Did Voyboy tease a new champion, death recap, and item in his Mordekaiser gameplay videos?

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For the past year, Riot Games has been trying really hard to give content creators that are part of its League Partner Program the opportunity to reveal new things. But Akali and Yuumi’s reveals were both bungled by creators leaking their videos ahead of schedule.

But with the Mordekaiser rework that just dropped, everything seemed to follow the script. His new abilities were revealed on May 28 and on May 29, popular streamer Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani released a footage of Mordekaiser gameplay that he captured at Riot’s studios.

But it wasn’t long before the internet parsed through his video and found a couple juicy tidbits that maybe shouldn’t have been there. Or maybe they were left intentionally—Riot does review these videos before they’re published, after all. Maybe all of this is Riot actually teasing us.

The first thing that users noted almost immediately was that anytime Voyboy died, the middle of his screen was blurred out. This led to obvious speculation that Riot is finally working on an update to the broken death recap system, a change the community has been asking about for years.

This is almost too obvious—why go to the effort to blur the screen instead of just cut away? It seems like Riot wants to increase the anticipation level for when the death recap finally drops.

The other thing that internet users quickly found was that, in the item shop, there is a new support item that’s labeled “experimental.” That means it’s still probably under heavy testing by the internal design team, but its premise is pretty interesting.

The item, “Spellthief’s Ring,” allows the buyer to choose between receiving gold-per-minute, health, attack damage, or ability power. This has big ramifications for how support items work—perhaps Riot is trying to open the playbook a bit and allow supports of different types to share starting item builds. It’s also unclear whether the user has to choose between those stats when purchasing the item, or if they can toggle between them later on—what if a tank support could start with gold generation and then switch to HP in the late game?

And that’s not even the end of it! In another video, Voyboy’s champ select screen had an extra icon for a mystery champion named “Aphelios.”

This is almost certainly a project or code name, possibly for the AD assassin that Riot is working on. But it’s another thing to wonder—is Riot really getting ahead of all of us with these leaks? And if so, what more could come? We’ll probably have to parse these videos even more closely to find out.