Week 1 EU/NA LCS thoughts: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Surprises!!

EU and NA week 1 are in the books with super weeks on both sides. Each team played a total of 4 games over 3 days and we get to see some initial results of where each team and each region is, we get to see what the meta looks like at the end of 4.7 and we get to see what teams are going to need to work on and how they will adapt for 4.8. While I normally like to keep my articles about one topic in particular I have a feeling I would be doing a severe injustice if I didn't cover the gigantic breadth of 30 games that we had in the week, so I will use that classic cliché of "The good, the bad, and the ugly”.

Note: This is going to be a long one, so I apologize in advance.

Let us start with the good as we all want to know who came out on top and who did not. In both cases here there are some pretty well defined winners in Alliance for the EU side, LMQ for the NA side, and ADCs for the champion pool.

Alliance started 3-1 in their super week only falling to Supa Hot Crew who seemed to have their number since joining the LCS. It could, in fact, be argued that Alliance really only lost on a fluke game as Selfie get fed on Yasuo while Wikid did nothing in the top lane as Iraelia. It seems that Alliance was a bit lost still on how to rotate properly and play the slow-push game as in this game (as opposed to their wins) they were taken completely off guard by the sheer aggressiveness of SHC. In their wins, however, Alliance played very controlled games, moving around the map well, coordinating for objectives and really starving their opponents from taking any advantage before closing out each game. Much of this credit is to Tabzz who seems to have really stepped up his game and is showing the fire to re-claim his #1 EU AD Carry spot.

In NA the winner was LMQ who took flawless record over their week 1 matchups. LMQ showed a wonderful display of good mechanics as well as a great propensity to setup 2v1 and 3v2 situations to just out-aggress their opponent. While it is arguable that LMQ had a bit of a soft schedule with their only winning opponent being CLG who finished 3^rd place in the previous split and week 1 with a record of 2-2, LMQ did end the week 4-0 which is nothing to overlook. If LMQ can keep themselves out of situations where their aggressiveness is baited and forces them into bad situations, or as the LCS casters would say “predictably aggressive” then they will make a huge impact in NA bringing the level of competition higher than it has ever been.

The other real winner was the NA ADCs as in opposition of their EU counterparts who seemed to have struggled to come up with a suitable counter to Lucian, when Twitch was banned. Other than Graves, the NA ADCs were able to cover a range of champions to various successes playing: Miss Fortune, Caitlyn, Corki, Vayne, Jinx, Draven, and even Kog’Maw. While I don’t think that this shows us that NA ADCs are in any way superior to their EU counterparts, I do think it is interesting that NA is more willing to explore various ADC options and are willing to trust their carry players to play what they are more comfortable with in the role. While ultimately I believe this list will be shortened it is interesting to see the variety as teams are adjusting their matchups and being better ready to handle bans towards the rat.

Next we will explore the other side of this coin and look at teams of deferred success in Gambit, EG, and Iraelia picks.

Gambit has had a bunch of roster changes, namely, losing their star mid-laner and “face-of-the-organization” in AlexIch. However, Gambit still came into this season with a load of talent being led by All-Star DiamondProx and a superior support player in EDward who was able to lead the mixed team of “Gambit in Pajamas” to some mid-spring season victories. Their major problem was with a new mid laner in NiQ who was named as the “temporary replacement” and, after week 1, we can all see why. NiQ offered almost nothing in 3 of the 4 games Gambit played essentially getting his lane pushed in or giving away early kills and basically putting his team really far behind from minute 5. Despite good pressure from the jungle and bottom lane making superior plays, Gambit as a whole seemed to have no mid lane presence and no AP damage during team fights. The lack of a solid wave clear or fierce assassin from the mid lane simply, crippled the team in their 1-3 bouts in the first week. We will see how the team does in the upcoming weeks as Fomko has been named as the new mid-laner, hopefully, bringing the team a fresh start. Despite this, Gambit is still going to have a number of communication, pick, and team synergy issues to deal with and it may end up being an extremely rocky season for them.

