Maybe it’s some twisted part of their strategy, but CLG love to be the underdog. League of Legends is a game that makes it hard to come back from a deficit, but CLG manage to do routinely. This weekend, they not only came back from a huge deficit – Cloud9 was up 9k gold – but they did it against the number two team in the NA LCS. Did we also mention that CLG was sitting in last place before they took the win against C9?

This weekend saw a CLG reborn. In Week 6, CLG played like a team with nothing to lose. They were overly aggressive, engaging and chasing into fights that they didn’t need, and the enemy teams were easily baiting them into deaths. It was frustrating to watch, but evidenced by Darshan’s 1v1 against Huni, CLG is a passionate team. Fortunately, they recouped after a weekend of aggro plays and showed up hard in Week 7.

The biggest change was in focus. CLG recognized that their win condition was in Stixxay on Xayah. Despite misplays all split, Stixxay has been playing remarkably well, but this has been undercut by the losses and mistakes from the rest of his team. Part one of CLG’s strategy to overcome C9’s crushing snowball was feeding Stixxay little by little. It was only a few small kills in the beginning, but eventually Stixxay was on his sixth kill in a row, and it was around this time that C9 realized things might not go the way they had hoped. By the end of the game, Stixxay had done over 50k damage, twice as much as anyone else on his team.

It was plays like the one above that won CLG the game. They played smart, dancing back from C9’s engages and grabbing kills where they could. It was completely different from how they played last week, and it showed that when the team needs to, they can team fight with the very best. Reignover and Darshan in particular – as the two massive tanks for CLG – did an amazing job of harassing C9 while peeling and protecting their team.

Above all else though, what led CLG to victory was the fact that once they identified a win condition – feed Stixxay by taking small victories – they never faltered from it. Some team fights ended with a single kill to Stixxay, and then CLG would retreat. However, even after CLG started to make a comeback, they sent a three man to hide in a bush where they predicted Svenskeren would arrive on Kha’Zix. Not only was their prediction correct, but they immediately crushed him, setting the tempo and advantage back in their favor.

It’s this style of playing that has won CLG two NA LCS finals, and it’s the one we hope will stick around a little longer.