#upsl 2015

Brought to you by Benjamin Jiang

Picks/bans

So going into this, I didn’t really know who on their team was going where. I was relatively sure aznsexy was going top just from talking to him. Generally speaking, he plays like jungle, ad, and top. His top champ pool is pretty much just Renekton though. Honestly, I was pretty okay with just giving him that strong early game pick because I was afraid if I banned it out he was going to go jungle and just rail the rest of my team. 

I started out by banning two supports that do well vs our support’s champ pool. I wanted to get Rod of Ages onto his comfort picks (Zyra/Leona) and a good matchup. Kaizen Winzor’s Nami is pretty good and I think they played Naut last game. Naut is just a stupid support champ in general so yeah, away they go. They banned Swain and Fizz. The important part about this is that we had first pick and Ryze/Hec were both still available. By banning Fizz, they were going to guarantee our team at least one power pick. I figured I was okay playing either of those into aznsexy’s Renekton. I banned Reksai last to take that away from aznsexy potentially and to minimize the amount of overall game impact the enemy jungler could have. Again, I have much more faith in our lanes to win in straight matchups, but because we were playing with a jungle sub, it’s not like I was expecting that much jungler pressure from our side. 

They take away Ryze, I first pick Hec. At this point I assume aznsexy is going to play Renekton and they’re going to combo that early game strength with a strong early game jungler and just camp the fk out of me, because that’s what people do smh. That means Gragas. Unfortunately, I can’t do much about that because our sub doesn’t play Gragas. Whatever, the extra jungle pressure on me means that our bot lane is pretty much free to shove and win trades because it’s really hard to roam on Shrines and Hec has a stronger roam than Renekton. 

Instead, they grab Sivir and Sej. Both are still pretty strong I think, nothing wrong with that. We’re pretty comfortable taking Zyra and Lucian for bot. I think the problem starts when they take Leona and Renekton. I don’t think Renekton is a super great champ, but I see their logic. They take Sivir and grab 3 tanky front line champs, it’s a super simple idea that we’ve run all the time in ranked 5s. The problem is that Leona and Sivir have almost no lane synergy and Leona loses lane to Zyra really hard. This is going to become very obvious when they start getting bopped in lane.

We grab Amumu and Ahri. It’s not like we have a ton of synergy in our team comp. We’re like oddly immobile and mobile at the same time with Hec/Luc/Ahri vs Zyra/Amumu. Like, there are 3 big AoE ults and 2 champs that just run around the edge of fights. Then they last pick Leblanc which I think is a huge mistake cuz LB kinda sucks now. 

Game

Anyways, game starts. Early on our bot lane pushes in and gets the advantage from the early lvl 2. That’s huge because Sivir should never really be pushed in on, but because of how much Leona sucks vs Zyra/lvl 1, we’re able to. Renek is slightly outtrading me, I have more pots but he does much more damage and I need to push to trade. Sej swings top at 3 before she has red, but she’s spotted and I just dip. Amumu goes for the invade and I think if our jungler was slightly better, he would have been able to kill Sej at red/steal it but whatever. I greed pretty hard and Sej gets a kill on me for pushing too far. Meh. Maybe I should have taken ghost or something, it’s not like I can take Renek in lane even with ignite. On the bright side, our bot is crushing lane and freezing/trading to deny farm. Mumu provides backup on an early dive because we know Sej is on top side and we trade Sivir for our Zyra. It’s important to note that Zyra only died because she failed flash, and Leona got the solo kill on Zyra while Lucian got the kill on Sivir. When they come back to lane, Lucian has BFS to Sivir’s pickaxe and is able to bully even harder. 

In mid lane, unicornfurys is kind of keeping up in cs, but it’s at the cost of a lot of lost pressure. He’s being consistently pushed into tower and is staying and farming with very low hp/mana. That’s probably a mistake, he needs to just go b if he wants any pressure in lane. Because of the lack of pressure, he isn’t able to respond to bot lane’s constant pushing/diving. 

Another really awkward mistake happens at the first Sejuani gank down bot. It just seems pretty poorly coordinated. Sivir doesn’t have ult yet and they don’t stick on a single target. Depp actually gets a bit too low and they don’t anticipate Lord Arbiter and Rod of Ages turning the gank. Leona completely whiffs ult because she expected them to keep running and because of that Lord Arbiter picks up another kill. Dude is pretty big now.