On the NA side, the struggles continue for EG who started the week 0-4 even behind the new-to-the-LCS Complexity.Lol. Again, we see this stem off of team turmoil as EG needed to replace their ADC in YellowPete and were not entirely ready to do the swap on day 1 which might have been part of the reason for their horrible loss on day 1. Day 2 we were able to see the swap complete as Krepo took to the bottom lane with replacement Altec who, despite a rather good performances on Kog’Maw, Twitch and Corki, was still not able to close out games against TSM, Dignitas, or CLG. EG seemed to have no other strategy than to give their top lanner Innox, a carry top laner forcing Lee-Sin and Kha’zix picks. This gave their opponents an easy path to victory focusing rotations around the top lane and not allowing EG to gain the early advantage they needed to win the game. If EG are able to clean up their picks/bans and show more than one strategy they will be able to climb out of their hole and maybe not be relegated again this season. Their star-mid-laner Pobelter no longer has to attend school between matches so hopefully the team will use this as an opportunity to really gain some synergy and clean up their communication for their upcoming matches.

Finally the worst part of the entire week had to be the Iraelia picks. EU seemed to have this at the top of their priority list and seemed to be forcing the pick in many situations. While the general strategy of Iraelia top is to get her fed early so that no champion can compete with her in lane; the “power-pick” seemed less than stellar and seemed to be a pain-point for any team who picked her. In addition to drawing constant jungle attention from her team, Iraelia seemed to not really have an impact until about 15 minutes, at which point she would then be behind in the lane and have little to no impact in team fights. This then forced teams into either chancing the Iraelia falling behind in lane or having an under-farmed jungler. Either way, the team was simply losing the game. Despite her poor performance she continued to be picked throughout the week to little success and even was banned in at least one case. I commend EU for trying to find a meta-dominate carry in the top lane, however, it seems like hedging your bets on getting Iraelia going isn’t the way to go about it. While the EU is known for off-the-wall picks and the top lane has seen a much larger variety than their NA counter-parts, this seemed to be one pick that was simply just not working, despite multiple attempts from a variety of teams.

Finally, we end with the teams and champ selections that were just plain ugly, these included Fnatic, C9 and mid-lane picks.

Fnatic has been struggling for some time now and despite winning their 3^rd consecutive EU LCS title, since that time, they have been extremely lack-luster and have seemed to be more fragmented than their 8 game losing streak mid-season in the Spring. In fact, since their EU LCS win they have gone 3-7 in their last 10 games only winning one game at All-Stars and twice in week 1 going 2-2 overall. It seems that the team has learned nothing from the extra-practice of All-Stars and really picked up nothing overall from their matches against SKT, OMG, and C9 all of which exposed their weaknesses and really gave them some good video to review. It also is very obvious that Fnatic is slow to pick up on getting a Coach/Analyst as they just recently posted on social media that they were acquiring these and it is hard to say how quickly these will be able to make an impact. Despite all of the changes, Fnatic still showed struggles in the top lane letting Soaz farm on his island and fall behind and letting their lack-luster vision control haunt them in the mid game. Fnatic were able to show some signs of life in their 2 wins but, it is arguable that these were due to throws by CW and Roccat who also had shaky starts to their season. Fnatic has shown time and time again that they have the talent but it seems they need to adapt to the meta faster and really learn the value of vision and rotations to build their core strategy and not have to rely on completely out-fighting teams to win.

Despite my writing a glowing article on C9 talking about how much they benefited from All-Stars C9 had, arguably, the worst overall start to their season only going 2-2 and dropping some rather surprising losses to Dignitas and Complexity.Lol. While it seems that C9 would be the dominate-force in NA, again, this season it appears that switching back to Hai in the mid lane was more of a problem than anyone expected. While Hai didn’t specifically stick out as doing a poor-job it could be seen that C9’s shot calling was lacking and the players were often times out of position and not coordinating the way they are used to. It also seemed that Hai lost some of his ability to play the “support mid lane” not placing as many wards and disallowing Meteos to run around both jungles and pressure the enemy team. In fact, the striking difference between their wins and losses can be seen in their warding as when they fall behind it seems as if no one on the team is buying wards and the ward control coordination is non-existent. C9 even admitted after their games that they were surprised to even get away going 2-2 saying: “We know we are bad right now” and keeping a positive attitude saying how it was a blessing to not be on top all the time. If C9 can keep this attitude of being the underdog this will definitely motivate them to practice hard to get their 3^rd consecutive NA title and we could be looking at the birth of a C9 team stronger than ever.

