It’s Mag1c: EU Week 4

Here are 11 quick thoughts following the fourth week of the EU LCS 2015 Summer Split.

All of the statistics referenced below are available on the OraclesElixir.com EU LCS player and team stats pages.

1. So let’s get right to it and deal with the giant elephant in the room. The GIANTS elephant. They were 4-2 and seemed to be flying high, and people were singing their praises. I wrote last week that I still wasn’t sold on them, and now they’ve gone 0-2 and sunk down to a 4-4 record. There’s still room for them to have a good split, but I’m not seeing it, especially if their opponents stay smart and keep banning out Werlyb’s Jax.

2. Speaking of my favorite player, Werlyb played two carries this week, Rumble and Ekko. Against Gambit he had died four times by 20 minutes and was down 70 CS. Against H2K he had died three times. He was getting picked off on overextensions, and gave up the most deaths on his team in both games. To be fair, as Rumble he put out the highest damage to champions on his team, but that’s a small consolation. Werlyb needs to stop Steveing and probably start playing some more Maokai. Too boring? Here’s another option:

3. How about Shen? The world’s worst ninja is hot off some buffs and showed up in three games this week, earning two wins. SK Gaming’s Fredy demonstrated how well Shen can tank with even just the components of his Sunfire Cape. With his huge map mobility through both Stand United and Teleport, Shen is a solid candidate to complement siege comps with his split pushing. He’s relentless and hard to kill, but pretty useless if he falls behind in gold, so even though he’s one of my favorite champions and showed up well in the Wins column, I don’t expect to see him rise to the top of the tier lists.

4. Roccat made a big move, removing Woolite and replacing him with MrRallez. Woolite’s positioning was heavily criticized: he got caught on the frontlines far too often, earning the nickname “the melee ADC”. Replacing him should have immediately improved the team’s ability to position themselves in team fights, but I’m not sure the rest of Roccat got the memo. In their game against SK, the gold was very close for a long time, and Roccat was the team with Sivir, Gnar, and Alistar, which gave them plenty of tools to dictate where and when they would fight. Instead, Roccat allowed a team with close to zero hard engage to catch them in their own jungle, which led to an SK team fight win, a Baron, and eventually the game. This has been a consistent problem for Roccat, and Woolite doesn’t deserve to get scapegoated for it.

5. On the topic of AD Carries and positioning, there were a lot of comments about how aggressively Rekkles was positioning himself against the Copenhagen Wolves. Watch him go charging into the middle of the Copenhagen Wolves’ base as if he doesn’t afraid of anything. Why was he throwing himself headlong into the fray? Let’s make a list of the Wolves’ Crowd Control options for punishing his aggression: Dark Binding, Parallel Convergence, and… Oh wait, that’s it. There were literally two skills Rekkles had to look out for (unless you count Yordle Snap Trap, I guess?), and let’s not forget that Sivir has a spell shield.

6. The freedom Rekkles had to go wherever he pleased naturally extended to Febiven’s Viktor, too. In fact, the only threat Fnatic’s carries faced was somehow having Jayce poke land on them. There wasn’t much risk of that when Olaf and Alistar were ready to meat-shield it all, and even if Soren threaded the needle Huni could throw shields down to blunt the damage. The moment Fnatic had even a small gold lead, they were in full control of the game.

7. A quick thought on Caitlyn: some analysts I’ve talked to feel she could be an up-and-coming meta pick, and after thinking it over I’m inclined to agree. Caitlyn is amazing in a poke comp because she can add poke with her Q, set up zone control with her W, kite with her E, and kill tanks fairly effectively once she gets three items. On top of that, she’s a strong early tower pusher and a big-time lane bully. That helps with the big problem poke comps have, which is how to get the gold lead they need to start working properly. I’m definitely adding Caitlyn to my list of champions to watch for.

8. Did You Know: Kikis had 100% kill participation as Nidalee against Gambit, but even after that performance, his average kill participation is still only 72.1%, fourth among EU junglers.

9. Did You Know 2: Hjarnan has the most kills in the EU LCS, with 52, with Niels (50) and Rekkles (49) nipping at his heels. But Hjarnan’s team has the shortest average game length in the league, while Fnatic and Origen have the third and fifth longest, respectively.

10. Did You Know 3: Froggen has the highest average damage share in the league (34.9%), even though his average damage per minute is only sixth. (PePiiNeRO has the highest DPM at 665.)
11. Final thought: There’s a fairly big range in game pace among the EU teams so far. H2K is playing the most bloodthirsty, with an average of 0.85 combined kills per minute (CKPM), while Gambit are playing the pacifists at just 0.68 CKPM. But Gambit only has a 0.62 kills-to-deaths ratio, so credit for that slow pace probably goes more to their opponents than to them.