We recently had a chance to play Ranked Fives, which was a nice change of pace because it had been awhile since we had all five members of our Ranked team online. I’m only going to give a short synopsis of each one because most of them were painful.
The first game I’ll write about is the game that got us to our highest ranked elo ever. I really don’t know if this is the highest we’ve ever been, but it’s the highest we’ve been in a long while. This game was really funny because the enemy team decided to run a five-man gank squad to bot lane at level one. I think they got first blood out of it, but we got something in return:
This is a picture of the game 6:36 in. You’ll notice that the enemy mid Katarina player had ZERO CS. I had recalled and bought a Tear of the Goddess! I was back to standing in lane! She didn’t try for a single creep! Enjoy your first blood, because it’s the only highlight you’ll get this game.
Our next game was just us being silly. For some reason Jack said that I should play Singed top. I am hypothetically experienced with Singed, but I haven’t played him in so long there is no way I could say I’m practiced or current with him. I should have just said no! Instead, I went up against Olaf, who actually got whooped by me. The enemy team’s Lee Sin was actually a really good player, and he caught me behind Olaf’s turret a couple of times. As I would try to escape he would reduce my health to zero, which caused problems in top lane.
Other than my blunders in top lane, bot decided to swap roles, which didn’t help our cause, and Jack lost to Anivia mid who didn’t have Ignite. Not a pretty game for SM!
For our next game we tried to pull in the reins and try a proven strategy called “Protect the Kog”. Here’s how it works: my team plays champs that can keep Kog’Maw alive and peel for Kog. The best options are Taric, Lulu, Soraka, and Nunu. Instead, my team picked those roles, but refused to play them. We probably wasted 22 minutes of our lives in this game, but it’s hard to know beforehand if no one is going to follow the game plan.
After dropping that much elo we needed a win. I was complaining in chat to Adobe’s team captain, Tai Feng and he responded with “Just play LeBlanc.” Well, that’s a grand idea. I’ve only had one experience where I broke 20 kills with LeBlanc and still managed to lose, but I knew that game was a fluke and it probably wouldn’t happen again. Now, all I needed to do was break 20 kills. At 19:23 in this game I had 508 Ability Power. I was so obnoxiously strong in this game that it was shocking that the enemy team didn’t surrender at 20. I can understand if the enemy team LeBlanc has 10 kills and you think “if we can just shut her down we can win”, but this was 22 kills. I had 20 stacks on my Soul Stealer. Everyone on my team had a 2:1 KD, except for me, I was 7:1. You lost. Surrender. Heck, even if you think you can pull it back and win, surrender anyway! Do that LeBlanc performance a favor and compliment her with a surrender vote. Otherwise, it’s your Ranked KDA on the line.
Once again people didn’t know how to play roles. I ended up face-tanking mid tower in a dedicated poke comp. This game was thoroughly embarrassing. I felt like I was playing in 900 elo. The enemy team didn’t have a jungler, yet controlled all the buffs and dragons. They ran double ADC, and still managed to make it work. They managed to out-poke our team with Varus and Cho alone. I think Fiddle was the flaw to this game. His ultimate is too commit-based because of his ultimate and doesn’t have any effective poke. I think if we would have had Steve on Mundo, Jack on Cait, and Jeff on Lux we would have been in a much better situation. The enemy Cho did add me after this game and complimented me on how well I did laning against him. What I didn’t realize was that Cho was farming wolves and wraiths between waves to get himself a CS advantage. Then he lost to me in CS even though his team won. He was really impressed by that.
At this point Ranked queues broke. Thus ends this article due to games being over.