Friday, March 22, 2013

Woot! Bronze II

Played two games last night and crushed in both to get my promotion to Bronze II easily. That puts me at 6 straight wins and 9 of the last 11. I was a bit disappointed to not get vaulted to Bronze I, especially since the second game consisted of me being the ban selector (indicating that my MMR was the highest on my team) but everyone on my team was Silver V or Bronze I/II. Seems a bit silly to me.

The first game, I played as Hecarim and had the mid Akali and top Fiora so happy that they were pledging to have my little horsey babies. It was just one of those games that felt like everything was going right. I made a couple mistakes by getting too aggressive at one point but overall just flat dismantled the enemy team. The highlight for me was when I ghosted through the top tower to chase down a fleeing Singed and then ran into a Jarvan jungler who I soloed from half health, picking up two kills and certainly causing the enemy team to go nuclear on each other. Fun game. The ending was especially funny. We were planting ward coverage in the river after the last team fight and Akali and Fiora were with me (with our support/adc close by). I went ahead and checked their blue buff to see if it was up and started it. Jarvan jumped across the wall into me and the rest of his team followed on. I clobbered Jarvan and Fiora got a quadra kill for the ace. All because we baited them into a stupid attack (at that point, I had Iceborn and Randuin's... so Jarvan was a non-threat to me anyways... but his team probably thought they were picking up a quick kill on the annoying horse... lol).

The second game was less dominating by me but, playing as Sona, I had some really clutch Crescendo's that locked the other team down hard. The best one was near the tower on bot early on. Cait and I were struggling a bit against an MF who had managed to get fed (partly by us and partly by bad Shaco ganks). Shaco said, "Sona, Ult" and I thought, good idea. So I flash ulted into MF just as she hit her own ult trying to get four of us (dumb luck). I locked down 3 of them and we proceeded to annihilate them under tower. They killed me but we got 3 kills and pushed down two towers giving us a huge pushed lane and a huge gold lead. Focusing the support is such a stupid idea in most situations. There's always this temptation to shoot at the person that is charging you but oftentimes, the more dangerous opponent is the girl with the giant rifle BEHIND the scary keyboard lady. It was a really good game but we were ahead in kills but behind in towers for much of the game until we got a bit geared up. I'm also learning to love the power of Aegis of the Legion + Locket of the Iron Solari. These two items make your team ridiculously more resilient in team fights.

One other thing about the second game that was interesting was that it was a chance to fully implement my banning strategy. In most drafts, Malphite/Shen/Blitzcrank/Amumu get banned out of sheer momentum. What I've started doing is "forcing" one of them if I have first pick. So I'll ban something like Elise first and if they ban one of the "power 4" then I'll just skip banning the really good champs (instead banning Darius and Miss Fortune). This guarantees that I'll get one of the power 4 (all of which I can play... though I'm not great at Shen). Worst case scenario, they figure out what I'm doing and leave a 2nd one open so that we both get one. But even then, I'll get to choose first so that's okay too.

So in the second game last night, I forced Malphite and they got Shen. But the only person who knew how to play Shen played him as a jungler and that's not exactly optimal (he has horrendously slow clear times). It's a strategy more people should employ. On a side note, the counter strategy for the purple team is to ALSO not ban a power 4 champ. This forces the blue team to have to ban a power 4 or risk giving the purple team 2 of them.

Having said all that, this is a low league strategy. These champions are powerful not because they're just inherently OP but because they're very good against less skilled people (and, conversely, relatively easy for low skilled players to play).

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