Overall Look at the Impact Curse Academy May Have

Why North America Needs to be Afraid of Curse Academy.

This is a tidbit of the team Curse Academy and their strengths. This is in no way guaranteeing anything from the team and is no way, shape, or form degrading every other team. This is kind of like that ticket you might’ve gotten this morning for your meter running out when you got to the car. I’m using more of analogies and speculations along with possibilities to describe Curse Academy because it’s just easier then doing 5 million paragraphs.

Top Lane: Hauntzer

Although this name may not ring any bells or whistles it is surely a hot topic. The first thing is first and that is background gameplay of mid lane. The ever evolving circle of the solo lanes is different than each other. Mid is a way more explosive of a more fists up top lane. This brings questions of how well the 1v1 goes for him? For a long time we didn’t know TSM’s Dyrus would solo so many people during the playoffs. Ow! A great thing that Hauntzer has for him is his pick and ban phase is that he knows how to play the Maokai vs Lissandra match-up. A lot of people that play top lane play one of three champions ; Maokai, Lissandra, and Rumble. The thing Hauntzer has for him in this is that he can pick these suprise mid laners and bring up maybe a top lane Leblanc for all we know. Problems with a lot of mid laners who deviate to other roles in League of Legends is that they get stuck in that mentality of a mid laner. Another problem is that the mid lane mentality only sets you up for failure in the jungle and the duo lane. Hauntzer is definitely a wildcard to a lot of other top laners as he loves to do a lane swap in poke lane match ups to trade the dragon with top side vision control.

Jungle: Saintvicious

Get your laughs out right now. The Smite ‘God’ of our generation is still within our ranks. Out of due respect for the God, he is a great benefactor in Curse Academy’s success. The infamous jungler is showing his marbles with his big gap of skill from when he last played in the Challenger Scene before going into the LCS to now. While I was looking for the good of Saintvicious I found his inconsistency oddly enough brilliant. With Saintvicious being a legendary player in the scene it takes a lot of the pressure off of Hauntzer, Keane, and Bunnyfufu who may think too much pressure will make them break. Although sometimes he looks like that Bronze 5 guy that plays champs without ‘skill’, his knowledge of the overall games surpasses a large amount of these teams with new players. Curse Academy has players that have been playing together forever and some of these other teams are having players and lanes where they can’t even remember if that’s an I or the number 1 in someone’s name. I’m generally proud of what Saintvicious is doing with his new Golden Age in the jungle. In all honesty, the Season 5 jungle isn’t about the top mechanical skill junglers anymore. It’s more about players that can use their champ in the jungle to do find creative ways to make pressure. This can be from using constant gank pressure in solo lanes to counter jungling and applying vision control with solo lane pressure all game.

Mid Lane: Keane

Keane where do we begin with you? Honestly, change your name to something to like ‘WILDCARD’ because that’s what you are. If I had a deck of cards you’d be the joker because you may be the most useful useless card or the most useless useful card. This is towards Keane’s amazing champion picks but maybe a lackluster execution on some. When Keane plays an AD champ all the people’s hands go up but when he plays against an unfavorable matchup they may sometimes go down. Keane is a solo queue player at heart, like a lot of the people on Curse Academy, and when a solo queue player goes against an unfavorable matchup…All hell breaks loose. Keane is not a tilting player by any means, he is a jet flying over the mountains. One incorrect mistake will send him dying. It’s most likely pressure and nerves but that’s ‘showbiz’ as they might say as a direct analogy to esports. Another thing is that we’re still in the dark on whether or not his English that good. We are assuming it is due to him officially being on Curse Academy since April of 2014. Keane reminds of me of Madlife. You realise that he will be good at all times but sometimes you wonder about the strains he goes to come back into the game.

Bot Lane: Bunnyfufu and Cop

I feel this bot lane needs to be bunched up into the same paragraph because they are so drastically seasoned and similar. Bunnyfufu is hands down one of the best supports in North America on a mechanical level. Bunnyfufu’s Thresh is on a level where sometimes even supports that are better than him need to take notes. Bunnyfufu is able to manipulate your mind in such a way that it causes you to forget what you are actually dodging when he winds up his Death Sentence. Sometimes I get mad at myself when he predicts your juke from the hook like Michael Phelps swims the lane to a public pool. Despite his mechanical skill he gets caught a large amount of the time which may be hindering his overall skill. But I feel something like this needs to be addressed on by the team, not the individual. Everything is much easier when you know for a fact that there’s a problem. Cop has one of the widest AD Carry champion pools I’ve seen in a long time. The only champion we really haven’t seen Cop play is Vayne, which is more of a specialty player pick for people who like to dominate the late game rather than the laning phase. With Bunnyfufu’s great lanterns and hooks in during their games together, I would love to watch every single one of their games in the NA LCS.

Overall Impression

The line-up doesn’t sound very scary to some but it shivers me timbers when I look at their past games and experiences as a team. For crying out loud they almost one in a series against CLG by winning the first 2 games in a row. Although some of their mechanical skill, mentality, or just plain outright antics don’t seem very threatening. They are quite a force to be reckoned with if you add in other factors.