My Fantasy LCS Picks AKA Rambling no One Else Gets or Cares About

As most of the people that read this blog know, I am pretty big into esports, particularly the League of Legends scene, and one of the things I really enjoy is the Fantasy LCS. It is essentially like Fantasy Football, but for the League of Legends Championship Series. (LCS) Players enter into a league and at the beginning of the season/split draft a team and compete with each other on a week to week basis. Each team consists of six players (one for each position in a team and an additional "Flex" pick) and one team on a starting roster and there are three sub positions available for players to draft in additional players to shore up potential weaknesses in their team. Participants in the fantasy league are also limited to picking only two players for each position since certain positions are worth more points. It would be like trying to draft a team in fantasy football made entirely of quarterbacks. It just doesn't make sense. Now that you have a general idea of what Fantasy LCS is you are ready to have my overwhelmingly intelligent picks explained to you. I'll start from the top (lol wordplay) and go down the list giving brief (hopefully) explanations of why I choose them for my team. The full team list can be found here if you want to put faces to the names I'm throwing out.

For my Top lane pick (get the wordplay thing now?) I've chosen Quas of Team Liquid. Quas is a versatile top laner who is capable of fitting into whatever role his team needs him to play. Quas can play team fight oriented mages like Lissandra, Rumble or Lulu that rack up the kills or beefy tanks such as Gnar, Renekton, and Sion that distract the opponents while his Korean carries clean up the fight. He has intelligent teleport play, but with Piglet's tendency to split push himself it shouldn't be seen as a surprise if Quas is often found grouped up with his team ready to get into the mix. I expect that for the most part Quas will be providing a healthy stream of assists to keep his fantasy score high.

Moving into the jungle I've got myself Jankos of team Roccat, who just might be the best jungler in all of Europe with Svenskernen of SK gaming being his only real competition. (Shook is simply not consistent enough to be the best.) Pair that talent with with one of the rising stars of Europe in Nukeduck and you have one of the strongest mid/jungle pairings in Europe. I expect early kills with smart snowballing from the Polish jungler.

Whether you want to admit it or not TSM fans, your team lives or dies based almost entirely on the performance of the Danish superstar Bjergsen. While this might be considered a weakness by some, I wouldn't worry to much about it yet since Bjergsen is one of, if not the best players in North America currently, and there is actually an argument to be made that he is just THE best in NA right now. The Dane is famed for his incredibly strong laning that has netted him many solo kills on his opponents and his ability to almost always get ahead of the enemy allows him to make plenty of big plays which mean plenty of fantasy points for me. Bjergsen is so good I planned my entire fantasy draft around him and Forg1ven who I will touch on next.

Forg1ven (yes it's spelt with a 1 and not an i, just pronounce it Forgiven) as I mentioned just now was a pick I planned my entire draft around. A couple of people in the draft with me suggested that this was my "Sleeper" pick. I don't really understand how anyone can really think he is a sleeper though, Forg1ven was the shining light on an otherwise dismal looking Copenhagen Wolves last year, and this year he's been put into a much better team with SK gaming. Forg1ven has just as much talent for League as Rekkles who is very often stated as being the best AD carry in all of Europe, but Forg1ven has something that Rekkles simply does not. An aggressive playstyle, and to top it all off he is now paired with one of the best minds in the game in nRated. These two together have both the brawn AND the brains to back it up. Forg1ven is going to lead the charge for both SK and myself all the way to the top of the standings.

Last year I refused to pick any players from Team Solo Mid (TSM) on the simple reason that I didn't like the team. Now that I've moved on from that childish mentality I've gone ahead and picked two players from their roster. Really that's all I have to say about Lustboy though, I picked him up pretty late into my draft, but he is a very good support player playing for what I think will be a very successful team. What could go wrong?

The sixth slot is designated for fantasy players to have a "Flex" pick where they can but a player from any position in allowing a fantasy team to play two tops, two mids etc etc. However since Mid laners and AD carries get the lions share of points almost everyone just picks one of those two to double up on. For myself this is where I've taken a bit more of a risk by picking up Keane of Gravity. Keane is a risk not because I don't know how good he is, I know that Keane is a very good player. What I don't know is if Gravity is all that good as a team and with the way fantasy points are earned you need players to be on winning teams if you want to succeed. Keane is my riskiest pick-up and even then I'm not that worried. Gravity can't fail completely can they?

