Hanwha Life Esports employs G2’s comp in game 3 against T1

In professional League of Legends, stealing someone else’s homework is not just acceptable. It’s considered a power move.

Hanwha Life Esports pulled out the Shen-Lulu-Kog’Maw composition in game 3 of their best-of-five series against T1 on June 12, a strategy that G2 Esports had previously deployed at the First Stand international tournament. The match was part of the LCK 2026 Road to MSI qualifier, the series that determines which Korean team earns the region’s top seed at the Mid-Season Invitational.

Why this composition matters

The Shen-Lulu-Kog’Maw comp is a classic “protect the carry” strategy. Kog’Maw is a late-game hyper-carry marksman who deals absurd damage but has roughly the survivability of a paper airplane in a hurricane. Lulu provides shields, buffs, and polymorph crowd control to keep Kog’Maw alive. Shen’s global ultimate allows him to teleport a massive shield onto any teammate from anywhere on the map.

G2 ran this composition at First Stand, and it clearly left an impression on HLE’s coaching staff. Korean teams have historically been the ones setting the meta, not importing it from Europe. That dynamic has been shifting for years now, but seeing HLE deploy a distinctly G2-flavored draft against T1 signals that the flow of tactical innovation has become genuinely bidirectional.

The stakes behind the draft

This wasn’t some regular season throwaway match. The Road to MSI qualifier is the gatekeeper for Korea’s top seed at the Mid-Season Invitational, one of the two major international tournaments on the League of Legends calendar.

HLE’s willingness to deploy a composition associated with a rival region in this context tells you something about their confidence level. Pulling out a different identity in game 3 is a textbook adaptation move, one that forces the opposing coaching staff to prepare for a wider range of possibilities in subsequent games.

Where crypto meets the Rift

The T1 versus HLE series drew heightened activity on prediction platforms including Coinbase Predictions, Polymarket, and Kalshi. Significant monetary transactions reportedly flowed through these platforms in the hundreds of thousands, reflecting the growing appetite for esports-adjacent speculation among crypto-native audiences.

G2 Esports has been particularly active at the intersection of esports and digital assets. The organization has engaged in cryptocurrency-based betting partnerships, including a collaboration with Betpanda. G2 has also previously profited from SOL token investments, positioning itself as one of the more crypto-forward esports organizations in the competitive landscape.

T1 has its own history with digital assets, though it skews more toward the NFT era. The organization participated in an NFT auction collaboration with Swappable back in 2021, during the initial wave of esports organizations exploring blockchain-based collectibles.

Neither team currently has direct tokens associated with their brand in any meaningful way, but the infrastructure around them, prediction markets, sponsorship deals, blockchain-based fan platforms, continues to expand.

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