The last time Royal Never Give Up participated in Worlds was a sad memory for their fans. It was in 2019, when RNG lost to FunPlus Phoenix in the 2019 LPL Summer Finals, and ended up attending Worlds 2019 as the second seed, landing straight into the group of death, featuring SKT T1 and Fnatic.
That year, during the group draw ceremony for Worlds 2019, a rather humorous incident occurred. Jiizuke – the player invited by Riot Games to the draw ceremony, drew the slip with RNG’s name, but he accidentally held it upside down and innocently showed it to the camera.
This incident led Jiizuke to receive quite a bit of teasing from the Chinese LoL community (just playful teasing, as it didn’t affect the ceremony too much). However, for RNG fans, many felt that this image seemed to foreshadow some bad omen.
And indeed, the intuition of these fans came true shortly after, when RNG could not get past SKT and FNC, resulting in their elimination right from the group stage. This was the worst performance in RNG’s history, and sadly, it happened in the last Worlds that the legend Uzi could attend.
Since then, RNG fans have viewed Jiizuke as a “grim reaper”, as the humorous image from the draw ceremony inadvertently became a “death sentence” for RNG. Of course, most of these remarks were made in jest, as the RNG fans themselves understood that the team’s elimination that year was largely due to professional issues.
Uzi had gone through a long break due to injury and only returned in the late stages of the 2019 LPL Summer. Despite his efforts and pushing through the pain to compete, leading RNG to the LPL Finals, that was all he could do, as the pain in his hands and shoulders rendered Uzi ineffective in the Finals against FPX, as well as at Worlds 2019.
However, upon returning to Worlds 2021, RNG fans once again recalled that “unforgettable” moment, and they were alarmed to realize that Jiizuke, now representing Evil Geniuses, would not attend Worlds this year, and there was a chance he could be invited again for the draw ceremony.
Thus, the story goes that RNG fans are “praying to heaven” for this guy to stay as far away from RNG as possible; if he does attend the draw ceremony, they hope he doesn’t draw the slip with their team’s name, because “spiritual matters are no joke”, and one experience with this “omen” is more than enough.
Not to mention that this year, RNG’s performance and roster are not particularly outstanding either. They are attending Worlds as the third seed, and the risk of once again falling into the group of death is very high, without even waiting for Jiizuke to “cast his spell”.