After two months of break, the League of Legends European Championship (LEC) 2022 Spring Split kicks off on Friday, Jan. 14! The LEC off-season offered us a lot of excitement and hype, with loads of roster moves and big names returning to EU.
As always, we will be taking you through our preview and going over some of the best bets for one of the most important matches of the week. Without further ado, let’s jump right into it!
Back to the LEC for another trophy
The LEC 2022 Spring Split will be starting with the two most hyped teams in the off-season. MAD Lions and Team Vitality will battle each other out on the opener, as both teams are looking to get “First Blood” in the LEC.
On one side, we have MAD Lions, who lost out on two very important members from Lions’ recent success; Humanoid and Carzzy left the organization. In order to replace them, MAD picked up two new rookies, Reeker and Unf0rgiven, hoping to continue their streak of success from last year. This is not the first time the organization sends away very good players, but the last time they did, they went on to become back-to-back LEC champions.
Will this happen again this year?
We previously mentioned Carzzy who left MAD Lions. Coincidence or not, the marksman went on to join Team Vitality, in one of the most exciting super rosters of recent history. Together with him, the French organization hired both Alphari and Perkz who returned from the LCS. With Labrov and Selfmade as the support and jungler, Vitality went from being a mid-bottom tier team to a contender for the title.
MAD Lions’ biggest question mark around the team is how will they perform early into the season with these two new players. The Lions are notorious for growing strong talent and having formidable coaching staff, but playing against two contenders in week 1 (MAD will also face G2 this week) might put them on the back foot.
Nonetheless, the MAD Lions did find two players with somewhat similar characteristics to the previous two. Reeker showed great champion pool last year in Berlin International Gaming, while Unf0rgiven is a great Ezreal and Kai’Sa player just like Carzzy. We’ll see if MAD Lions will try to build something similar to last year’s team and how the two rookies will get used to the new environment.
Team Vitality basically built a new team from the ground up, only keeping Selfmade from last year’s roster. Initially, I thought that Vitality would’ve had issues adapting to each other at the beginning of the split, as they had to find a common vision of the game and playstyle. However, Perkz and Alphari have known each other for quite a while and I’m pretty sure they have the experience and the personality to make everything work. The only doubt left for me is if Vitality will actually play around Alphari. Based on how the meta is evolving with the teleport changes, the top lane will be isolated even more, making it easier for Alphari to show his true skills in the individual matchups. If he’s able to constantly win lanes, Vitality will seriously become a big menace, since both mid and bot lane are very solid in terms of their playstyle.
With that being said, let’s take a look at some of the best bets for this series. I expect MAD Lions to play very similarly to how they used last year, playing proactively with jungler Elyoya around the mid lane and the bot lane, since the meta is mid-bot centric.
On the other hand, Vitality will likely try to go for a strong 4-1 comp, abusing Armut in the top lane and giving Alphari the ability to take over the game on picks like Jax, Camille and maybe Gangplank. If that happens, which I think is highly likely, then Vitality will win the game.
Below you can also find some of the better odds related to this series (odds are offered by GG.BET):
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