Mole during the laning phase, he was playing Orianna, a champion that inherently required no aggressive play. Instead, it was WE that shouldered the offensive pressure.
Under offensive pressure without the opponent giving any openings, impatience easily set in.With a stat line of 5/0, FoFo put on a masterclass in the first game, perfectly embodying his former identity as a "dean". Furthermore, FoFo's purchase of a Veil left WE's three dive threats with nowhere to target.
WeiXiao, watching from his stream, had already begun retreating into his own thoughts.
The chat screen was completely flooded with spam asking why the top lane wasn't given a carry champion instead of a utility pick. WeiXiao offered no explanation for this. He knew WE's current plight. Besides, he didn't want to explain either; trying to explain to the chat why WE drafted this way was pointless. When you lose, everything is just an excuse.
The second game began shortly after. Following their defeat in the opener, WE reverted to their original strategy, putting Mole on a utility champion while securing Lee Sin for Breathe in an attempt to turn him into a solo-lane explosive threat, alongside giving Elk Kai'Sa to anchor the late game.
Once figured out by major teams, this strategy could actually be summed up by another name:
"Trust the players' individual abilities."
In this game, Elk's 7/1 Kai'Sa and Breathe's game-winning, kick-happy Lee Sin caused a roaring cry from an otherwise suppressed WeiXiao: "Chen Chen, my superhero!"
Without securing a single Dragon, WE relied purely on individual ability to squeak out a win against an RA squad that had operated their way to the Dragon Soul.
The Rift had thrown WE a lifeline; what RA secured in game two was the Cloud Soul—the classic, useless Dragon Soul.
Yet the Goddess of Fortune could not favor WE every single time.
Thus, in the third game, when RA showed no courtesy whatsoever by simultaneously banning out Lee Sin, Viego, and Gwen, WE was left entirely out of cards.
Just like the first game, it was another crushing defeat dictated by macro play. Mole's newly drafted Ryze was beaten down to a stat line of 0/4, and a four-centimeter ultimate cast during a desperate escape became an instant classic.
Backstage in the rest area, sask made the decision to bench Mole right then and there.
There was not a single moment to mourn for Mole.
The next one to step up was Shanks!
***
"Already lost?"
Li Yao, who hadn't traveled with the team to the venue, had just finished a ranked match. Watching his super account successfully climb into the Grandmaster tier, he stretched his arms, opened his web browser, and saw that WeiXiao had already ended his stream.
"The team... has hit another Waterloo."