League of Legends Worlds 2024: FlyQuest: May the Leaf Bloom (17/20)

The League of Legends 2024 World Championship kicks off in Berlin on the 25th of September. A total of 20 teams will compete to succeed T1 at the top of the Riot Games MOBA world hierarchy. On this occasion, Sheep Esports brings you a daily feature on one of the teams taking part. This September 21st, the sixteenth episode of our series focuses on FlyQuest, LCS first seed.

2020 was the last – and only – year we saw FLY battling it out in the World Championship before 2024. After three seasons where FLY were relegated below the top of LCS NA competition, 2024 marked a major change after another total rebuild. FLY had indeed made a habit of changing a lot of players, if not the entirety of their roster, from one season to another (even after their good run in 2020).

2023 was the first year where FLY fielded a 5-star roster with names such as Lee "Prince" Chae-hwan and Jeong "Impact" Eon-young, a year with a bittersweet Spring (a third place finish) and a disastrous Summer. This failure didn't prevent FLY from looking big for their 2024 team, with their topside of Gabriël "Bwipo" Rau - Kacper "Inspired" Słoma and Nicolaj "Jensen" Jensen, however, the botside was aimed to be more balanced with rookie adc Fahad "Massu" Abdulmalek and overlooked support Alan "Busio" Cwalina. During the season, Song "Quad" Su-hyeong was even substituted in from the academy (although he is definitely not a rookie), being the last piece FLY needed to compete with Team Liquid, the league’s dominant team.

FlyQuest's season has seen them slowly rising to the top, after a difficult MSI and a roster change, they finished third in the LCS regular Summer Season, placing them below favourites C9 and TL. Their playoffs run showed however that FlyQuest had scaled and found better game habits as the training weeks went by, peaking at a 3-1 win over a so-far unbeaten TL. FLY is a gathering storm that could arrive in Worlds with an excellent momentum and be a bigger threat than expected.

With the change in mid and an initial roster construction that didn't want a superteam to implode, FlyQuest seem to have the experience and consistency brought by high-rated players as well as a balance in the gameplay that allows every player to thrive. This stability in the game system FLY proposes lies at first in their identified conductor: Inspired. The Polish jungler has four versatile and creative players around him and is allowed to construct a gameplan around them where he can have more impact than the enemy jungler.

This effectively inverts the place junglers tend to have in Western League of Legends, where they need to be at the service of their laner and follow the wincondition on the lanes. FlyQuest is a team that has seen every player play for the jungler to have maximum impact more than the other way around, providing more flexibility and cohesion to their play. Although such a gameplan has negative repercussions - for instance, if the jungler is out of the game, FLY's gameplan is significantly weakened - it has helped FLY to win the LCS Championship and perform when needed.

Everything is not perfect still for the Milwaukee Bucks franchise, as FLY's mid and late game macro hasn't had the same attention to detail as their early game, and often have they found themselves short of options past the 20-minutes mark. In these situations, the carry duo of Quad and Massu has been able to carry FLY through numerous fights, while Bwipo and Bussio have found multiple creative moments to clutch FLY out of a bad situation.

As we said previously, Inspired is the maestro of FlyQuest in-game as he has four players that will play around his position and pathing. In the end of the LCS Championship, it was clear Inspired was the best jungler of NA and could use the edge his team mates gave him very well. After his third season in LCS and with a new NA residency, Inspired has finally found a team that suited his identity, similarly as he had with Rogue in the LEC.

Inspired is a jungler that is very much different from everything else that you can find in the West, establishing himself as the main win condition of his team, he takes the carry role not as a gold-funneling role, but as a "everyone plays for my tempo" role. Such a playstyle has never really been the norm in EU nor NA outside of him and other polish jungler Oskar "Selfmade" Boderek. Looking like a much more modern jungler than his NA peers, Inspired is the player to look at for NA's chances to reiterate - if not improve - their 2023 performance where NRG finished top 8 of Worlds.