The seventh and final starting spot on a fantasy roster belongs to a team and I've picked up the boys in blue, Team Liquid. This team has an insane amount of hype around them right now, and I won't lie, I've bought right into it. Liquid looks incredibly solid with nearly every player on their roster having been a proven player in some aspect or another. The only unproven player is Fenix, their mid laner. While Fenix doesn't have too much experience on the bigger stages of play nearly every other pro in the scene has spoken highly of his skill so I wouldn't consider it anything to be worried about. Everything points to Liquid having a very successful season, and to top it all off their playstyle is very methodical taking every objective possible as to not allow an opponent they've gained an advantage over the chance to get back into the game. This play style will convert into lots of fantasy points for me. WHOOO!

This is already an incredibly long post so I'll try and get through the subs part of the team quickly. My subs are picked with the intention of being solid players that I can put in if some of my starters are facing difficult teams that particular week. Wickd of team Elements is ready to sub in for Quas and Helios of Winterfox can replace Jankos if needed. I also have team Fnatic on my bench just in case they actually turn out to be as good as they played in the first week.

I think it should go without saying that I think I've drafted a good fantasy team, and more importantly that my team is better than my opponents. My picks should show my superior knowledge of the League of Legends pro scene and I hope I win this Fantasy league convincingly. If you actually made it to the end of all this rambling let it be known that I love you and hope you had a great day today. Peace buds.

Obligatory picture of my Team Liquid shirt to show my support!

My Lottery Winnings

So I sort of fell off there for a bit, but I am definitely not out of it! I've still got the need to give you something to read! (bad rhymes ho!) anyways I'm going to talk about what I would do if I won the lottery. Following some janky math I figured 35 million would be a suitable number to work with for this hypothetical. Now first things first. That is an unreal amount of money right? jeez, hard to even comprehend the idea of spending it all, but I will try for your entertainment. Also as a side note, for the sake of this post we will assume that this is AFTER TAXES pay out. Ok? ok.

The first thing to do when obtaining an massive sum of money is to make sure that you stay absurdly rich for the rest of your life. This for me would involve finding some sort of financial adviser to handle the task of investing the money I have safely and with intelligence. So I turn 30 million of my total winnings over to the task of investing and the likes. I'm not a expert but I'm pretty sure that much invested properly should keep me very rich for the rest of my life rather easily. Now we have 5 million dollars left, and I'd just one more responsible thing before I start goofing around, something simple like making sure anyone in my family has their debts taken care off, which shouldn't even put that big of a dent into my money unless there is some crazy crime debt stuff going on like on TV, but like come on, what are the odds of that? For the sake of numbers we'll say I dedicated half a million to this. I Definitely don't think I'd come even close to using all that but whatever.

What are the odds of my dad being Heisenburg? Zero, it'd be my mom obviously

It seems silly to say this, but I'd also like to move this blog onto a site of its own as opposed to being hosted here on blogger, not that I don't appreciate this service, but I'd like to have it be functioning on it's own. I'd also get some quality design people to come in and make sure it's well built looks nice. It's something that I would really like to have done.

Four and a half million dollars kicking around to just go be dumb with. (#TheDream) Even that is an absurd amount of money to spend. HOW DO RICH PEOPLE DO THIS!?!?!?! oh right yachts and things like that.. nvm figured it out. This is the part I think more people want to hear about since it we all love to indulge these fantasy fulfillment at least a little bit. First thing I would do for fun with my money would be to traveling. My plan for this would be to essentially attend a huge number of E-sports events around the world and  then spend something along the lines of a week after the event to soak in the place I am at. This gives me a solid start in destinations. Now that I'm rich I'll definitely be eating pretty good every night as well, prob not eating out every day, but being able to buy good food to cook for every day is nice. (RIP Ichiban) I'd buy a totally baller custom PC that I would probably have someone with more tech expertise than me set up just to make sure nothing is messed up. A new car would also probably be in order as well, but nothing super fancy. In fact I'd probably just stick with a Corolla, but have it be new. The last really stupid thing I would like to do would be to go to a fast food place, order so much food that they'll tell me that it's going to take like 15 minutes, and then tell them that I'll be going to another fast food joint and I'll be back. I really just want to see the looks on their face, plus with that much food I should be set up to throw a pretty nice party.

