The Mid-Season Invitational Power Rankings
— -- Welcome back to ESPN's League of Legends Power Rankings, dear reader. With the end of the first splits of the year completed across the globe, we enter Riot's second annual international halfway event: the Mid-Season Invitational.
Last year, it was this season's MSI hosts, China, that reigned supreme, with LPL's spring champion EDward Gaming prevailing over Korea's SK Telecom T1 in a 3-2 instant classic. Although securing the massive victory, EDG couldn't continue its success into the latter half of the year, and the MSI champs failed to capture the summer championship before falling out in the quarterfinals of the World Championships.
SKT T1, the team that lost the mid-season event, retooled its game plan, went into the summer months stronger due to the loss, and went on to rampage through the next LCK season and Worlds.
Winning the Mid-Season Invitational is important and very well could catapult a formerly disregarded region to the limelight -- but it's only as important as what you learn from it. As a champion of a region, your peers' representative, you have two goals when walking into the war that is MSI:
1. Win, obviously
2. Learn as much as you can from your high-level opposition and grow as a team in the summer season
With that being said, let's get to the rankings of our six combatants heading into the tournament next week in Shanghai.
S Tier
1. SK Telecom T1
The kings of Korea (and thus the world) smile gently down at its foes below, ready to strike another accolade into its already overflowing history book. SKT T1 comes into this tournament as the odds-on favorite, even more so than how it entered last year's Worlds. While many still picked T1 to win the Summoner's Cup in 2015, the rise of China and its MSI victory gave the impression it'd be an all-out war between the two sides come the biggest event of the year.
However, when we got to Europe and the World Championships, Korea dominated like usual. The Mid-Season Invitational is the only trophy missing from T1's trophy case, as the team did win the spiritual predecessor of the tournament, All Stars Paris, but failed to beat EDG last year in Florida. A victory in Shanghai would mean SKT T1 would be the current holders of the Summoner's Cup, IEM World Championship, and the Mid-Season Invitational crown, completing the international triple crown and putting it in another galaxy compared to the other organizations in the scene.
Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok, the world's best player, will of course have all eyes on him throughout the competition, yet it'll be up to the team's greenest player, Kang "Blank" Sun-gu, whether T1 completes the trio of titles or not. The rookie has improved rapidly from his missteps early in the spring split, and his crafty play was a major part of T1's wins at the IEM World Championships and the LCK Finals. In a meta where a jungler's ability to assert a presence on the map early can either make or break a team, Blank can solidify himself as one of the world's best in the jungle with a third straight stellar tournament performance.
Moreover, Bae "Bang" Jun-sik is really good. Really, really good. SKT T1's AD has been the most consistent cog for his squad in 2016, and the fleet-footed carry has put himself in the conversation as one of the top five players in the world. Even when the likes of Faker and Blank have disappointed this split, Bang has been the X factor that has kept T1 intact.
A Tier
2. G2 Esports
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