If you have been a fan of the competitive League of Legends scene since its early phase, you are probably well aware of the team that I want to dwell on today. A team that has seen many ups and downs, but managed to come out stronger after every setback. A team that goes by the name of Fnatic.

Season 1 World Champions

You wouldn’t be far from the truth, if you say that Fnatic have been around forever, even if they didn’t go by that name in the beginning. The European organization picked up their League of Legends roster from myRevenge after they won the first IEM LoL tournament in early 2011. A few months after that, they took the scene by storm when they won Riot’s Season 1 World Championship. A legend was born during that competition – Fnatic’s top laner Maciej 'Shushei' Ratuszniak is remembered till this very day for his AP Alistar and Gragas plays and what plays those were!



Keeping up the momentum from their big win in Sweden, the team placed 3rd in their next event - IEM Gamescom, and took home the trophy from IEM New York without losing a single game. At that point, they were considered one of the strongest teams offline and despite having minor setbacks online, they would always have an ace up their sleeve at LANs.

Shushei’s falling out of grace

With the official beginning of Season 2 things went sour for Fnatic. The nerfs to AP carries left Shushei without the option to play them in the top lane and the team struggled for a long time, trying both him and the mid laner Enrique Javier 'xPeke' Cedeño Martinez as bruiser players. The jungle changes weren’t much to the taste of Lauri 'Cyanide' Happonen as well and he had a rough time adjusting to them. Despite the expectations towards the team when entering an offline competition, they couldn’t get out of the groups at IEM’s World Championship and that was a clear signal for trouble.

Soon after that, Fnatic flew out to Korea to participate in the first edition of OnGameNet’s “The Champions”. If anything could have helped them fix their issues, it was the gaming house environment and the extensive scrims against the Korean teams who were just coming to power at the time. They left the tournament after the Round of 8 and upon their return to Europe, things were looking better for them with Shushei showing signs of improvement in the top lane. They had to find a substitute for Peter 'Mellisan' Meisrimel though as he was unable to travel with them to offline events for a while due to university obligations. The German support player Patrick 'Pheilox' Walpuski joined the team as a 6th member and soon after that was when out of nowhere, (for the public at least) Shushei was released. It caused a huge uproar among the Fnatic fans and many negative comments were targeted towards the team, but in the end, it was a change for the better for everyone.

”Retiring” old members and the beginning of FnaAatic

Fnatic quickly signed former aAa top laner Paul 'sOAZ' Boyer as their 5th player and the team attended MLG Spring Championship and DreamHack Summer with him and Pheilox, still in search of their old form and a top 3 finish. Soon after that, Mellisan officially retired from competitive League of Legends. With those two members of the initial Fnatic roster gone, Pheilox followed them as well citing real life commitments.



A week before the very important Season 2 European Regionals another former aAa member joined Fnatic – the support player Christoph 'nRated' Seitz. That was the reason a lot of people eventually started calling the team “FnaAatic”. nRated and Manuel 'Lamia' Mildenberger showed good coordination for such a short time of playing together but they couldn’t overcome the CLG.eu powerhouse and thus Fnatic was denied the opportunity to defend their World Champions title at the Season 2 Finals. Soon after that, Lamia, who had been planning on retiring after the end of Season 2, left the team and the competitive scene to pursue his education.

Back to the top

Fnatic was left with the hard task to find a new AD carry that will fit their play style and help them qualify for Riot’s pro league in Season 3. They spent quite a lot of time looking for the right player, until in the end it was the 16-year-old Swede Martin 'Rekkles' Larsson that turned out to be the best addition… if only he wasn’t 16. Due to Riot’s age regulations he was only able to compete with Fnatic in November and December 2012, but what a difference he made in that time.

After only a week of bootcamping with Rekkles, the team won DreamHack Winter in a final against CLG.eu, which they’ve never beaten before offline. That gave them a massive boost of confidence and when they set foot in Las Vegas for IPL 5, the victories over teams considered much stronger than them started piling up. The only squad they couldn’t overcome turned out to be World Elite and thus Fnatic finished as runner-ups. Another Asian team, this time SK Telecom T1, stopped them in their tracks at IEM Cologne a few weeks later and Fnatic had to put up with yet another second place, but despite that, they had returned to the place where they started from – the top of Europe and the world.