So at the second spawning of our blue, Amumu accidentally takes blue from Shrines. He then tries to gank top lane. It isn’t warded, but he misses his bandage toss. I want to disengage after that, but he flash ults onto Renekton. In retrospect, I should have just fully committed to the fight as well. I didn’t use ignite early enough to cut Renekton’s Q heal which was huge. I also kind of wimped out when Sej showed up. I used my ult to dodge her ult, but I didn’t go in the right direction and we get wiped for 2 kills up top. 

I think I teleport up top and aznsexy uses that chance to teleport bot. It’s in the middle of a fight and Sivir and Leona are both low, but aznsexy has double buffs. There’s another instance of poor communication where aznsexy thinks that Sivir and Leona can finish Lucian without his help and he goes for Zyra. They don’t expect Lucian to dash forward at the low health bot lane and get both of them. Renekton turns and eventually does get both of them, but it’s 2 for 2 instead of 2 for 0. Also, all the gold is on Renekton whereas all our gold is on Lucian. 

They go for dragon and it becomes really important that Ahri has no blue because she’s unable to really harass them off of it. Amumu tries to steal but barely misses it. He goes down, but then they just hang around mid with low health instead of going b. I take top tower and start pushing to rotate mid. Bot lane catches depp and we use that to put a lot of damage onto mid tower. They get pretty greedy here and hang around mid tower even though it has like 2 hits left on it. They overcommit a bit onto Shrines and then I just run in from behind and take down the tower before they can really group to react. I honestly thought one hit would be enough to drop it but it takes 2 shots which makes the fight a big uglier than would have otherwise been necessary. We get aznsexy’s killing spree onto Lucian and after that Lord Arbiter’s godlike positioning lets us push hard in almost all situations.

Like, at their tier 2 mid tower, we’re completely comfortable just letting Lord Arbiter chip it down with Lucian passive because we have faith in him avoiding any engages. We mess up a fight where Amumu overcommits, but you can see the difference in teamfighting when depp just goes in instead of trying to pick off Amumu. He gets a pretty good ult off, but Leona doesn’t time her ult right with depp’s ult and Leblanc isn’t doing much in the backline. It’s very easy for us to trade Amumu for Sejuani even though we messed up the engage and once major ults are on cd, ADCs become much stronger and we just had the better adc. 

TL;DR

This leads to a lot of action for the next couple of minutes, including a great counter-gank down bot from precipic leading to the death of depp and call for dragon. However, unicornfury’s aggressive actions actually turns the overall exchange into a 2 for 1 in favor of Dongsquad as well as stall the dragon.

The CS lead on sRaper, as well as the couple of kills picked up in prior exchanges, give him the item lead to tower dive MrPhenomenon under tower, giving him enough gold to complete his tri-force and pick-up a Spectre’s Cowl as well as take the top-outer turret at 17 minutes. 

Once this happens, sRaper is able to solo kill MrPhenomenon over and over, including forcing MrPhenomenon to waste his TP as he tries to escape the ever aggressive irelia.

An aggressive dragon call from Dongsquad goes poorly, leading to 2 kills and a free dragon for $152 from a pincer attack and poor positioning.

This is perhaps the biggest turning point in the game as $152 now has complete control of the lead and is able to out-rotate dongsquad, getting free turrets and maintaining a vision lead. A smart push from Dongsquad goes wrong as a very good hook from BearsDrinkVodka pulls in a very behind Maokai leading to a 5 for 1 as well as a baron for $152.

Dongsquad are able to make the occasional pick on $152 in the jungle, but the fed Irelia is able to apply just so much pressure, it takes two people just to push her off the inhibitor. With the support of a TP from Karthus, sRaper and hugenoodlebrain are eventually able to take an inhibitor while the rest of their team pushes in bot and takes down another inhibitor turret. After taking down more inhibitors and more turrets, the overwhelming swarm from the Red super minions and the growing gold lead crumbles Blue’s defenses leading to a victory for $152 in week 1.

Misc

Over aggression from Irelia almost allows MrPhenomenon to kill her, but a great Q onto a minion allows her to level up to 6 gaining the smallest amount of HP necessary to survive.

depp doesn’t check an obvious spot for a pink ward and walks straight into a trap, falling to Irelia, who is able to pick up a fresh blue buff.