Finally we come to the ugliest part of the entire week on both sides of the pond and this was in mid-lane picks for the teams. While we know that there is a ton of viable mid-laners and banning out the mid-lane is, currently, one of the hardest things to do the picks from various teams was still rather poor as teams do not seem to understand the matchups and what can work well against what. We saw many situations over the week where teams would counter-pick themselves into mid-lane matchups and have it ruin their entire game. In EU we saw Gambit’s NiQ pick Syndra into Millennium Kerp’s LeBlanc and simply get stomped by the assassin. It is true that Syndra is a strong pick at the moment but this does require the player to be able to play one of the most skill-intensive champions in League of Legends and be able to control the wave and their opponent. While it could be argued that this game was one of the major reasons for the replacement on Gambit’s roster, even just the pick as a strategy overall is a bad idea. In NA we saw Curse pick Yasuo into a TSM Soraka which, despite some argument from the NA casters, is not a good solution. The Soraka, piloted by Bjergsen, was able to build nothing but armor in the early game completely negating the advantage gained by the AD Carry in Yasuo. Soraka was even able to completely turn a team fight by silencing Yasuo long enough to prevent his ultimate from going off and kill him before his team had time to take advantage of the initiation. Teams need to re-evaluate their mid-lane picks and really learn to force their opponents into a rough decision with their mid-lane pick. It is also arguable that power picks like Lulu, Soraka, and LeBlanc were under-utilized and need to be looked at more often. This and the top-lane picks mentioned earlier are both major pain-points from some teams and will be something to watch how they evolve over the next few weeks.

I want to write a final small section with a few honorable mentions. Millennium was the surprise in EU coming out with a 3-1 record and really showing an understanding of rotations and champion selection. They will be the team to watch in EU to see if they can keep up this consistency. Dignitas is my mention for NA also coming out to an outstanding 3-1 record only falling to Curse. The Baron curse plagued Dignitas again in this game but despite this they looked extremely consistent. We are also all awaiting the addition of Braum to the champion pool and it will be interesting to see if he is ever able to be played based on his raw strength in solo queue at the moment.

While week 1 as a whole did bring us a lot of exciting action and this fan a lot to write about, we can look forward knowing that NA and EU are changing and making it a lot more fun to watch. Based on this upcoming week’s matchups the teams to watch will be Alliance and LMQ as they will both be playing some stronger competition and we will get a real glimpse of what they can do. Keep reading and stick with me as I will do my best to get these articles out every week and, hopefully, before the day of the LCS in the next week. Whoever you root for, root hard, your team needs you.

All-Stars: Cloud 9 the real winners!

All-stars is over and done with but now that we’re living in a world where teams are starting to realize the advantage that having a coach and a analyst brings I think if anything All-Stars showed us that the upcoming LCS/OGN/LPL is going to be extremely interesting. SKT T1 K did an amazing job and really did show that they are back and in top-form, however, there was one team that really flew under the radar and really made huge strides towards their personal growth as a team. This team, of course, was Cloud 9.

Cloud 9 came in as the underdog for the entire tournament. They played in a region riddled with roster changes resulting in below-average team competition. They were down their mid laner and main-shot-caller in Hai who was sidelined only about 2 weeks before All-Stars with a collapsed lung. They had to train and teach-how-to-shot-call a replacement in CLG Link (who did a rather good job). On top of it all, their first game was against their rival EU LCS team in Fnatic with the home crowd heavily against them.

Despite this, Cloud 9 performed remarkably admirably in the tournament walking away 3^rd overall with a 3-1 record in the group stages and ultimately falling 2-0 to the 2^nd place OMG team in the finals. However, this record alone does not tell the story of why this was such an important event for Cloud 9 and why they are the ones who truly got the most out of the tournament.

Throughout the NA LCS Spring split Cloud 9 was one of the only teams who actually showed clear understanding of rotations. Not only were they simply mechanically better than every other team (as a whole) but they also better understood the meta and clearly showed that they could play the movement-central rotate/push style. We even had glimpses their ability to plan ahead and bait other teams into poor fights and ultimately dominate games, the greatest example of which came in their 3-0 domination of TSM in the NA playoffs for their much sought-after spot in the All-Stars tournament.

