After seeing how well StarHorn Royal Club, a Chinese team featuring two Korean veterans, performed at the Season 4 World Championship (beating out the two other all Chinese LPL teams and reaching the finals) LPL team owners started buying Koreans en masse. OGN, NLB or SoloQ, their level of play or experience didnt really matter. Obviously the big name OGN stars got more attention, but before we knew it there was only three full Chinese rosters left in the LPL (OMG, Gamtee and Team King). With mid season 5 reports that there are over 60 Korean players playing for Chinese teams and more than 25 Korean players playing for European, North American and Taiwanese teams, the great Korean exodus was in full swing.

October 17th 2015: EDG, the most successful Chinese team ever and last hope at the Season 5 World Championships, are eliminated in an extremely one sided quarter final matchup vs. their European counterparts Fnatic. This marks the first time that a European team has defeated a Chinese team in best of 5, the worst ever World Championship performance by LPL teams and the worst ever tournament finish by EDG (Season 4 they at least went to a full 5 games).

Its safe to say that the LPL Korean exodus dream is dead. Claims that the LPL overtook LCK/OGN as the strongest League have been massively overstated and the region is in tatters. LGD certainly underperformed (large in part due to coaching issues) and EDG found themselves out of meta without the neccessary tools to suceed but given the amount of money that team owners spent on players like Acorn, Imp, Deft, PawN, KaKAO, Rookie, Save, Flame, Dade, Looper, DanDy, Mata, Swift, Fly, Limit, Raphael, Sky, Beast, Ella and Spirit its clear that not reaching semi finals was a massive underperformance. Many people will claim that these teams poorly utilised the talent they bought, that the mixed language rosters can still work and while I agree on both counts I also have to question: Whats the point?

Korea, on the other hand, has performed better than ever. For the first time ever, no Korean team lost a best of series to a foreign team. With two Korean teams in the finals, Korea finishes with a 21 - 3 record vs. foreign teams (an astonishing 86% winrate) in what is the most dominant performance from Korea ever.

- Season 2 NaJin Sword and Azubu Frost, despite topping their group, both fell to the Taipei Assassins.

- Season 3 Samsung Ozone went 5 - 4 in their group losing a tiebreaker to Gambit Gaming and failing to advance from group.

- Season 4 NaJin White Shield, despite topping their group, were crushed by the boys in black OMG in a one sided 3 - 0 series.

Even after having the entire region sucked dry of talent, Korea still prevails. It wasnt always pretty and it came at the expense of both IEM Worlds and MSI but Korea has secured its 3rd World Championship title. 

So what happens now? Korea, after the Korean exodus, was forced to evolve in order to surivive. Sister teams were abolished, OGN had its format completely changed and the numbers of competing teams slashed. If all the Koreans in the LPL alone returned itll create a huge saturation of talent and give us some of the most stacked rosters weve ever seen in the history of competitive League of Legends.

SK Telecom T1

MaRin

Bengi/T0M

Faker

Bang

Wolf

For the sake of narrative I assume that SKT will both win the Season 5 World Championships and not change a player. I dont think its unreasonable to imagine a scenario where Easyhoon, being as strong as he is, seeks oppurtunities elsewhere (something well get too).