Poke Comp – League of Stories

AHGL: Zenimax

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There was a lot of hype leading into this game. People were all waiting for our AHGL match against Zenimax. We had managed to go undefeated, and they had accomplished the same feat until the previous week when they fell to Twitch. This was going to be the clash of the titans, and we were super excited to have such fierce competition in the league.

The first game started with some interesting bans. They targeted Lux, which made sense because we use her a lot. They banned out LeBlanc which does make perfect sense when you look at my ranked stats. The last ban was targeted at Senor Choppes with a Jayce ban. I could see the logic in all of these bans as we normally play a very poke-based comp and try to wear a team down with the poke from Lux and Jayce, and they didn’t want to experiment with LeBlanc’s trickery.

We decided to run double globals. I still wish we would have picked up Pantheon for that triple threat, but with Riven in top lane we knew that we would win that lane for free. I picked up Twisted Fate and Czarni jungled Shen. This gave us the ability to pressure their team regardless of where they were on the map. However, Unit02 got to pick his comfort pick of Maokai, and GoTWooD got to try to counter pick Twisted Fate with Talon. I’m not sure that Talon is a counter to Twisted Fate. Ultimately, I only have one ability that I can’t cast when silenced, and before Talon pounces on me I can lock a gold card anyway. Plus, my ultimate reveals him when he tries to stealth using his own, and his movement speed boost is completed wasted by the fact that I can teleport to his location after he uses his ultimate. Ultimately, Talon was probably a bad pick, but it just allowed him to be aggressive early.

All three games had Maokai camping mid early game. GoTWooD basically got free lane pressure in every game because of his dedicated jungler working to shut me down. It definitely worked early in this first game. I tried to apply pressure bot, but my assists weren’t making my 0-2 score look any better.

We started to fall behind in this first game, but just as we were making our comeback nubehound’s computer died. Complete shut down. When he tried to boot he was greeted with a number of errors telling him that he couldn’t boot back up. We were in a bit of a panic. I called nubehound and he asked “Do you have a computer I could play on?” Sadly, I didn’t. I didn’t have League installed on another machine. However, after another restart his computer booted normally and we went on our merry way. It felt like we were starting a second game, because we had waited more than 13 minutes for him to get back online.

As soon as we unpaused Zenimax disappeared from their grouping in the mid lane. I saw them heading towards our blue. Nubehound must have seen it too, because he walked over there to see what they were up to. His death pushed the score to 7-6, with us ahead by just one kill.

Then the game was over. We started winning some pivotal team fights, and we never looked back. We literally didn’t die after that point. We really got to flex our team work muscles. I did have some fun plays and got to do the Twisted Fate split push thing. Once Twisted Fate gets to that tipping point where his abilities clear out a full creep wave he gets very entertaining to try to play against. I actually had Maokai, Darius, and Talon chasing me to stop me from split-pushing, but while they chased me down bot lane my team took middle inhibitor and then I chased Darius down to hear the announcer yell “Legendary!” Oh how I love that sound.

The second game never happened. Katarina got to spiral out of control and pick up kill after kill. It got to the point that we should have just surrendered. We had a few ways to take Katarina out of her ultimate, but Katarina isn’t built around that ultimate anymore. She can lane with just health potions, and she never has to leave lane and Xerath has no kill potential against her because of her Shun Po. Again, GoTWooD got a free counter pick against me after they banned out LeBlanc and Twisted Fate this game.

This game was a total flop. We decided to go poke comp because we had the Jayce and Elise picks both up. I picked a super harassing mid with great poke and then our ADC was Caitlyn, so we had good poke from our AD with good disengage with her traps. For support we probably needed another way to put pressure on the enemy team, like a Zyra, Morgana, Blitz, Thresh, or any other champion that has a long skill-shot ability. Instead, we got Taric, a melee, aura-based champion. It just didn’t fit the play style of poke.

However, Zenimax had the chance to counter pick our poke with WuKong and Katarina anyway. It didn’t look like a game we could win, because we just wouldn’t have the tools to deal with their dunk engage.

This leads us into the third and final game of our best of three series!

Going into the third game we knew the pressure was on. We had to win to keep our undefeated streak alive. For the third game we again saw LeBlanc, Twisted Fate, and Lux bans. They really didn’t want to have any fun with my mid champs! Also, for the third game in a row I let GoTWooD counter pick me. When he picked Orianna I breathed the largest sigh of relief. I don’t know where people are getting that counter pick information, but this wasn’t the first Orianna to get picked against my Malz. Oh and I love the match up.

Of course, Maokai camped mid again. I actually walked over to ward the bushes at level three and thought better of it, so I walked around and warded over the wall. Of course, Mao was standing right there. He eventually left, and just walked around to the other side of mid. That’s when Czarni got sandwiched between Maokai and Orianna and gave up First Blood and gave Orianna Red Buff. Oh fun! This was just the tip of the ice berg for where this game was going. We started spiraling down hill fast.

This is where my lane opponent was when the game was looking most grim. That’s a 6-0 kill stealing Orianna ruining my fun in mid lane. I guess GoTWooD wanted a repeat of the previous game, but we weren’t going to let that happen. It was at this point that we knew we needed to rally together and start putting pressure down on the map to get the global gold lead back in our favor.

We grouped in top lane and started to fight back. Very quickly we got ahead and started flexing our muscles in team fights. The next time we forced a Dragon fight we went into the battle up, 8-13, and left at 8-18. The game didn’t get much closer than that, as we finished 32-10, but in the final moments of the game Choppes called out “SNIPE BLITZA!” which was a request that Caitlyn more than obliged to fulfill. Czarni dodged the bullet to make sure that Blitzcrank would die to the Caitlyn ultimate. It was so funny to watch. It was a humorous ending to a true show of teamwork and rallying under pressure.

