Team SoloMid further cemented itself as the strongest organization in the North American League of Legends Championship series with a 3-1 Summer finals win against Immortals in Boston.
For much of this series, things went largely as predicted by many analysts.
The first two games were tight, back-and-forth affairs with impressive plays coming from both sides. TSM support Vincent "Biofrost" Wang put his foot down in Game 1 with beautiful engages and maintained perfect kill participation until the final minute of the win to open the series with a win. In Game 2, Immortals jungler Jake "Xmithie" Puchero demonstrated his trademark early pathing on Sejuani, expertly punishing TSM's lack of wave clear after Immortals pushed Soren "Bjergsen" Bjerg onto Kassadin with five mid-lane bans during the pregame draft.
After TSM took a slow and steady Game 3, Immortals looked to change things up. Straying from the series (and meta game) norm of scaling carries, the trailing team drafted an aggressive mid-game-centric composition, with Lucian mid for Eugene "Pobelter" Park and Rumble in the top for Lee "Flame" Ho-jong. Immortals used these picks to dominate early on, and with a 10,000-gold advantage and 7-0 kill advantage at 24 minutes, a deciding Game 5 was all but certain.
However, Biofrost's Rakan came through once more, landing a miraculous engage onto Immortals AD carry Cody "Cody Sun" Sun's Xayah, which turned into a 3-for-0 teamfight in favor of TSM. The remainder of the game was more of the same, as Biofrost landed perfect engages and won fight after fight for TSM. The team took the Nexus in under 43 minutes and claimed its third straight title.
Due to TSM's lackluster performance at the Mid-Season Invitational earlier this year, as well as the spread of Championship Points throughout the league, the outcome of this series actually had no bearing on the World Championship whatsoever; both Immortals and Team SoloMid will enter the group stage as Pool 2 teams.
It will be the first Worlds appearance for Immortals and the first new North American face at the tournament since 2014. TSM, meanwhile, finished off the first three-peat for any North American team. It also became the first North American team to win the Spring and Summer split playoffs in the same calendar year.
For the organization, specifically, it means a sixth North American championship and a fifth for star mid laner Bjergsen. However, while the North American trophy is nothing new for TSM; the organization has yet to make a real splash at the World Championship. Only time will tell if this year will be any different.