The path to the Pro League

With Rekkles forbidden from participating in Riot’s LCS, Fnatic had to find a new AD carry once again. After a couple of weeks of speculations the inevitable happened and Bora 'YellOwStaR' Kim joined the team, giving “FnaAatic” its final form. With their roster completed, Fnatic headed to the European qualifiers for Season 3 with only one goal in mind – qualifying.

It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than most people expected though. They had quite a rough time in the group stage winning their first game convincingly and losing the second one in the same manner. With everything on the line in the last match of the group things started up pretty bad for Fnatic, but they managed to turn it around yet again and advance to the second day. In a Best of 3 that would give one of the teams the dream spot in Season 3, Fnatic was up against MYM, one of the most formidable opponents they could have faced. The team led by xPeke was flawless this time and didn’t give their enemies any chance to throw them off their game. A quick 2-0 and it was time for Fnatic to finally smile in relief as they accomplished what they came for.



Top 3 achievements in 2012



xPeke – the Spanish conqueror

Enrique Cedeño Martínez, more known among the League of Legends community as xPeke, is the pillar that has always kept Fnatic moving forward. Initially known for his Ashe, with the meta shift that sent the AD carries bot lane and the AP ones in mid, he switched to playing the “mage” role and never looked back. Probably the most consistent in terms of skill and improvement of the founding members of the team, he has been feared for so many champions – from Morgana and Malzahar in Season 1, through Twisted Fate in Season 2, to Katarina, Diana and Kassadin in Preseason 3. His love for assasins with gap closers and champions with heavy ganking potential has been evident through the days, as well as his affection towards the teleport summoner spell that he made so many other pro and casual players start picking up all the time.

While Shushei was clearly the star of the show at the Season 1 Championship, xPeke was the man in charge ever since IEM New York when he received his first nomination for IEM MVP. There was a rather long period of time in which even he couldn’t carry his team to victory, but the hard work and practice finally paid off at the end of 2012. IPL 5 was the time he started to shine again but IEM Katowice was the moment that made fans all around the globe realize his true potential. The Kassadin play and the Nidalee spears showcased an insane level of micro management and precise thinking that finally gave him the MVP award from his third nomination (second one was at IEM Cologne) and put him in the limelight for months to come. If there is a player in Fnatic that can carry the team alone when needed, it would be none other than xPeke. Hopefully, the burden that comes with the high expectations towards him doesn’t affect his play and he continues to bring magic to the Fields of Justice.

Cyanide aka Best Stealer EU

If you have watched at least one tournament in which Fnatic played, I can bet you have seen this guy steal at least one super clutch dragon or baron away from his opponents. His flash + smite/feast/consume abilities are pretty much unrivaled in the scene and have secured a lot of comebacks for his team. Besides that, Lauri Happonen or Cyanide is the second still standing member of Fnatic from the time they won the Season 1 Championship. Despite the fact that he’s only 18 he has been all around the world with his team and has managed to keep up with high school, which luckily for him he’s finishing in March and he’ll be able to focus on League of Legends 100%.

During his time in the team Cyanide’s favourite junglers changed from Rammus through Lee Sin, to most recently Cho’Gath, Shen and Olaf. He had quite the hard time after the jungle changes in Preseason 2 when “carry junglers” fell off but seems to have embraced the ones in Preseason 3 and is doing his job of feeding kills to the laners just fine. Or at least he does that when he’s not playing Olaf, because then it seems the Bromacia Viking takes the best of him and the axes start dealing one killing blow after another.

The innovator sOAZ

A veteran on the Fields of Justice, Paul Boyer or simply sOAZ was one of the aAa members that was denied the Season 1 trophy by Fnatic in 2011. Now a core part of the team, he contributed to Fnatic’s ever improving game play from the moment he joined and especially in the end of 2012. The French player loves trying out the newest champions in the top lane and is the reason behind a lot of the common picks in his lane in the past 6+ months. He was the first to showcase the potential behind Jayce and Kha’Zix, both of which later became perma picked or banned.