To understand how this works: you, as the reader, really need to be familiar with how rotations work, and while I am not claiming I am an expert on the subject; I have been playing MOBAs for a few years now and watch A LOT of competitive ESports and do my research where necessary. I hope these articles are proof of that and I hope that you will take this for what it is: a fans educated yet simplified metaphor of what comprises a rotation. While the Riot Shout-Casters would have you believe that rotations have something to do with mathematics, “the act of rotating around a fixed point”, in video games, we like to think of this in terms of objectives and lanes. Essentially, the best way to think about this is to picture each of the lanes (and the jungle I suppose but this is a bit different) as an assembly line, you send workers to each of the lines to do their job (farm, push, defend, assassinate etc.). The idea behind rotating is to change people’s positions and jobs as to further your map position against the other team, that is: rotating around points of interest.

 Now, if the entire game was basically: "who can do their job (farm) the best" we wouldn't need strategy, you would simply find who are the best farmers in the game and we would see DOTA-style teams (old DOTA1 when it was a Warcraft mod) where you have 2-3 farmers and 1 or 2 supports basically just seeing who can get items the fastest and winning team fights. However, in League of Legends, we have highly-coordinated teams thus allowing them to periodically change people’s lanes or jobs again: rotating.

Going back to the assembly line metaphor, you will trade workers in and out of different positions to maintain quality control and to make sure that you are producing at the best possibly efficiency and quality. If you were to leave the same people in the same places all the time this could get very monotonous and the quality of your work will slip. Same thing in League of Legends, if we leave players in the lanes the whole game it will be…well…boring. So when a caster refers to someone as rotating they might mean switching lanes but it could also mean their changing their job. A classic example: a top lane player who is on his island farming will notice that the mid lane player is moving to the bottom lane to help assassinate a player or defend a tower, in either case, he can change his job to pusher on the top lane, push out his lane, and then rotate to the middle lane to defend the middle tower or to push out the mid lane to keep map presence (top is pushed and the team is not losing their middle lane). This is also a rotation for the mid laner as he has moved from farmer in the middle lane to now assassin in the bottom. Either way this is a classic example of a rotation, changing both player’s responsibility and lanes to further your map position and keep the enemy team guessing. The team also advances its map position by preventing an objective from being taken, possibly getting a kill, keeping their lanes pushed out, and possibly setting up another objective as a result (gives them room to take a tower, secure Dragon, or simply get more farm). Now, I understand that rotations in competitive LoL are more advanced than this but this is just a very basic example.

The thing that we are learning, as fans, is why rotations are so important and how crazy the strategy of rotations has become in League of Legends. Teams are now learning to plan ahead with their rotations being able to win their lane in such a way that they can rotate without giving anything up and putting their opponents farther and farther behind and reach the snowball point much faster. Again, one of the main reasons that Cloud 9 dominated the NA scene so much was their very keen understanding of this and their ability to plan a few minutes into the future with their rotations that allowed them to take many objectives from their opponents. They understand how winning your lane can result in the ability to place deep-wards that then sets up their ability to rotate with very little risk and stop other team’s rotations in their tracks by simply being aware of what they were doing and then capitalizing when they fell short. It was no fluke that Cloud 9 was 22-4 on the split and though they lost a few games early that had them behind TSM nearly the entire season, they eventually caught up and then ultimately dominated them in the playoffs. They simply understood rotations better than any other team and were able to push their advantages more; in essence, they were the best team in the entire scene.

We got to see some of this at All-Stars as in their 3 wins in the group stage over Fnatic, TPA, and OMG. Cloud 9 showed their signature style of dominating their own jungle, getting a kill in the top lane, deep ward off their lane advantage in the middle and bottom, and then switch gears at 20 minutes and take quick successive objectives. Once they hit their 20 minute-peak: the team rotations become metronome like as they rotate bottom then middle then top securing all 3 towers in a matter of minutes then baiting the other team into a bad fight and winning the game from there.

