In today’s 3-1 Summer Playoff loss to Cloud9, Evil Geniuses, the reigning champions, were unable to overcome their 14-day absence from the LCS stage. C9 defeated the top-seeded team in the league to snag the second spot for North America in this year’s League of Legends World Championship.

Despite receiving the top seed in the playoffs, a scorching-hot Cloud9 squad immediately eliminated EG from the top bracket of the Playoffs, dropping as many games in one day as they did throughout the whole Summer Split.

In game one of the current series, C9 made a bold statement by defeating EG 15-1 and nearly going undefeated. From that point on, they won two of the series’ final three games, leaving EG with little breathing room, even in the one game they did manage to win.

First blood in the fourth and final game of the series didn’t occur until 19 minutes into the match, but Zeri of Berserker was prominently featured in the teamfight that followed. He led the way for Cloud9 towards the scaling-heavy late game, picking up four kills in the process. He would go on to conclude the match’s series-clinching game with eight kills, bringing his series total to 24/8/16. (5.0 KDA). Three of the four games played today featured Zeri and Berserker.

Earlier this week, in an interview with League content producer Travis Gafford, Cloud9 top laner Fudge projected that C9 will quickly 3-0 EG. According to the scrim results, the audacious statement “EG is one of the weakest teams in the playoffs right now” was made. To understand the scrims, though, like, Jesus, dude.

Only the 10 players and the four walls surrounding them were aware of how skewed those said scrim results may have actually been, but throughout today’s near-sweep, EG seemed the worst they have all season on stage. In contrast to Fudge’s assertions, C9 midfielder Jensen lauded EG in a post-match interview while on stage, declaring that they were “the greatest team and the toughest opponent we had to play.”

C9 performed effectively enough to stop any late-game assault by the defending champions despite the Evil Geniuses being able to gain a game.

As a flexible anchor for C9, Fudge in particular upheld his pre-series boasts with a great performance, posting a scoreline of 11/6/20 over the four games while switching between carry champions in the first two games and defensive tanks in the last two.

Due to their upper bracket seeding, EG just needed to win two best-of-five matches to reach the LCS finals for the second time in a row. The squad now has to win three series in order to get through the lower bracket and reach the championship game. On Friday, September 2, they will play TSM to start their lower bracket run.

With their victory, Cloud9 has moved to the LCS Championship’s upper bracket semifinals, where they will face 100 Thieves on Saturday, Sept. 3.

Both of those teams have already qualified for this year’s Worlds; the only thing left to determine is how they will be seeded in the top League of Legends competition.