I was queuing with Obscene Tangerin and I ran into someone else from my friend’s list on our team. Obscene was blown away. He said that has never happened to him. I just let him know that it’s happened to me multiple times in the past. I told him that most of the people on my friend’s list are people who were around the same elo as I was so it makes sense for me to get matched up with them in games.
The person I ran into was scottnasty, who I used to queue with back in Season Two. However, I stopped queuing with him and I dropped to ~1550 and he went up to ~2100. Five of his top seven most-played champions in Season Two were supports, which is a great testament to his level of team play. Also, he was in queue with a sexy chick, or SexyChickqT, who he described as his brother. We got a Skype call going and had four of our five team members on Skype in a blind pick Normal! What an advantage! Now I’m sure we’re going to do well.
Obscene Tangerin decided to play Sivir, but I don’t remember why. I have nothing against Sivir, she was just the best counter for the lane we were going up against, so that was another spot of luck in our already lucky game. Jarvan and Leona in bot lane. It’s the dumbest parlor trick I’ve ever heard of. It’s a kill lane with two ridiculously tanky champs that can’t be harassed out of lane. Super frustrating! I could throw hundreds of bananas, zero effect. It was not a good time in bot lane.
However, we need to address the elephant in the room. Master Yi was the ONLY person on our team who wasn’t in our Skype call. So what did he build? Did he play a traditional AD Yi to wait for the end game and split-push potential? Nope. Did he go the slightly accepted method of AP Yi that dominates lane and can get some slick kills later in the game? Nope. Did he go on-hit Yi which has never been done by anyone ever? Yup. Did he also build a Void Staff? Uh huh. Let’s move through his items one at a time so that my brain has time to puke this out without exploding.
First item: Berserker’s Greaves. This is a VERY traditional item on AD Master Yi, at least until he gets his third Phantom Dancer and sells his boots.
Second item: Malady. This is a fairly standard item in on-hit builds because it lets the magic damage done by the items do more damage. It makes sense. For on-hit.
Third item: Madred’s Bloodrazers. Again, this item was very popular back in the day of on-hit Teemo builds. However, it’s very expensive and gets negated easily due to magic resist, unless someone buys a…
Fourth item: Void Staff. Yup, he did it. In the interest of having the highest amount of magic resist shred possible he built a Void Staff AND Malady. This guy is serious about his magic pen.
Fifth item: Bloodthirster. We made a build almost entirely based around magic damage and then he build a life steal and attack damage item. Brilliant. Why not?
The reason I had to break these items down was because of Yi’s insane number of kills. I don’t know if this guy is just a Master Yi master, or if he just wanted to try something so people would get mad at him, but the enemy team was chanting “YI MVP!” in all-chat when he managed a Quadra kill while fighting 1v4. His Alpha Strike did surprising damage with that much magic pen, and his autos definitely hurt. Meanwhile, his meditiate still gave him a 4.0 AP ratio (which is unrivaled in the League). He was a glass cannon of on-hit, magical, and physical damage. You couldn’t build magic resist to counter him and armor would do very little for you. Our random fifth actually turned out to be one of the luckiest picks for our team!
As a side note, that Lee Sin saved us in bot lane. Once he showed up and shut down Jarvan and Leona to put him on a rampage we were able to stabilize in the lane, force Leona or Jarvan to blow ult and then turn and fight and win. Good times in the solo queue!