In their game vs. Fnatic we can see the impact of this where top and mid did not flat-out win their lane but they were able to generate vision and allow Meteos to be free reign in the top lane and jungle. This resulted in a huge advantage for Balls by 25 minutes and cleared the way for Cloud 9 to out-position Fnatic in the later stages of the game to ultimately win at 37 minutes. In fact, the only reason this game lasted as long as it did was because of their still-forming CLG/Cloud 9 communication and Link getting caught out in the first two big fights in the game. Once Cloud 9 won the fight at 17 minutes in the bottom lane, Cloud 9 flipped that switch and rotated flawlessly into a free middle tower and top tower within 2 minutes of each other as Fnatic were helpless to get anything done. We can further see this in the gold difference between the two teams as the difference remained unchanged (1.5-2k) until about 35 minutes when Cloud 9 won the fight by Fnatic’s blue-buff. After this, Cloud 9 took Baron and then won the game 2 minutes later. While it is true that Fnatic had their own issues with this game; Cloud 9 was able to come from behind and snatch the victory by showing their ability to plan ahead and use their rotations to not allow early mistakes to let the game get out of control. This also shows their mastery of game mechanics, in that, despite Fnatic winning a majority of the early fights; as soon as Cloud 9 gets one favorable fight they use their positioning and ward coverage to easily secure multiple objectives and erase any advantage gained in the early game.

The difference can be seen in their game against SKT where the Korean juggernaut showed them how effective rotations can truly be, as SKT shut down Balls so hard that Cloud 9 could do nothing to stop the snowball. The game started with Cloud 9 doing the early tower push in top lane, but then the game broke down from there. Impact was able to freeze the lane and get very secure farm thus freeing up Bengi to get 3 buffs, freely rotate between mid and bottom lane, and ultimately secure multiple objectives. This also allowed Piglet and Pooh to Balls the bottom lane preventing Cloud 9’s star top laner from being able to rotate and ultimately down in farm. SKT could then dictate every movement on the map even: using Impact to secure jungle buffs for Faker and keeping Meteos fishing for very low-percentage kills. By 15 minutes SKT was up in kills and towers to the tune of 5500 gold and snowballed to a 30 minute win. While it was easily the biggest beating that Cloud 9 would ultimately take the entire tournament they were smiling as they lost and graciously shook hands as they knew they put up the best fight of any team in the group stages (maybe with the exception of OMG).

Despite this, in interviews with Cloud 9, Meteos spoke to how they understood that SKT were “a million times better” than them but; just the practice they had received against them and the video they would acquire playing against teams as strong as them, would be invaluable in advancing their play and really taking their teamwork to the next level. The Shout Casters then even took this farther speaking to how Cloud 9 was saying in earlier interviews that they were learning lots of little things such as: freezing lanes, using rotations to create plays a few minutes into the future in the game, and even better understanding pick and ban phase to play to a set of champions’ strengths. SKT was, in return, very complimentary of Cloud 9 in their interviews and showed a lot of respect to how far they have come despite their international experience. Remember, Cloud 9 as an organization has had 4, yes, 4 international matches, and now these matches are hard to count as it was not with their whole line-up. Faker even admitted in an interview that he wanted to play Cloud 9 for a very long time and was upset he could not play them at their full strength.

While Cloud 9 did ultimately fall to OMG in the finals, we can see a little bit of this learning about early rotations starting to come into play but ultimately they lost the vision game as OMG simply rotated much better than they did and shut down their vision control in every phase of the game. OMG pushed this into an advantage that was simply unbeatable and then seemed to have had a slight mental advantage in game 2.

Talk in interviews and the caster desk the entire weekend was about rotations, lane freezes, and other map movements which, really was, the story of each of the wins. The entire weekend, SKT T1 K dominated due to their new-found heavy-map-movement strategy and just pushed other teams all around the map setting up dives and engagements wherever they needed to. To think that Cloud 9 was practicing against this over the whole weekend, even without Hai, is going to be invaluable for them as a team. It is hard to think that everyone in the Cloud 9 organization: their players, their coach and especially their analyst wouldn't see this as a huge opportunity to be able to learn from this and further develop their own play and understand the differences between the games they won and the games they lost.

What is most interesting is that we, as fans, can learn something from this too in that, in reality, many times, victories can come down to farming and movement. It really does come back to what the loading screen tips say, players who coordinate with their team to secure objectives have higher win percentages. SKT T1 K dominated most of their matches because of the massive disparity in farm for one of their lanes at 10 and 20 minutes into the game and were able to adapt their rotations and strategy around this. SKT T1 K were excellent at planning who is going to be in what lane a few minutes from now and planning objectives based on how the other team moves and what objectives are available if they rotate to a different part of the map. This understanding is ultimately what every team in League of Legends will need to live up to in order to have any chance at worlds against the Koreans, especially teams in NA and EU who are just now finding their footing internationally.

