Crown is coming to North America to start for OpTic Gaming

Former World Champion Lee “Crown” Min-ho is headed to the NA LCS as he joins OpTic Gaming.

The former Gen.G mid laner had played his entire career in Korea’s LCK before moving to OpTic, where he will move straight to the starting roster. In the 2016 season, Crown helped lead a fairly young Samsung Galaxy team — the former name of the organization now owned by Gen.G — to the World Finals, where they were defeated by SKT in five games. However, the very next year in 2017, Samsung and Crown returned to the Finals to once against face off against SKT and won in a decisive 3-0 sweep.

In 2018, the first year that the team was called Gen.G, Crown once again returned to Worlds, but this time the team put up the worst ever performance by a Korean team at Riot’s largest annual international tournament, failing to even advance from the Group Stage.

OpTic Gaming didn’t fair much better than Gen.G’s Worlds run though. The organization joined the NA LCS as a part of the franchising program that started last year, and failed to find success. While signings like former NA LCS MVP Noh “Arrow” Dong-hyeon at ADC and the talented European mid laner Tristan “PowerOfEvil” Schrage proved to be intriguing, the team still only managed a ninth place finish in the Spring Split and a seventh place finish in the Summer Split. Now, the team’s roster remains largely up in the air, however, it appears that Crown will feature heavily as the team’s new cornerstone.