This party will require a great venue though, and I'll also want it to be my own place, so I suppose a new apartment/house will be in order. Not a bachelor pad though since I quite enjoy having roommates, I would probably still charge rent on them, but it would be at quite a discounted rate. I'm not really comfortable with just letting anyone free load off of me you know? Another aspect of a new place to live would be that I would have an office. There is something about writing in one's bedroom that I find... less than ideal. It would also give me a good space to continue to goof around and do creative things whenever I feel like it. Hold up. When did it become a priority for me to have space to be creative? I was never like that as a kid. Anyways, I'd stay in Edmonton for at least another year or so, but would be ready to move to a new city as needs be.

I don't have to be really attached to any one place since I won't have any commitments to a particular place. School would definitely become more of a hobby kind of thing, like I'd go just because I want to learn more, but only like part-time and I wouldn't be super concerned with when I graduate, since I don't really need to jump into the job field that early. I'd be there for the pursuit of knowledge and not the pursuit of a piece of paper to get me hired like university seems to be like for most people. Maybe I'd attend schools like NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) to learn some of the ins and outs of specific jobs. Cooking classes for sure, things like that.

Lastly, I'd put money into E-sports. Most likely in the form of sponsoring a team since I don't have the know how to run a team, but I want to be involved. With the level of buying power I would have and since it would just be me sponsoring instead or a corporation that could potentially rival sponsors already in place I could probably work with any team/player I wanted to. It's not like there are teams that don't want more money to work with. Personally I'd like to put my money into two specific teams. Cloud9 for sure, I have a lot of respect for their League of Legends team and think the owner Jack Etienne is absurdly smart with how he's running the entire organization. Definitely think he would put that money to great use. I would also like to work with Axiom E-sports if given the chance. While they only operate in the StarCraft II scene, I think the team is amazingly well run and I would love it if they had the resources to expand their roster out. I think it's for the best that I would work with organizations rather than through sponsoring individual players mostly due to my previously stated lack of experience in handling business like this and I would much rather just entrust people, but I would have to go with organizations that are already established and trusted since I actually want the money to be put to good use rather than have it be used in one of those dumb scams that seems to frequent E-sports often. Plus how cool would it be to have something like a graphic for this blog up on a Cloud 9/Axiom Jersey? Only cool to me? Right. Don't care, it'd be awesome.

So try and wrap up this massive wall of text. Invest most of the money to stay rich forever, pay off family debts, buy new house/car, go to school for fun rather than constantly stressing, new place, blog on it's own site, lots of travel and my face on a Cloud 9 jersey or something like that. Peace buds. 

A Quick Look at the Fast-Push Strategy in League. Part one: Compositions.

Fast-pushing is a strategy that has become extremely prevalent in competitive League of Legends. The strategy revolves around taking enemy towers down early and fast in order to establish dominance over the map and snowball the game into a fast victory. It often relies around team compositions with strong early/mid games but suffer heavily into the late game. This puts an effective "Timer" on the team to create the overwhelming advantage before the opposing team accrues enough gold to buy the core items for their compositions which often rely more on the later portions of the game. Recently in the North American LCS there was a game that very well described how a fast push should work, and also what a team needs to do in order to stall the game out long enough for overcome the early disadvantage and win the game. I'll be going over the Curse vs Counter Logic Gaming match from Week three of the NA LCS to examine some of the in's and outs of Fast-Pushing, both pros and cons. Today it'll be just the drafting portion of the game.

So what I would say is the general rule of drafting fast pushing teams is that you want attack damage/speed, strong wave clear and mobility. You also want to try and bait the other team into picking champions with weak wave clear, as strong wave clear is the main method of stopping a fast pushing opponent. With that in mind let's see what drafting decisions Curse and CLG make in champ select. Starting with bans, where not a whole lot unfolds in regards to the fast push strat. CLG ban away a few champs that have strong potential to pick off individual champions, but that doesn't really matter that much to Curse because they aren't going for a team comp that focuses on picking people off like that, rather forcing them to back away from turrets through out numbering people at the turret with smart and fast rotations. Curse also doesn't ban away any really strong wave clearing champions, more of two all around strong picks with the Annie and Elise bans.