Moving forward, if Cloud 9 continues to do what they've been doing: improving and adapting strategies the way they have, we will again see a NA scene dominated by Cloud 9 with no team being close to them again record. Even Fnatic is beginning to admit that they haven't adapted the way they need to and are now looking into getting an analyst. YellowStar and Rekkles both posted on social media and Reddit apologizing to their fans for being “under prepared” and about their coming team changes (getting an analyst not changing players). We also see this coming to fruition in the amazing season put up by SK Gaming in EU and CLG in NA: each of these teams has shown their understanding of the rotation-style gaming and their ability to draft a team comp around the concept of pushing, poking, and movement to gain an advantage. While none of the teams at All-Stars looked nearly as polished as the Korean juggernaut, this tournament was really a stepping stone for the rest of the world to understanding how to take their League of Legends game to the next level and we will see much more competitive international events in the future.

Get ready for exciting summer splits in all 5 regions, and be ready for a clash of the titans like we have never seen at Worlds 2014. With teams beginning to acquire coaches, analysts, mentors, psychologists, and other support staff to help with their gaming, the level of competition is going to increase, and just get better for the fans.

It had to end this way, the end of the General's Command

I didn't want my first story to be about a player quitting, I really didn't want it to be about TSM. This is not to say that I don't like TSM, I enjoy watching league as a hobby, and in all honestly, love watching every single game, digesting it, analyzing it, breaking down individual plays and trying to figure out what the teams were thinking (“…without comms” as MonteCristo would say). However, I think the end of one of the most polarizing figures in League of Legends and the retirement of a player who has been around the NA scene since its inception is worth a mention.

We will all miss TheOddOne, as I said, he is one of the longest standing players in NA; being a part of one of the most polarizing teams in the region and at the height of his career nearly inventing a new type of jungle that he played to great success. Love him or hate him, cult follower or not, respect the Maiokai or not, he needed to be replaced.

After their extremely disappointing finish in the 2013 Summer Split, TSM vowed on its VODs, and on Reddit to its fans that it would get better. Despite qualifying for worlds for a 3^rd time the team was not happy and team owner Reginald was not happy and did not want to look at another 14-14 season. Wanting to see his brand grow and wanting to be able to focus on the business that he had nurtured and grown, Reginald decided to sit himself and search for better talent.

Acquiring Bjergsen was seen as the best offseason moves of any of the NA teams and gave fans new hope for the return to the dominance of TSM. Bjergsen delivered and surprised many fans with his insane lane mechanics, his excellent champion pool, and his adaptibility within the scene. Bjergsen in many games was able to carry the team out of situations they should never have won through completely out-playing many of his lane opponents. This became the mantra of TSM, “Don’t lose lane, don’t lose game”. As long as they could come out of the lane phase even, close to even, or ahead, they were able to easy out-engage, and out-team-fight the other teams in NA.

While TSM was able to ride this new wave of successes to a 22-6 season, in week 11 of the split and into the playoffs it seemed that TSM was having a hard time adapting. Even in their interviews the TSM members talked about how they might have been struggling with adapting to the new patch and how they needed to just spend more time learning the changes and really figuring out a strategy for how to attack finals.

Reginald had shown that his team was capable of this showing in the 2013 Summer Split finals that he too can pull a rabbit out of the hat, switching over to double AP comps having Dyrus play Karthus in the top lane and having the team as a whole play more Chinese-Style push comps with WildTurtle going on Corki and Xpecial picking up Fiddlesticks to challenge the meta in the finals and ultimately win them their 4^th spot to worlds. The fans blew these losses off knowing that this was entirely possible again and trusting that the master-planner Reginald would again come up with a solution and work with the team.

