Karmine Corp’s international debut has continued in disastrous fashion as a 2-0 defeat the the LCP’s CTBC Flying Oyster all but condemned the French organization to an early elimination. The team would now need to beat at least one of Hanwha Life Esports and Top Esports — the two First Stand favorites — to have any chance at moving on to the knockouts.
Image credit: Riot Games
The new KC era, the same ol’ Karmine Corp
Yike’s arrival at KC this year saw his career move into its next phase. No longer was he a cog in G2’s LEC winning machine, but now he would be the leader of a new contender that’s home to two of the league’s best youngsters. The immediate winning of LEC Winter showed Yike thriving in this new environment and left G2 with egg on their face for letting him go.
But at First Stand, Yike and KC have fallen flat and play is uninspired. It almost looked like KC reverted to their 2024 Winter Split form.
On Monday, the Swedish jungler was dominated by Team Liquid’s UmTi, expected to be the weak link of the Americas champions and tipped as First Stand’s worst jungler ahead of the tournament. Now they’ve faced a second successive defeat, this time a more conclusive 2-0 against CFO.
Karmine Corp’s slow start to First Stand
The LEC split finished later than any other region, giving Karmine Corp the least amount of time to prepare for First Stand and patch 25.05. The side arrived in Korea a matter of days before the tournament kicked off and can somewhat be forgiven for starting slowly.
Mid laner Vladi rejected this as an excuse, though he revealed that they only played a handful of scim blocks before their opener against TL and “need to catch up”. He pointed to communication between himself and Yike as the key issue in that opening defeat and felt KC could “easily” beat Team Liquid with improvement.
Image credit: Riot Games
Downward spiral
But the situation worsened today with the battering received by Flying Oyster. If anything, KC’s form looks to be worsening. Their player with by far the most experience at this level, Yike is needed to lead by example, but his 2/11/5 series scoreline against CFO won’t inspire confidence.
Speaking after the second defeat, he admitted that he “can’t really tell” the reasons for the sudden drop in form and has found it hard figuring out the cause of the issues.
Part of the team’s issue is that the nature of First Stand’s format leaves no room for a slow start. KC will end up playing all of their group series on consecutive days, leaving little time to review and/or scrim. The tournament‘s quick turnaround makes momentum key and Karmine Corp’s downward momentum is incredibly difficult to stop now with no time to mentally reset.
Support Targamas explained this after the CFO loss, describing how, after coming into the tournament “out of shape”, it’s now “hard to reset and find new ideas because we’re playing every day”.
“We don’t have time to improve on what we’re doing wrong”
Today, KCorp meets TOP Esports in a do or die series. The survival chances and First Stand odds are not in their favor, but they got to win if they want to no to be meme’d on by three whole LoL regions.