An excellent hook on aznsexy by BearsDrinkVodka into the bot-outer turret is able to bring Graves down to 375 health allowing the Karthus to do what he does best : press R for a free kill.

You gotta ward the map. A lack of vision in the jungle leads to Sivir getting picked off almost instantly (but an ever pushing Irelia gets a free turret top lane as well as half of the inhibitor turret’s HP).

Conclusion

Very good showing from $152. sRaper was a monster this game and hugenoodlebrain showing why pressing R on Karthus can be a scary thing. In addition, some great counter-ganks from precipic allow for huge advantages overall.

Unicornfurys and his aggressiveness keep Dongsquad fairly even with $152 for the first half of the game. Some aggressive counter-jungling from Depp takes away a decent chunk of experience from Precipic, but overall, I would’ve liked to either see him help MrPhenomenon top side more often to help deal with the extremely aggressive Irelia.

Finally, ward the map teams. Just overall very poor vision across the map, with at most 6 wards placed on the map at a single time. People are constantly getting caught out in the jungle.

Brought to you by Jeffrey Shih

Picks and Bans

MrPhenomenon (Gold 5)         —     (Plat 5) sRaper [subbing for iBisu]

depp (Gold 3)                               —     (Silver 4) precipic

unicornfurys (Gold 5)              —     (Plat 2) hugenoodlebrain

aznsexy (Plat 1)                     —     (Gold 1) MVP Tom Brady

KaizenWinzor (Unranked)          —     (Bronze 1) BearsDrinkVodka

Bans

Veigar                LeBlanc

Malzahar             Rumble

Annie                RekSai (?)

Ban Analysis (excluding the Reksai ban because both teams don’t really remember what the last ban was):

From Dongsquad, the bans were clearly targeted towards only hugenoodlebrain, who is a huge malzahar player and who was also spamming a ton of veigar games in solo queue, as well as MVP Tom Brady, who many may remember getting the Annie pentakill in UPSL 2014. Pretty smart bans considering no one would want to face the annie terror nor would they want to face off against some of hugenoodlebrain’s comfort picks. However, they do miss the crucial ban, his Karthus, which is one of hugenoodlebrain’s most played champions of all time.

Game Analysis

The first half of the game is fairly slow-paced. Not too much happens across the map except for some action that occurs at the 3 minute mark. An excellent early ward by unicornfurys allows Blue side turn around a 3-minute gank from the Sejuani. 

An excellent charm from unicornfurys + flash-body slam from depp allows the Ahri to live as well as walk away with first-blood and a blue-buff.

However, as the game continues , there’s a fairly even split in terms of leads in CS across each lane. From the very beginning, sRaper is able to gain huge lead on MrPhenomenon, consistently maining double the cs. Down bot, aznsexy is able to apply a lot of pressure with KaizenWinzor on MVP Tom Brady and maintain about a 15 cs lead for most of the laning phase. 

Once the game hits the 10 minute mark, things really kick off. A good gank from Depp brings Irelia down to less than 50hp. However, through a combination of things (a great flash + glacial prison from the Sejuani and a Karthus ult) allows the Irelia to walk away and depp falls. 

Things don’t stop as unicornfurys lands a fantastic charm on Karthus leading to a solo kill, but the TP from Irelia allows her to clean off the low-health Ahri. 

While all of this is happening, bot lane gets into their own skirmish, with sivir barely managing to get away and a low-HP graves getting a kill on the Blitzcrank. A smart roam bot from sRaper however leads to a tower-dive and another kill for the Irelia.

Things go insane as everyone is now just funneling bot. Maokai TP’s in, Karthus TP’s in. Finally the Karthus and Irelia go down to the Ahri and Gragas.

Brought to you by the Penn League Club Secretary Benjamin Jiang aka “Evangelion”. For more analysis, please follow us on this tumblr page, our facebook page, or our Github website (under construction).

The Commentary is structured by team (6 total). For your benefit, the roster page is linked here.

