While most of his former teammates are still on their way to conquer the peak of professional League of Legends, Sword – the top lane piece of the “rookie” team Griffin back in the day, has left fans curious as he has been “missing” since GRF disbanded.
It wasn’t until recently that Sword’s “whereabouts” were discovered, as he participated in a China-Korea showmatch tournament regularly organized by the Chinese streaming platform Huya. In this tournament, as usual, the Korean team consisted mostly of former professional players who are now pursuing a streaming career, while the Chinese team gathered top players from their “super server”.
Unexpectedly, the Korean team, which was rated higher, surprisingly lost 1-2 to the Chinese representative team. The lineup including former players Sword, Ben, and Pilot failed to deliver the expected performance against the “Challenger” team from China. They fell behind 1-0, managed to equalize, but ultimately lost in this Bo3 match.
The most notable highlight in this matchup was Sword, who entered game 1 with a Kennen top lane pick against a Fiora in the hands of a Chinese server master. Although Ben and Pilot performed well, Sword could not match his two colleagues; he was completely crushed by Fiora from start to finish, and Kennen in the hands of “Sword the God Blade” ended the game with a KDA of… 1/10/6, while Fiora on the other side became the MVP of game 1 with impressive stats: 14/1/15.
What’s more noteworthy is that the player using Fiora finished with a gold difference of… over 9,000 compared to Sword. It’s important to know that having a team lose by more than 10,000 gold is considered a “foregone conclusion” in most professional or amateur matches, yet here, just counting the individual position, Sword lost with a resource gap nearly equivalent to the “loss condition” for the whole team.
The comprehensive deficit in the matchup between the two top lane players in game 1 became a subject of mockery among netizens, as in the past, when playing for GRF, even without touching on the scandal with coach cvMax, Sword was often criticized as the “critical weakness of GRF” and was seen as someone whose skill level did not match the other four members.
Although in the following two games, Sword performed better, his “Agent 1/10/6” cosplay still left many viewers disheartened. Even supporters of Sword found it hard to believe that this guy has fallen so much in form, as even average-level players like Ben or Pilot still showed a distinct level difference between professional players and streamers, but for Sword, he was simply completely destroyed by an unknown opponent.