The only problem with this was that the fans that turned a blind eye to the one sore spot on TSM’s record, which was the team’s extremely disappointing record against Cloud9, only going 1-3 against them during the split. Much of this success was attributed to Cloud9’s stellar consistency and their large champion pool, not to mention the rise of Sneaky and LemonNation as one of the best bottom lane duos in NA. However, many of the keen observers talked about the importance of the matchup of one of the most influential positions in League of Legends; simply because of the direct impact it places on the rest of your team and the opponent’s team, I am talking, of course, about the jungle.

As fans of the NA scene we were none too familiar with TheOddOne v. Meteos matchup as it had been featured a number of times during the coveted TSM/Cloud9 matchups. However, one common denominator of these matches was simply: Meteos was out-jungling TheOddOne at every turn. In the matches during the split we saw Meteos go 10-9-27 to TheOddOne’s 3-13-20. However, these scores don’t tell anything about the outcomes of the games where it was obvious that Cloud9 seemed to understand something that TSM didn’t out-maneuvering and out-pushing TSM at every turn and really showing the cracks in their lineup. Many players could see this to be particularly true in the mid lane where the record setting Bjergsen seemed to be able to do nothing against the ever-stalwart Hai and not being able to pressure or push the way he wanted simply due to the lack of lane-pressure and playmaking by TheOddOne.

This all changed though when the teams got 2 weeks off for the playoffs as they both were head-and-shoulders above the other teams in NA and earing their weeks off to prepare for their eventual opponents in the playoffs. Cloud9 was easily able to stick to their plan and swiftly defeat their opponents in Curse who had just come off of their emotional victory over Dignitas. However, TSM’s games told a much different story.

While CLG was on the rise and their team was starting to look better and better and, perhaps, like the true 2^nd ranked team in the NA it took multiple throws at multiple parts of the map for CLG to lose game 2 to TSM and arguably go on tilt for TSM to squeak back into the series and come back for their win. Many experts claim that if it wasn’t for Xpecial landing the mid-game Thresh hook in game 2 of the TSM/CLG final that CLG would have easily rolled that game to a 2-0 victory, but here we were with a repeat of the 2013 Summer Split final between Cloud9 and Team SoloMid.

The games were a stomp.

Cloud9 easily won all 3 games only giving TSM a small 20-25 minute window in game 2 to come back and an even smaller 10-15 minute window in game 3 before both of the games were out of control in Cloud9’s favor. The TSM members reacted by posting on social media about how they simply were out rotated and Xpecial even apologizing to his fans about how that was the “worst BO5 he had ever played” but the stats and the game footage said something different. These games were not simply the result of map movement, they weren’t the result of team-fighting, it was clear that there was one common denominator that was really holding TSM back, it was TheOddOne. The final match result of C9s 54-6 to TSMs 6-54 (KD) over the 3 matches didn’t begin to scratch the surface of how poorly these matches went for TSM. Again, with TheOddOne being the biggest culprit to this contributing 2-13 across the 3 games to this score. While, it may be true that this was 33% of TSMs kills it also was nearly 25% of TSMs deaths, way more than his fair share of deaths. Again, the scores would show that Dyrus did an equally unimpressive 1-13 across the 3 games but this was with Dyrus having 2 favorable matchups. Twice Cloud9’s Balls picked Jax into Dyrus’ Renekton knowing that he could easily rely on his jungle player Meteos to out-pressure TheOddOne and make up for Jax’s early game disadvantage and played it out perfectly as TheOddOne hardly showed his face in lane and watched helplessly as Dyrus gave away his early game advantage.

Further, fans watched on as TheOddOne who would have had the late-game Jungle advantage on a Feral Flare jungler in Xin’Zhao vs. Meteos’ Elise simply have little to no impact as Cloud9 was able to take map advantage before the Feral Flare was ever in range of being a threat to team fights or champion picks. Cloud9 seemed to be two steps ahead of TheOddOne on every turn even baiting him and Bjergsen into 2 blue buff steals/kills in game 2 allowing Hai and Meteos to simply walk over them for the rest of the game and set TheOddOne's jungle plans back 5 minutes in each mid-game where his Feral Flare should have mattered. You can call this a small champion pool, you can call it poor jungle mechanics, whatever the reason, it was obvious that this matchup was so tilted that this was a major flaw in TSMs game plan, and was something major that the organization failed to address in their team changes from the end of Worlds 2013 to the beginning of the Spring Split for this year.