Moving into the picking portion of the draft we begin with Curse picking up Ziggs. Ziggs works really well with fast push strategy because it's very easy to push enemy minion waves out and shove yours up against the oppositions tower allowing you to either put damage on the turret or to roam to another lane and help shove turrets there. Shoving a lane like this also keeps at least one person pinned to the turret allowing for your rotation to become more effective. CLG respond to the Ziggs pick with a Renekton and Shyvanna. Now both of these champions have decent wave clear with Shyvanna's actually being quite strong, however picking them both of these forces the Shyvanna to play in the jungle, making her far less effective in stopping the fast push because when you are playing Shyvanna in the jungle, your strength comes from counter jungling, and not so much from moving into lanes and assisting/ganking. Curse then takes Dr. Mundo and Jinx. Dr. Mundo can hold a turret very well and Jinx might be the best turret pushing champion in the entire game with her natural attack speed steroid from her Q and strong wave clear from her Q as well. These two picks now are also very smart as they don't reveal that Curse is looking for a fast push strategy. The first three picks from Curse are totally normal picks that could also be used in a pick comp or a team fighting comp due to Mundo and Jinx both having forms of CC and strong late game scaling. Not knowing it's a fast push comp CLG take Vayne and Yasuo next. Both of these champions are really bad at defending the fast push as vayne has no real inherit wave clear and Yasuo needs a static shiv at least before he can clear waves easily. Knowing that CLG has now picked a team compositon that will struggle against the fast push Curse immediately lock in the Nunu and Janna picks. Nunu and Janna both have good synergy with  Jinx adding another attack speed steroid and an attack damage steroid with Janna's shield, not to mention the knock-up form Janna can also persuade people to abandon turrets form fear of the dive initiate she brings, Janna's ultimate also can counter-act the hard engage a Shyvanna ult brings to a team fight. So two very smart picks for this composition. CLG knowing what they are up against now have no real choice but to simply stick to the comp they are already bulding and lock in the Lulu for the last pick.

So in summary, Curse picked strong pushing champions that are also usable in other compositions to bait CLG into picking champions that are weak against the fast push. Once Curse knew CLG couldn't build a strong composition to counter their strategy they revealed their strat with their last picks. CLG at this point has no other choice but to stick to their guns and hope to out play Curse in game.

Later this week (Prob Tues/Wed) I'll be looking into the first twenty minutes of this game to see how Curse now execute this fast push strategy.

Obligitory Chauster picture. 

Image source from ibuypower.com

The Casual Fan's NA LCS Power Rank!

With the North American League Championship Series booting back into high gear this weekend, I'd thought I would share some of my thoughts on how the North American teams stand up to each other with their European imports. So without further delay, we'll proceed form eight too one!

#8 - Dignitas. Let's get something straight, I am a Dig fan, I love these guys and I sincerely think that Qtpie is one of the best AD's in North America, but at this moment there isn't really a lot else going on for them. Scarra is kind of just another mid right now, Kiwikid is still new to support, Crumbz has some moments of brilliance and Cruzer just looked totally outclassed against Wickd at the Battle of the Atlantic event. I hope to see this team improve and I think they can, but right now they are in deep trouble.

#7 - Curse. Curse probably isn't actually as bad as I'm saying they are, but thats mostly because I haven't jumped on the Quas hype train. Dominate and VoyBoy seem to be meshing well together in play so they've got that over Dig at least. Cop and Zekent will almost guaranteed be one of the most average bottom lanes in North America, and with the upcoming changes in patch 4.1 almost forcing the 2v2 every game Curse's bottom lane will have to lean on their solo lanes even more if they are to start winning games.

#6 - CLG. I don't get it. I just don't. CLG has everything in the right place to be top 2 team material. They have one of the best strategic minds in League with MonteCristo coaching them, one of the two most mechanically gifted players in North America with Doublelift and Link who are both very capable of carrying games. I'm particularly fond of Doublelifts preference to playing Jinx, a champion I think can carry games infinitely better than other top picks such as Cait, Lucian or Sivir. On the other end of the bot lane, Aphromoo seems to have become very comfortable with supporting and is enjoying it, and Nien continues to evolve into a high quality top lane player. Finally, they have the super strong European jungler now in Dexter. They should have everything going for them, but things just don't seem to work out. I wouldn't be suprised in the slightest if CLG challenged for Top 2 in NA, but until something magical happens that makes this team work they'll continue to wallow in mediocrity.

