For years, Western League of Legends pro teams have searched for a formula to close the gap on the LCK and LPL. Every international event begins with optimism, only for many squads to discover that playing a cleaner version of the Eastern meta rarely produces different results.
G2 Esports has long rejected that approach.
From unconventional drafts at the height of its dynasty to off-meta pocket picks in recent years, Europe’s most decorated organization has built its international reputation by making opponents uncomfortable and winning their domestic leagues. At the MSI 2026, jungler Rudy “SkewMond” Semaan believes that philosophy is still the West’s greatest equalizer, even if G2’s approach has become far more measured than simply locking in surprise champions.
Settling down in G2 and why surprise picks only work when the moment is right
SkewMond has already seen unconventional strategies pay off on the international stage. His Dr. Mundo jungle pick at Worlds 2025 helped catch opponents off guard, while G2 continued experimenting with champions such as Shen and Kog’Maw during First Stand, where they reached the final, defeating their heavy Korean heavyweights.
Those moments reinforced an important lesson—creativity matters, but only when backed by preparation. “We as G2 have this power, in a way, and creativity to really surprise people with a lot of secret picks,” SkewMond told Dot Esports in an exclusive interview.
“We have a lot of good ideas, but we really need to obviously have the good scenarios and the good conditions to pick them,” he added.
Rather than forcing unconventional drafts, SkewMond says the team waits for favorable situations where those champions can maximize their impact.
“We’ll just wait for the right moment to pick them. Hopefully, we’ll be able to just play our own game.” The philosophy reflects a more mature version of G2’s identity.
The goal is no longer to surprise for the sake of surprise, but to create calculated advantages against opponents who may have never practiced those matchups. The biggest example of it came in their upset against T1 when BrokenBlade pulled out his Kled, which completely changed the fate of the deciding game four.
Replacing a player with Jankos’ legacy brought immediate expectations, but SkewMond said lifting his first LEC trophy was the moment he truly began feeling settled within G2.
“I think since last summer when we won our first title, it definitely gave me more confidence as a player on how I’m fitting into this team,” SkewMond said. “Joining G2 and not really being able to win titles in Europe is seen as a failure.”
He admitted the pressure was significant during his first months with the organization, especially given G2’s history of domestic dominance, but said consecutive title-winning splits have helped him feel at home.
“I had a lot of expectations and pressure on my shoulders, and it felt a bit rough in my beginnings. But since last summer, and this first half of 2026, I’ve been feeling pretty great here in G2.”
Beating the East means refusing to play their game
For SkewMond, the gap between Western and Eastern League of Legends remains real. He believes trying to match LCK and LPL teams champion for champion often plays directly into their strengths.
“I think for European teams, NA teams, like not the Asian teams, it’s really important to have this kind of secret strat to actually just take off guard the Asian teams,” he said. “If you just go on equal terms, if you are being realistic, most of the time the LPL and the LCK team will just win against you if you play standard,” he explained.
That doesn’t mean abandoning fundamentals altogether, especially in Fearless Drafts, where you can’t always choose or blind pick these pocket champions, as the enemy team may punish them with strong meta picks as the counter.
SkewMond emphasized that G2 still spends significant time preparing conventional drafts because a best-of-five cannot be won through gimmicks alone. Pocket picks create opportunities, but consistent fundamentals remain essential once opponents begin adapting.
“You really need to prepare some normal drafts as well sometimes,” he said.
SkewMond also believes his shift from scaling utility junglers to aggressive carry champions is less about personal growth and more about G2 becoming a more complete team. “Playing slower champs and more scaling stuff, for example, Maokai, are usually always a safe bet,” SkewMond said. “It made us win so many games, even against the best teams like Gen.G.”
“At some point, I feel like you reach a ceiling,” he said. “Especially in Fearless Draft, when you need to have way more picks and playstyles, you really need to be able to adapt to the series and who you’re playing against.”
SkewMond added that predictable champion pools become an easy target as tournaments progress. “That kind of playstyle is really hard, and it’s not really sustainable, especially in long tournaments like Worlds,” he said. “People start to actually know how you play and what you are comfortable with, and so they can actually target ban you.”
Since Worlds, he believes G2’s overall improvement has made aggressive picks far more effective. “I think we’ve just changed a lot as a team, and we’ve been playing just better in general,” SkewMond said.
“So me picking champs like bruisers, like Pantheon, for example, just feels easier because we’re actually able to snowball properly. Whereas last year, it really wasn’t the case,” he said.
SkewMond says G2’s flexibility, not a jungle-first philosophy, has fueled his rise
Despite becoming one of G2 Esports’ biggest carry threats this season, SkewMond rejected the idea that the team has intentionally shifted toward a jungle-centric identity. Instead, he said G2 adapts its approach based on draft and champion requirements, while still recognizing the value of playing through Caps whenever the opportunity presents itself.
“I think that we didn’t really have any specific talk or mindset in terms of how to just put me in good condition to carry the games,” SkewMond said. “Most of the time it just comes naturally, and we just go with the flow depending on the drafts and what we have in front of us.”
He pointed to his Nasus performance in the LEC Summer Finals as an example of how G2 adjusts around a champion’s needs rather than forcing a fixed strategy.
“When I played Nasus in the last game of the finals, it’s really a champ that needs to get through the early game and needs a bit of resources from your teammates,” he explained. “So we played around that, and I was really able to just take over the game later on. But if I’m playing a champion like Xin Zhao or Vi, it’s a bit different.”
“Playing around Caps is usually always the good way to advance the game because he’s an exceptional player and he really knows how to progress the game,” he said. “Every game is different, and we are really doing our best to be adaptable.”
That adaptable mindset also extends to the outside noise surrounding him. When asked about G2 General Manager Romain Bigeard’s belief that he will surpass FlyQuest’s Inspired as Europe’s best jungler by the end of the year, SkewMond said the comparison is understandable, as fans want to know who is the best, but ultimately difficult to judge.
“I think that it’s just a bit funny,” he said, noting that the rivalry began after Inspired defeated him at MSI before G2 responded at Worlds. “A lot of people are comparing me and him because he’s always winning in NA and has consistently shown that he’s an amazing player, and I’m kind of the new rookie coming in.”
Still, he argued that comparing players across different teams ignores too many variables.
“It’s not really realistic because the conditions are really different. We’re not playing on the same team. We don’t have the same players around us. We don’t have the same staff. We don’t have the same experience,” SkewMond said. “For me, I just want to do everything in my abilities to win with my own team and prove that we are good, and me, I guess, good as well individually.”
G2’s confidence comes from knowing they can challenge anyone
Despite advocating creative drafting, SkewMond isn’t relying on surprise strategies because he doubts G2’s ability. If anything, First Stand strengthened the team’s belief that it can compete with the world’s best after defeating two LCK representatives on its run to the final.
“We know that we have this ability to beat the best teams,” he said. Still, he cautioned against assuming that success automatically carries over into MSI. According to him, the meta has evolved, opponents have changed, and every international tournament presents new challenges.
For SkewMond, that only reinforces why adaptability matters.
Whether through standard drafts or carefully prepared pocket picks, G2’s objective remains the same: force the world’s best teams to answer questions they aren’t expecting. If the West is going to challenge the East once again, SkewMond believes it won’t happen by copying them. It will happen by making them play a different game altogether.
G2 Esports pulled the biggest upset of the international event by taking down T1, but they lost their next series to North America’s first seed, LYON. The defeat also meant the team moved on from the veteran coach Dylan Falco to Perkz as the team’s head coach for the EWC 2026.
