Tales from the Secretlab Chair (1/25–1/31 LoL Week in Review)
I wanted to start by outlining what this is going to be. Of course I took inspiration for the title from elsewhere, but I wanted to start writing more again. I always thought that I could break down a few things and show a few images to go with it so that it’s much easier to explain things with pictures than sole spoken words on a podcast. Expect a few memes and some song references at some point, but here we go.
First week in the books of LCS and Week 2 of LEC down and the standings are looking exactly as we expect. Vitality are sitting pretty in first, Astralis is 9th, and there is a 4 way tie for 2nd. Classic LEC with their shenanigans… wait the 4 way tie is between MAD, G2, BDS, and SK? Also XL lost to Astralis and is sitting 10th? KOI and Fnatic are behind Heretics?
As Wunder said it best.
Alright LEC was wild but there is no way that LCS is the game state right? Alright FLY and C9 went 2–0… but so did TSM and CLG. Also TL is tied with DIG, GG and IMT in the dead last spot after going 0–2? 100 Thieves didn’t look bad and EG almost lost to GG?
Alright back it up for a second, let’s take it from the top. Wild support picks, some crazy stats and the start of a new season makes for interesting storylines. For starters and the wildest stat of the week, there were 18 solo kills over the 10 LCS games this past weekend, which seems like a lot. It is. But when you compare it to the solo kill leader of the NACL so far, EMENES has 20 in 8 games, 20 solo kills to start the season! Hoon also has 12 in 10 games, but it’s not very often you see this happen.
Currently there are 4 100% prescence champs in LCS, Ryze, Kassadin, Lucian, and Sejuani, NACL has only 1 and that’s Maokai. I wanted to start by talking about the trees. Maokai as a champ we saw just twice in the LCS but has been banned plenty in all the regions. The two Maokai games we saw both came from Spica but they were both incredible performances by Flyquest. The jokes of letting Spica cook were flying and his team was cooking for sure. I talked about in the last column that I thought FLY were going to be the best team the LCS has ever seen. After the first week it looked to be that way. Impact was a stable rock in the top lane as expected from him. Vicla came over and had a strong performance in both games despite the mistakes that he was making. But the bot lane and Spica were on fire this weekend. Prince’s only death came on a fountain dive to give him a pentakill that was messed up but Winsome didn’t polymorph Summit on the dive, and Prince only got a quadra and his first death. But Spica’s pressure on the map was fantastic this weekend. Playing against TL and DIG may not look as difficult as we expected a week ago due to the fact that DIG had a lack of practice as they only had 3/5s of their roster initially. Spica was able to read Santorin who is one of the strongest LCS junglers of the last few years, and Pyosik who is the reigning world champ. Flyquest after the first week is great, and they can only go up from here hopefully. Let’s flip to the other end of the table, Team Liquid had a 0–2 week and looked to be the strongest of the two teams that went 0–2 unless we consider the barnburner that GG gave to EG day 1 with Young instead of Gori. Liquid looked rough, after getting dismantled by FLY on day one, then having a lead and throwing it away against TSM there is lots of questions that are already starting to be formed about TL and their strength after going all in on Haeri/Yeon and bringing in Summit/Pyosik. I will be the first to say it, they are fine. Two rookies coming to the stage which Yeon didn’t look bad, I was really impressed by him this week, Haeri I need to see more from but they are the team that is taking longer to mesh and they will be back to strength before we know it. TL has GG and IMT this week who are both also 0–2 so if they don’t have a 2–0 this week then it’s time to ring the alarm bells. The other team that was impressive week 1 that went 0–2 was GG, after announcing that Gori who was definitely the player that I was looking forward to seeing most on this team was going to miss and Young was starting I was skeptical that they would perform. But in reality, River controled the map against EG for 75% of the game and Stixxay and Huhi who were getting 0 credit looked fantastic against EG and had their moments against C9.
On the other side of the pond, we have the LEC who deserves an emmy for how bonkers this split has turned out to be, let me just drop the standings, and that might make some of the questions have answers which in turn would creat more answers.