#5 - Coast. Coast looked really good playing against the other challenger teams during their relegation period, but those are only the challenger teams. Coast suffers from the same problem that Curse does in my mind in that they are good players, just not great. Nothing about them really stands out, but their bot lane doesn't make me cringe with how passive they are at least so I'll rate them a fair bit higher than Curse. Someone's gotta be the middle of the pack team I suppose.

#4 - XDG. I honestly didn't know whether to put XDG or EG here, ultimately the recently renewed commitment to swapping Xmithie to AD and Zuna to jungle forced my hand though. Xmithie is a great jungler, and I really don't think he's going to fully adapt to the bottom lane until very late into the split or even the summer split. Zuna's positioning as AD was well... pretty awful, he just seems to want to go in deep all the time, so I guess Jungle will suit him better, but really this move overall is a mistake I feel. Despite this bad move within the team, I still think XDG will be a strong team that will give people a good run for their money. If they can stop throwing games I think they can beat anyone really.

#3 - EG. All hail the European rejects! Seriously though, this team has a really solid line-up. Snoopeh seems to be back on the rise getting his mechanics back together. I do thin Yellopete is way to passive, but the bot lane makes up for it with Krepo being willing to go balls deep at a moments notice and on top of that the team seems synced up with Krepo well, diving right with him. Innox seems to be a solid top laner, but I do hope to see a bit more from him over these next few months. Lastly there is Pobelter. He's super strong, I'm not going to lie, but EG cannot afford to fall into the trap they did with Froggen. They cannot rely too much on their mid, they must realize that other people on the team are totally capable of carrying the game as well. regardless, this team looks to be solid throughout the year. How ironic it would be if they made it to worlds from NA and Alliance failed to make it...

#2 - Cloud 9. The biggest debate I had with myself over these placements was the top 2. It seems pretty clear but who are the two best teams in NA right now. (I'll give you a hint, its the ones that WON Battle of the Atlantic matches.) The real question is which of these two is better than the other though? Ultimately I had to put the boys in light blue in second, but really I can see either of these two being number 1 easily. Cloud 9 absolutely dominated the last split of  the LCS with strong team fighting oriented compositions and decisive decision making. Having one of the best Junglers in the entire world acting as the spearhead certainly helps as well. Coming into this split Cloud 9 have to prove that they can still be the best consistently. I again criticize the bottom lane for being passively oriented, however Cloud 9 plays that as a strength by having Sneaky and Lemonation play utility oriented bottom lane that allows for the solo lanes to shine. I don't think its optimal, but it works pretty darn well.

#1 - TSM. Team Solo Mid has only made one change, but boy was it big. Team Owner Reginald stepped down from the starting roster to coach the team. Replacing him is star European mid laner Bjergsen. This not only makes what I thought was TSM's weakest point one of its strongest, but it also removes the massive power dynamic issues that plagued the team during Season 3. In game I feel that TSM is now actually in a position to communicate in a healthy manner. Combine that with TheOddOne's recent surge in performance and we have a scary scary TSM. Just how strong is TSM now? Strong enough that I think Dyrus is the weakest player on the team now. Yes Dyrus, the North American All-star that consistenly performs and often would be large factor in TSM's season 3 wins is now the weakest person on the team. They're like SKT K lite now, thats honestly not even a real dig at TSM. They are scary and I expect great things from them this season.

So there you have it! Some random fan's opinion on how the LCS teams are going to do in NA this split. Hopfully I get at least a couple of them right.

The Five Things I'm Most Excited About in 2014.

Alright so it's the end of the year about and that means its time to makes lists. There really isn't a whole lot to be said on that subject, its just a thing that happens every year and we all seems to enjoy it so without further stalling, let's talk about the five things I'm most excited about in the year 2014. These aren't listed in any particular order by the way.

