Invictus Gaming are the Demacia Cup champions

The Demacia Cup comes to an end this January 3 with a dominant victory from Invictus Gaming, who clean swept JD Gaming to secure their third title in the competition, after previous wins in 2014 and 2018. The win came against a full-strength JDG roster, while iG fielded two substitutes, in midlane and support.

iG’s run in the tournament looked easy for them, with a 3–1 win over Top Esports followed by two clean sweeps against LNG and JD Gaming. On JDG’s side, the experience gained was significant for a roster newly built around the mid-jungle duo Tsai “HongQ” Ming-Hong and Yu “JunJia” Chun-Chia. Not every team fielded their main roster, such as Anyone’s Legend, which lowered the overall level of competition.

With this new iteration of iG, the team looks perfectly oiled and was clearly the best team at this Demacia Cup. At Worlds, the four LPL representatives were them, Bilibili Gaming, Anyone’s Legend, and TES. While BLG had a disappointing showing and TES made it to the semifinals without truly impressing, Anyone’s Legend, eliminated in the quarterfinals, were widely considered a very solid team.

As for iG, they were knocked out in the Play-In after a hard-fought series against the eventual six-time world champions, T1. Despite playing only a single best-of series at Worlds, iG were viewed as one of the toughest opponents the world champions faced, as mentioned by Ryu “Keria” Min-seok on stream. Several players also stated that iG were among the hardest teams to scrim against, but unfortunately did not get the chance to go further due to this year’s format.

The Demacia Cup comes to an end, and players will have about ten days to prepare for LPL Split 1, which kicks off on January 14. This time, the major teams will be showing up at full strength or nearly full strength, although some players will be taking a break at the start of the year, such as Yu “JackeyLove” Wen-Bo and Tian “Meiko” Ye.