It’s the end of the year, and it’s time to look back on the last season of League of Legends and evaluate how well you did.
Mostly, you’ll see champions you flocked to as they rose and fell from the meta, like Ezreal, Varus, Sejuani, or Nautilus. You’ll look at the hundreds of games you may have played on these champions, trying to find your best chance at climbing that all-important ranked ladder.
But after so many champions played in so many different metas, did support Rek’Sai ever occur to you? Because it did to Shadarek, a Master-tier jungler and streamer, who decided to play that and nothing else on his RekˆSaà account this season.
That’s right, while you were busy following the meta, this guy was climbing all the way up to Diamond II playing something as off-the-wall as support Rek’Sai, and he probably climbed much higher than you. After all, just by making it into Diamond in the first place, he made it to the top two percent of all ranked players in North America, according to League stats site OP.gg. At his current rank in Diamond II, this account is in the top 0.3 percent.
Stings, doesn’t it?
Shadarek dumped countless hours and 158 total ranked games into playing one of the most off-meta picks you’ve probably ever heard of. When you think of the AD diver-slash-assassin Rek’Sai, you may think that the top lane or mid lane would be your first choice for breaking away from her normal role in the jungle. Not this player, though. To Shadarek, support Rek’Sai was clearly the right call.
We don’t judge him for playing such a weird pick—certainly not as much as the endless sea of teammates that probably flamed him for locking it in—we judge ourselves for not thinking of it first.
After all, we’ve been slaving away all year playing the best the meta has to offer, and this person is sitting in high Diamond with a 61 percent winrate on something totally ludicrous. Clearly, it doesn’t actually matter what champion you play as long as you’re good enough at the game, and that’s a hard truth to swallow.
Maybe it’s time for all of us to just turn in our Maokai, our Ornn, and our Xerath. It’s time to insta-lock Zyra jungle every game until you hit Challenger. Let’s make League a better place.