As you can see, EU is wild. Vitality look fantastic despite dropping a game to SK gaming on Day 2. Bo and Perkz is a great mid/jungle combonation that can contend for top 5 in the world (I’m sorry Cubby) on their best days. The top of the table teams have strong mid/jungle combos as well as jungle/support duos. The big surprises of SK and BDS that have shocked everyone has come off the back of stellar individual play from players that we knew the names of, but personally didn’t expect. Adam and Irrelevant are leading the league in solo kills, Crownie has the highest KDA, Exakick has the highest CSPM, and Labrov and Doss are in the top half of support vision statistics. When you add up all the math both teams are 4–2 and have a great chance of finishing in the top 6 at least. The slights against the teams are that SK lost to MAD and BDS so they hold tiebreakers over them, but BDS in their final 3 has G2, Vitality and Heretics so their competition is about to ramp up. Meanwhile you look at the other end of the spectrum and there is XL. XL had all the expectations coming into this season after assembling a super team between all pro players, former MVPs and LEC champions into a roster with the 6 Star General himself Youngbuck at the helm. But while watching this team play it seems that they are either struggling internally and forgot how to play the game, or are just tanking Winter to bootcamp in the break between to play for MSI in spring. Targamas and Patrik don’t look to be meshing well together at all. The former is sprinting plays like he did on Nautilus against Astralis, and the latter has high damage statistics, but has lackluster GPM, KDA, and FB victim%, the first two statistics for Patrik put him into the bottom half of ADs. He is 8th in GD at 15, 10th at CSD at 15, XP at 15, and is tied for most killed ADC for First Blood with Rekkles. Combine that with the fact that Odoamne a player considered one of the staples of EU top lane has been the victim of the most solo kills and Vetheo looks like he is a step out of sync with Xerxe and Targamas at all times spells a recipe for disaster for this team. Lastly, I wanted to talk about Yike, the jungler for G2. After getting outclassed by Bo in the game versus Vitality yesterday, it looked pretty rough for him. But all of his other games have been fantastic. The statistical categories that he is leading in are remarkable. He is averaging a kill more a game than second place, he is 2nd in GD@15 to Hans Sama. Yike is on average 6 jungle camps up on his opponent at 15 minutes, that is a full clear up on his opponents by 15 minutes, while having 4 solo kills. The area that he is lacking in is FB%, he has only gotten first blood participation in 1 game compared to other junglers such as Sheo, Malrang, 113, and Bo leading the category at 66.7%. Yike has hit the ground faster than anyone else expected.
Two more things before I get out of here, power rankings for the Western regions. First off let’s start with LCS, I am conflicted on where to throw CLG because of their 2–0 week, they beat DIG and EG, but EG was shaky, I think A is the right place to put them for now. Everything else seems self explanitory.
Meanwhile it was hard to gauge where I would put the EU teams with SK and BDS on the rise, I felt like I spread them out nicely within the region on my rankings. I felt like I explained enough of each of the major shocks.
Lastly, there are some matches of the week that I wanted to highlight for each region.
For LPL, they are back, and they come back swinging. Within 24 hours of this posting we will get iG vs EDG on February 1st at 4am EST/1am PST. We also get at the same time the next day NiP vs JDG. Any match of JDG is one to watch as they are one of the strongest teams in the world.
(Official predictions: iG over EDG 2–1, JDG over NiP 2–0)
LCK this week just after the conclusion of iG vs EDG gives us GenG vs DPlus on February 1st at 5:30am EST/2:30am PST. We also get T1 vs HLE in a rematch of T1 vs Zeka and Kingen February 2nd at the same time. Lastly, we have on the 3rd a sneaky good matchup of LSB vs GenG at the same time as the previous two series I mentioned.
(Official predictions: DPlus over GenG 2–1, T1 over HLE 2–1, LSB over GenG 2–1)
LCS is pretty straight forward because I won’t shut up about this match Flyquest and C9 is the first game of Friday the 3rd at 5pm EST/2pm PST, I won’t say anything else. Another match to watch would be both TSM matches to see if they are champs or chumps when they play EG on the 2nd at 9pm EST/6pm PST, and 100T on the 3rd at 7pmEST/4pmPST.
(Official predictions: FLY>C9, TSM<EG, TSM>100)
Lastly, the final week of the first split of LEC. I’m just going to say both BDS games against G2 and Vitality. (vs G2 2/4 @ 2pmEST/11amPST, vs VIT 2/5 @ 1pmEST/10amPST) The other one that can have major implications on the playoffs is Fnatic vs Astralis to figure out potentially who gets the 8th slot on the 4th @ 3pmEST/12pmPST.
(Official predictions: BDS<G2, VIT>BDS, FNC<AST)
