Normally I wouldn’t expect to have a season where I had a champion without a lost game. However, so far this season I am undefeated with Teemo.
Of all the champions I play I have never felt like Teemo was my strongest. However, he is my go-to champion when I’m headed up into top lane. I like the vision that he gets from his mushrooms. I like his passive. I like that you can build whatever you want on him and he does just fine. This game I decided to try a different build and see where it took me.
One of the strange things about my latest game was how my lane opponent acted. I picked Teemo because I felt like it would be a solid pick against Tryndamere. I was correct; he never even came to lane. He swapped Fizz for mid. I warded early because I’m a big believer in the ganking power of Zac. Zac still just jumped over the wall outside of my vision and, with the assistance of Fizz, killed me pretty quickly.
I’ve always viewed Fizz as one of those champions who is easier to bully in lane, but if they get ahead they can snowball and just make you pay. Now that Fizz had a kill up on me I figure he would play aggro and force me out of lane. I was darting back and forth, not daring to get last hits because at any moment this Fizz could just kill me. However, this Fizz was playing like we were in Diamond. Instead of just playing aggro and trying to snowball the lane he was just calmly letting me farm and minding his own business. If I didn’t shoot him, he didn’t stab me.
Now I have seen players play like this, and like just goes on and on. I remember a game where I was Mordekaiser against a Pantheon in top lane (that tells you how long ago it was) when I was able to walk PAST this Pantheon to last hit creeps and we would intentionally not harass or hit the other person. The game was insanely comical. However, if you are playing in solo queue and trying to climb and you get ahead, you should take full advantage and do what you can to keep that lead. I guess that’s just my opinion.
I managed just fine in my lane. I would get bored of pushing Fizz into his tower so I would wander down and shroom up in the enemy jungle and in mid lane. It was extremely effective because the deeper I got my mushrooms the better the chance was that I would see Zac, and not only coming to my lane, but going to gank mid as well.
Ultimately, I was a tiny furry creature on a large map. My impact in this game was extremely limited. I’ve considered running Teleport on Teemo because the ability to teleport to a mushroom seems extremely powerful at every stage of the game. However, instead of having that global presence I instead took Ignite so I can do better in trades with my lane opponent.
One of the memorable parts of this game was watching from top lane as four members of the enemy team shoved down mid and killed three of my team mates, leaving only Graves and myself in top lane. We came walking backwards up mid lane, moving towards the safety of our purple base, but the four members of the enemy team were standing between us and salvation. I started to hesitate. Could we 2v4 these guys? I definitely wasn’t big yet, but my Graves had a couple items completed. I didn’t know how much he had left in the tank as him and I had just killed Tryndamere.
The enemy team sees they have a numbers advantage and they have us trapped away from our base. The mistake they made was not committing to the fight all at once. They saw the low-hanging fruit of two easy kills and they each wanted to take full advantage of that. Graves killed them all. I popped Zac’s passive, but then let Graves get the last hit as I just laughed. This game was over.
Graves finished at a whopping 16-3, more kills than the enemy team. I was just along for the ride. It was funny to watch one man just pick a whole team apart. Now I’m one game into my qualifier and that much closer to Gold III.
