LoL Worlds 2024: LCK snowballs, MDK and TL on the edge

Worlds 2024 resumed this Friday with the second day of the Swiss Stage. In the end, only one of the 16 participating teams will be crowned the League of Legends season 14 World Champion. While team some are already on the edge of elimination, others will be playing for qualification to the quarterfinals this Saturday.

The first game set the tone for the rest of the day. Yone is most likely one of the strongest champions of the Worlds patch, and — when he's piloted by Scout — even a 3k gold lead isn't enough to prevent Yone from carrying. The LPL's third seed eventually took the win in this LPL grudge match thanks to their midlaner. Yagao could never...

Gen.G struggled a bit in the early game against Top Esports. While Bai "369" Jiahao took a scary advantage on Kim "Kiin" Ki-in and completely snowballed the matchup with it, Kim "Peyz" Su-hwan did the same on the opposite side of the map. The Chinese top laner did not find any good angles to carry team fights, while the GEN bot lane duo completely crushed the LPL's second seed in midgame to advance to their quarterfinals qualification match.

The greatest Western hope delivered against HLE but eventually lost, even though they got three Nashors and fought back for 45 minutes. Not only did they resist, but Caps also took some interesting initiatives through side lanes to counter the unbeatable Smolder in late game teamfights. G2 Esports didn't win in the end, but the great battle they managed to showcase against LCK's first seed is enough to light hope in the hearts of fans.

As always, the West could've won in the following match between Team Liquid and Weibo Gaming... until they couldn't. Eain "APA" Stearns was especially fed but after a WBG catch on Jeong "Impact" Eon-young, the North American mid laner fumbled a shutdown and the Nashor to the enemy team. The Chinese fourth seed did not play as passively as TL with their newly acquired advantage and eventually sent NA to their first elimination match.

The only achievement for PNG during their game against the defending world champion was taking first blood in the 2v2 bot lane. However, the only uncertainty for this game was the time T1 would take to end it. The answer came quickly: 25 minutes, not a second more.

Dplus Kia was right to celebrate their draw. If Gabriël "Bwipo" Rau may have overcooked by picking Darius in this lane swap meta, the aggressiveness of Heo "ShowMaker" Su and his teammates seemed too hard to handle in the early game for FlyQuest anyway. Even though again, the West came close to completing an upset after a huge comeback in an interesting mid-game sequence. In the end, a single pick, while Fahad "Massu" Abdulmalek was recalling, was enough to crush NA's hopes.

The game was unexpectedly close between GAM and Fnatic; the Vietnamese team didn't give Óscar "Oscarinin" Muñoz's Gnar a moment to breathe during the early game. The Spaniard seemed completely out, with a near 2k gold/3 levels deficit on his direct opponent at 15 min. But GAM was simply not on point in the mid-game, where Fnatic and Oh "Noah" Hyeon-taek's Ziggs outplayed them all over the map before taking advantageous fights that got the LEC second seed back on track and eventually helped them secure their first win on the Swiss Stage.

During the Play-Ins stage, Mad Lions KOI took the upper hand against PSG Talon by winning the qualifying series in the upper bracket (2-1). In the rematch, the PCS first seed convincingly took their revenge on Europe. PSG seemed to possess all five cards to build Exodia, as their draft was made of the most prioritized picks in the Swiss stage so far. MDK just got rolled over all game long, and they are now on the edge of elimination.

The draw for the third round has been completed and the matches will kick off tomorrow at 2:00 PM CET with the start of BO3, featuring Gen.G - HLE and LNG - Dplus.