This habit of his and the fact that he can play a massive amount of the older champions on a competitive level, makes him impossible to predict or outban. He is picking almost entirely different champions in every tournament – assassins, bruisers, AP melee – you name it, he has played it and he did well. In the rare cases in which xPeke has a bad game, Fnatic can always count on sOAZ to turn things in their favour as shown in a couple of games at IEM Cologne, which granted him a well deserved MVP nomination.

Hook City’s nRated

Despite of the still ongoing unjustified devaluation of the support role, Christoph Seitz aka nRated has proved time and time again that his contribution to his team’s success is immense. If you ever have the chance to watch Fnatic play live from a close distance, it is very likely that you will hear him making successful calls and calling out the targets in team fights. He was also the first pro gamer that experimented with Zyra support and turned her into a much contested pick all over the word. His trademark is the semi AP carry build, which he uses not only on her, but on most of his ranged supports as well.

There is hardly any other support player who attracts as many personal bans as nRated. Fnatic’s opponents not only prefer not to see him playing Zyra, but fear his Blitzcrank as well and rightfully so. His clutch grabs have won most of Fnatic’s games in which he was supporting with the Steam Golem, probably only Frost’s MadLife has a better win ratio with that champion. Even if those two are banned against him though, nRated will just pull one of his oldest tricks for hard initiation – Leona. Despite the fact that she has, for the most part, fallen out of favour in competitive play, he can still utilize her to the utmost extent. Considering nRated’s skillshot precision, one can only wonder what he will be able to do with the newest addition to the League, Thresh.

Completing “FnaAtic” – Yellowstar

Bora Kim, more known as Yellowstar, is another member from the aAa team that lost to Fnatic in the Season 1 Championship Grand Final (That Ashe arrow!). Maybe he once held a grudge against xPeke and Cyanide, but now he is one of the reasons they qualified for the Season 3 Pro league. The French player may not have had all the time in the world to get used to his new team, but an AD carry on that level of play knows well enough how to farm until he can three-shot you as Kog'Maw and that’s exactly what he did in the “go hard or go home” game vs Alternate in the Season 3 European qualifiers.

Once a part of the most feared bot lane in Europe, during his time in aAa with nRated, Yellowstar now has the chance to take the synergy between them to an even higher level after their reunion in Fnatic. They were notorious for their deadly Corki + Leona combo, but since both champions are not very popular in Season 3 it is yet unclear if we will be able to see them relive that glorious past. Besides Corki, Yellowstar plays almost every AD carry that’s popular in the current meta on a very high level. We can see proof of that when looking at his picks at IEM Katowice and the EU qualifiers for Season 3 – Miss Fortune, Kog’Maw, Urgot, Caitlyn, with the latter being probably his favourite choice recently.

To wrap up Fnatic’s tale of ups and downs I managed to get a few words from their star player xPeke:

After the troubles you had in the group stage and the tough opponent in the playoffs, I can only imagine you were very relieved to finally qualify for the LCS. What was the atmosphere in the team before and after the games versus MYM?



Now that Season 3 is right around the corner how do you feel about moving to Germany and living with your team full time?



Bootcamping before events has historically proven very efficient and helpful for Fnatic. Do you think that living in a gaming house will make your team stronger than ever before?



Out of the 3 “favourites” to qualify for LCS, Fnatic was the only one to make it. Will the competition be less of a challenge for you considering the teams that managed to become a part of the Pro European league?



What are your goals for the first half of Season 3? Are you aiming for the #1 spot or would the team be content with just being a part of the top 4?



With their performance at DreamHack Winter and IPL 5 Fnatic showed all their fans and opponents that they are back to the top of the scene and that they are hungry for victories. Now after becoming a part of the European League of Legends Championship Series, they are looking to reclaim their World Champions title from Season 1. In order to do that though, they have a long road ahead of them which includes weekly matches against the best teams on the Old continent. Keeping their form and improving will be crucial, so can they do it? We’ll find out in the upcoming months.

Fnatic’s first match in the LCS will be the opening game of the spring season against no other than SK Gaming at 18:00 CET, 9th February, followed by a match against Giants two hours later.

Pictures courtesy of Fnatic, ESL and mouzVeya.