Great games, Zenimax!

Amazonian Scrim

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I want to apologize for piquing your interest and then dropping the topic on these Amazon scrims. I haven’t had a chance to play League lately, and so a lot of my drive was just absent.

I also apologize for the brief explanation of this first game. I don’t want to call people out because normally this blog only does that to strangers, but we had a couple key misplays early that cost us too heavily in the rest of the game. Amazon applied a lot of early pressure with the Hecarim pick, and it did work. We made sure they weren’t going to get that pick again. Also, I felt like Thresh was a key factor in their success, so we made sure to take that away from them.

Going into game two we told ourselves that we would run poke. In Champion Select we actually baited the Vi pick. We left it up so that the enemy team could pick it. I felt like we got to counter pick ever role except for the ADC role. I picked Kog’Maw with first pick, and then let Amazon pick two champs. They picked up Miss Fortune and Vi. We had left Vi up, while banning out Amumu and Hecarim, so we assumed Vi would be their strongest jungle pick. We immediately countered with Morgana, who they assumed would go mid. Morgana does exceptionally well in our poke comp because of the disengage powers of her ultimate, snare, and spell shield. Also, she is the PERFECT counter to Vi because she nullifies Vi’s ultimate, giving her no ability to scale into the late game. It basically changes Vi’s ultimate so now she Blitz hooks herself into the middle of our team and doesn’t get to CC anyone.

Laning phase opened strong for Morgana and myself because we had such an early Black Shield. I forgot to mention that it blocks all of Leona’s damage. It blocks her stuns, her extra passive damage, everything. It completely shuts down a support Leona in lane. It got to the point that Leona would go to engage on me, and without any of the CC from her abilities I would walk right through her towards Miss Fortune and MF would be forced to run away, leaving a poor Leona to die for her.

Our mid game had a few hiccups, but was otherwise flawless. We grouped and started taking towers and the enemy team could do nothing but watch. To think that we destroyed their Nexus at 24 minutes is really an amazing feat. Also, feeding your ADC by taking free towers and picking up Dragons is such a bonus. With the amount of global gold we had it was like everyone on our team was fed. I can see why most teams will take a four minute tower in a side lane now. It really made us all so big.

I felt really privileged this game to be the recipient of most of the spell shields and a focus for the Kayle ultimate. I felt like we were playing a real “protect the Kog” strat when really we just wanted ranged poke. It also was SUPER helpful that we had five ranged champs and ~~two~~ three melees!

It had been awhile since I had acquired double the gold of the enemy ADC, but it felt wonderful to have it happen in this game. At the end of the game MF went to trade autos with me while he was standing between her two Nexus turrets. After two autos from me she Flashed back towards her fountain, but my third auto was already in the air and finished her off. I was only 12-4 at that point, I had to pick up two more kills on the fountain itself.

This last game was for all the marbles. I was a bit nervous as they had bested us in the first game. We got pretty far behind in this third match up which really sucked as a Tristana player because Akali with a Kayle Intervention is enough to kill me. Luckily, while Akali was chasing me in the back of the team fight, Riven and Ryze were doing work on the rest of the enemy team.

Ryze got real big this game. Close to the end of the game Iggie said “I just need a bit more gold for my Arch Angel’s staff” and I interjected and told him that Ryze doesn’t get that anymore, he only needs Manamune to upgrade to Muramana. Iggie didn’t fight it or question it, he just said, “Ok.” With that Muramana his damage was literally almost doubled. He started flipping out over how strong he had become after that one item. It was a game changer. He picked up big team fight triple kills, which really helped us push this game over to our favor.

We were down close to 5k gold, but brought it back to tie the kills at 26 to 26. From there we kept our late-game pressure as high as possible. Our whole team had immense late-game potential, with Ryze scaling as long as mana items exist, Tristana just gets longer range, one Blitz hook ends the game, Riven buying second lives, and Hecarim tipping the “unkillable” scale, we were a mean looking team to have to deal with.

AHGL: Poking Down Zappos

Support Ryze vs Poke Comp

AHGL vs Curse

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This game started with one of the funnest level one fights I had ever seen. We could see Karthus checking the river bushes just north of Dragon, so I missed Sona walking out to scout the river. Dan started freaking out and I realized why. We were a team full of crowd control and we just were given a tasty treat. All I have to do is land this snare and we’ll have ourselves a tasty kill! Oops. I missed a target that didn’t know I was aiming for her. Sadly, that wasn’t my worst play of the game.

We ended up snaring a number of members of the enemy team, but never could commit hard enough to get the elusive First Blood! We wandered back to lane. Laning phase was rather calm as can be expected from a game against an unknown enemy team. Well, calm almost everywhere. Top was busy building his lead. Elise started to snowball out of control against Vlad. It got to the point that Karthus and Vladimir actually traded lanes so Vlad could avoid the Elise! This is probably why poor Karthus had so many deaths. He was really willing to sacrifice for his team.

Let me put into perspective for you how far ahead Elise was. We caught the enemy Sona when we were trying to get Dragon. A couple pokes and my snare dropped her to about half health. Then she died. Just like that. One second she was there at half health. The next second the call-out for her death was rolling up the side of the screen. Elise had taken her from half health to completely dead in one shot.

After Dragon we sieged mid lane again. We had four ranged champions who were able to hit the tower while throwing out extremely long-ranged poke. We burnt through the tier-two turret and kept the pressure up. This is the part of the game when the enemy’s resolve begins to fail. It’s too much to stand under your turret and dodge five different skill-shot Q abilities. A team can only stand so much. Poor Curse threw in the towel at 24 minutes, but not before our Caitlyn was legendary.