Number 1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I absolutely loved this first Captain America movie, I loved The Avengers, and the trailer looks friggen cool. So yeah, put me down for one ticket to this hype train! The Winter Soldier looks to me like it's going to be a great film, the trailer led me to think that the movie will have a bit more of an "espionage" feel to it and frankly that makes me excited. With the Bourne movies having lost their shine with the absence of Matt Damon and you know Jason Bourne, were left with only Bond for solid spy movies. While I don't think Captain America will spawn into a spy movie franchise, I do think it will serve as great filler until another good one comes out. You know what I mean?

I thought since I talked about the trailer a bunch I should have it available. 

Number 2. The return of viOLet to the major StarCraft II tournament circuit. I'm generally pretty excited about anything StarCraft related, but this one I'm hyped about. viOLet went nearly the entire year without making any appearances due to being consistently denied a visa to the United States, now though he has been granted a P-1A visa, the same kind issued to professional athletes, he's good to go for the next five years. 2012 was a great year for viOLet, he performed well in tournaments, and established himself as a good personality in the scene which got him a lot of support from North American and European fans. It would have been spectacular to have seen him continue on this path in 2013, but I'll settle for 2014. He's got everything he needs to become an extremely popular and skilled player in the StarCraft scene and I eagerly look forward to seeing where he goes. Hopefully a smart team decides to pick him up as well.

Number 3. The return of many of my high school friends from their missions. There isn't a whole lot of detail to go into here. There's Brad, Tyler, Dillon, Corbin, Zach, Jason and Lysa. Seven people I enjoy the company of that I will be able to enjoy their company again. That is something to look forward to if nothing else.

Number 4. The return of the League of Legends Championship series. (LCS)  I love the LCS. It's very well produced, the casting crew are knowledgeable and entertaining, and above all else, its high level league of legends games delivered to me at a time that doesn't absolutely destroy my sleep schedule. (I'm looking at you OGN.) Over the course of this first split in 2014 I'll be writing my own personal previews for some of the games in the LCS. The focus will be around Dignitas and CLG games because those are the two teams I have a personal bias towards. I don't think that Dig and CLG are going to be best teams though. Not at all. It seems obvious to me that Cloud 9 and Team Solo Mid are looking very very strong. Cloud 9's games against Fnatic at the Battle of the Atlantic event over this last month were particularly telling of their strength. That only speaks for the beginning of the split, nearly every other team has the "untapped power" to become a contender for best team in NA. It's going to be a great season and you should tune in at twitch.tv/riotgames (Riot plz give me moneyz.)

Number 5. Idk, list just look better when they are multiples of 5 so I thought there should be five items. Sorry to dissapoint if you wanted another one, but I got nothing right now. At least nothing that I could do a write up about.

Your face when there are only 4 things on the list. 

Why I Stopped Playing Competitive Games.

Let's talk burnout. I don't really know if this is a term used like it is with gamers, but burnout is pretty straight forward, you play one game a lot over an extended period of time and then you don't enjoy it like you did when you started playing and that causes you to stop. Occasionally you burnout on a game so badly that you never play it again. Most of the time it's just temporary lasting from a month or two to as long as several years before you return to a game. I'm really burnt out when it comes to League of Legends, I honestly can't even boot the program up and stay in a good mood. Nothing about playing the game is fun for me right now. I still absolutely love watching League be played at a professional level though, but I can't play it. To extend that even further I really haven't enjoyed playing StarCraft II as much lately either, even though I feel like I'm at a peak of sorts with my level of enjoyment as a viewer. I think right now it'll be good for me to simply take a step back from playing and focus on being a more informed viewer. That means goals, which I've been really bloody awful at finishing on this blog, but you gotta keep trying ya know?

So the new goal will be to reach the point as a viewer that I can write informed and decent quality preview and review pieces on the 2014 Season of StarCraft World Championship Series (WCS) and League of Legends Championship Series. (LCS) In order to accomplish this I'm going to have to become a little more focused on what I watch in terms of streams. I think for League I should be focusing on watching a decent amount of at least one professional in each of the five positions and for StarCraft a pro for each of the races.

So basically in summary, I'm not going to really be playing games right now, but rather focus on getting better at writing pieces for Esports which I'll post up here. I'll write another post "soon" TM where I'll go into detail about the streamers I'll be focusing on. Until then, good luck and have fun peeps!

So Picks and Bans did Win the Game. Mostly.