I actually wanted to write another article at the end of the split, probably wise that I didn’t as anyone who actually reads it would have thought I was a TSM hater talking about how TSM was done as an organization. It wasn’t until the recent shake ups in teams that I realized that the problems that had seemed so obvious to me were obvious to others as well and that the ever-steadfast Reginald was on the case and ready to make the moves he needed. While it is true that TheOddOne stepped down one could speculate that there was already something in the works as just as soon as Reddit had wind of TheOddOne stepping down we found out about the newest TSM acquisition in Amazing. While it may be a large step-up in talent it was announced that TheOddOne was going to stay on as a coach and would be a part of the organization bringing it another set of much-needed eyes to help the team learn from its mistakes and learn to adapt to this new movement-heavy meta that they might be able to actually do some damage in the international scene.

The good news for the team and really the main point in the article is this: TSM as an organization has been around way too long and enjoyed way too much success that anything short of winning NA and making worlds would, at this point, be considered a colossal failure. The team at this point has had a strong grip on the NA scene and has shown that they’re willing to change players in order to accomplish their goals. While it may not have seemed that this was a problem until now, looking at games going back almost a year now it has become obvious that the TSM as we knew it needed to change in order to go on to greater things.

This was even confirmed by TheOddOne who on stream, very emotionally, admitted that he wants what is best for the organization, and that he knew there was an opportunity to get better talent, and he wanted the organization to do this. TheOddOne was even the one who claimed in a GameCribs interview back in s3, when Chaox was replaced, that TSM isn’t the kind of organization that would sit someone for performance reasons, yet here we are thinking “What a difference a year makes”.

While speculation is still out on how good of a shot caller Amazing is, and we all have been able to see and study his awesome plays that he put out with Copenhagen Wolves during the EU Spring Split 2014, there is no doubt that this was the correct move for TSM. It is agreed across the board that this is a jungle upgrade for TSM in the same way that Bjergsen was for Reginald. However, TSM fans are no longer cowering in fear of the upcoming split wondering if they would even be able to crack 17 wins.

I believe that this is a statement by Reginald that he really is taking to heart his business and he really is closely watching his team and making the correct decisions for his team’s ultimate success.  While his decisions will always remain controversial and the moving of Xpecial to Curse and acquisition of Gleebglarbu is still a looming topic of conversation, TSM fans can rest assured knowing that Reginald will be closely watching everything that his team does and has now proven that he is willing to make the tough calls for the overall success of his team.

Whether it be a change in the meta, a change in strategy, a change in players or even a change in management, we have been able to see that TSM as an organization is willing to make the moves that it must to keep going as an organization and understands the sacrifice that is necessary to be champions. We all know that sometimes having the best players isn’t enough, you need the best team, and I believe that TSM has proven that, possibly more than anyone, they understand this and are willing to do what is necessary.

We will miss you TheOddOne, we will miss our General of the rift and Yordle-Hater extraordinaire. It is unfortunate you were the one that got caught up in the cross fire of team synergy and were an unwanted casualty. While you will still be around in the scene and in our hearts I believe that Reginald, TheOddOne, the rest of the TSM family and fans are all sleeping better knowing that the organization continues to strive to be the best and understand what it takes to be champions.

What I am trying to do...

Hi world.

So in the past I have always wanted to make a blog about my favorite video games, writing in-depth analysis about the latest happenings and goings-on and trying to be active in the community. However, I have struggled with this and always tried to find a game that can be my home that I can really take these ideas and run with them.

I believe now that, League of Legends might be the opportunity I was looking for, with the amount of action that is always happening week to week, the size of the community, the ever changing-game play, and of course, the drama that goes along week to week in the pro scene.

Basically, I am a fan with a blog, I have a passion for writing and sharing my ideas (despite not being the worlds greatest writer) and hopefully I can bring some interesting ideas to anyone who feels like reading. I will do my best to make this as professional as possible, and make these interesting reads. Let's see how this goes. I will try to make these once a week, I will try my best to provide the best commentary and analysis the best I can in a non-bias manner.

Remember, I am doing this on my own, I have no editor, I have no stats-man to back me up, this is just my analysis and my feelings on the LOL scene for the entire world, focusing on different stories in different regions the best I can. If you see something you want fact checked or find a misspelling please let me know! I will do my best!

Thanks!

-Xanwind