               For those of you that did not partake in the spectacle of the League of Legends world finals than you missed out on well… A bit of a stomp to be frank.  SK Telecom T1 ran right through China’s Royal Club in a convincing 3-0 fashion. While I had previously predicted a 3-1 victory by SKT I was quite surprised with the total sweep. One of the funny things about SKT is that they almost always lose the first 1-2 games in a best of X series. For whatever reason something happened on Friday night though, that allowed them to overcome that and crush on through. I will contribute a huge part of SKT victory to their Picks/Bans phase of the game, or maybe to Royal’s mistakes in the same phase.  There was a \ key error and a smart decision in champ select that I want to talk about myself.

               The first of these was ignoring Jax completely by Royal Club. I wouldn't criticize if they let it through in game one and then banned it out because of what a problem it caused.  If they had let it through twice and tried to counter it in game 2 I wouldn’t be upset. However, they let it through in all three games and Impact made himself known on the Grand master of Arms. (Jax) Malphite in game one would've had to get way in front of the Jax in order to stop the split pushing threat it created, although I applaud them for trying at least. The rumble pick in game two was only marginally better. Royal Club known with a Rumble in lane that Jax wouldn't immediately become a monster,  but like the rest of the picks in game 2 it resigned itself  to losing lane overall. Game 3 fell somewhat into the same boat as the first, a curious choice to lane a Kennan against the Jax, but smart rotations from SKT saw that game end by 20 minutes, which is about as fast as you can win a game of League.

               The smart decision from SKT was the consistent bans on Renekton and Annie. Not only are both these champions comfort picks for Royal Club, but both of them also fit into Royal Club’s fighting and dive oriented style of play. Removing the nigh invincible tank Renekton forced royal away from having a consistent tank that could really initiate a dive under the tower, while keeping Annie away from shot caller Tabe forced him to pick Sona in every single game, which allowed SKT to anticipate the pick and counter it in lane, thus making it very difficult for Sona to be effective.

               So yes, the finals were a stomp, guess what? It happens sometimes. Some teams just show up much more prepared and hungrier for a championship than others. It happens. Stop complaining to Riot about it, it’s not like they wanted a stomp either. Close series bring in more viewers, fact. Congrats to SK Telecom Team One regardless. 

Look at them in their nerdy glory!

Fun week!

               This was a good week, I’m going to be pretty straight up about that. I accomplished two major things that I wanted to do with my summer. One was out of necessity and the other less vital but of similar value to me, if that makes sense. I like didn’t need it, but I really wanted it.

               First off, I found a place to live this fall! WHOOOOOOO! That’s a huge relief for me, because as I began my search things just weren’t really going my way with it, so when I started the week I was starting to legit think I might be bumming off couches for the first month of my life in Edmonton. Jeez that would have been an experience. Probably would have sucked, but I would have learned a lot from it. That doesn’t really matter now because I did find a place to live. Nothing super special about it, 5 bedroom place in Southeast Edmonton, it has close proximity to shopping and LRT so I don’t need a car up there. (Huge plus for me!) It has a surprisingly nice looking kitchen in my opinion. But yeah, the LRT location is important for me because….          

Pretty Good for a Rental eh?

               With the confirmation that I will not need a car, I felt comfortable enough with my money to order the parts to my PC that I’m building! Yay! Isn’t it cool how those things actually link together like that? The build I decided to go with is the same one I talked about in my last post, so I don’t feel like I need to link it again. About 1100$ cost including shipping and handling, and Im confident that it will be able to do what a 1800$ pre-made rig would, so yeah. Lesson to the peoples, building yourself is way more cost efficient than buying a pre-made.

               You know what else I just thought of that makes this week even better? I’ve found what I believe to be a solution to my frustrations with League of Legends. Stop playing ADC. (Attack Damage Carry, I shot things a lot and win fights for my team.) Why? Because when I play ADC I feel an obligation to carry my team through the ENTIRE game. That’s not good, because when I think like that I get really hypercritical of my own mistake which leads to most of my frustrations. So I’m going to be looking to play more assassin like roles. Cause then I just make plays and be a cool dude. Yay!

               So yeah! Good week overall. Like a solid 8.5/10 More blogging next week! Or maybe tomorrow. Provably next week though.