Michael Kwok (Pangerino):

Pangerino pretty much only plays ADC. He went in early on possibly the strongest soloq jungler available. TheLastPanda is a hyper aggressive jungler who has high carry potential with fking full damage Lee Sin and J4. From what I’ve seen, he has really strong early game pressure and counterganks. If he gets out of control, he can just backpack his team by himself. I’m not sure if that really flies in competitive play, but then again UPSL is pretty much soloq with Skype. He also plays a very playmaking support and has displayed insane mechanics on Thresh in the past. Then he got Richy5555 which is possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. Pangerino and Richy5555 have a pretty tenuous relationship from their IvyLoL days when Richy5555 was forced to support him and fking hated it. It’s important to note that Richy5555’s second best role is probably support and even if he hates doing it, Pangerino and Richy5555 is probably the strongest bot lane in this tournament. Richy5555’s laning skill in bot lane is probably second to only Shrines. I’ve personally seen him backpack shit-tier adcs *cough*gonegirl*cough* against high diamond teams in lane and as much as IvyLoL likes to shit on Pangerino for not having carry potential, he’s shown that he’s like not *that* bad at adc... I think laneswapping against a Richy5555/Pangerino bot lane is going to be pretty much mandatory. I doubt Richy5555’s going to be going top because if he does I’m just gonna crush him :^)

Then Pangerino is pretty quiet until he picks up InyoreJireems(Support/Mid). He’s looking for a midlaner and she’s the highest rated one left. For his last few moves, he picks up Taixian (Top/Jungle), Randomguyyyy(Support/AD), and Sanctic (Mid/Support) relatively unopposed.

So it’s pretty obvious what Pangerino’s strategy was in draft, he takes away two top support players which makes it really hard/impossible for any team to field a stronger bot lane than them. They’re probably going to use TheLastPanda to try and snowball their bot lane. In a 3v3 between bot lanes and junglers, Pangerino has the highest 3 rated players and I doubt they’re going to lose and skirmishes. Meanwhile Taixian who plays primarily tankier champs and InyoreJireems who plays more supportive mids try their best to farm up and win midgame teamfights off the strength of their early snowballs. They’ll take dragons, bot towers, and rotate to pressure other lanes.

So how do you deal with that? I think the answer lies in laneswaps and dedicated anti-carries. It doesn’t matter if TheLastPanda is camping bot if your bot lane is hanging out up top and your top laner is duoing jungle. Then you pick at least one champ who’s dedicated to shutting down ADCs like Rammus/Malphite/Hecarim/Zed. I think TheLastPanda is much more comfortable on AD champs (although like any good jungler he has that 67% winrate, 4.5KDA on Sejuani) so armor stacking should serve you well.

Wesley Ru (unicornfurys):

Another captain who can only play ADC lol. His first buy is Aznsexy (ADC/Jungler). Aznsexy is possibly the most stable player I’ve ever played with. He doesn’t really tilt and will consistently do well. I’m assuming he wants Aznsexy to jungle in which case his RekSai will be a must ban. He’s also played the usual stupidly OP junglers like Gragas and Sejuani, although I’ve never seen him pull out the Nunu. He’s also just like… generically good at Caitlin, Corki, and Ezreal but he doesn’t play hypercarries like Vayne/Kog/Jinx. He can also like play top/support to a reasonable level… Really good player lol. Then he grabs JJbros (ADC/Support), who’s pulled out some really impressive games on Tristana (btw I’m pretty sure Tristana is like really, REALLY strong now… ban that shit) and Annie in the past. If he wants to put Aznsexy and JJBros in the same lane, they’ll probably be slightly worse than Pangerino/Richy5555 at laning but better at teamfighting.

Then he grabs Depp (jungler/support), despite Mahir’s warning that depp was eloboosted to plat LOL. Uh as of now his team has 3 adcs, 2 supports, 2 junglers. Wesley pls. He grabs mrphenomenon (top/jungler) for cheap to shore up that weakness and Kaizen Winzor (support) just in case his team didn’t have enough redundancy already. I think Kaizen Winzor is super underrated, he doesn’t really play ranked and although he doesn’t have great leadership skills, when I played with him last season he seemed like at least a low plat player on Nami. His final pickup is sorsandnyx (support/jungler) for maximum redundancy. I think sorsandnyx is probably a silver player based off of his past play but he’s unranked so that’s a big wild card.

Final total: 3 adcs, 4 supports, 4 junglers, 1 top, 0 mids.

I really hope Wesley or someone else can play mid lol. His bot lane is going to be really strong no matter who he picks for it. I don’t know if JJbros is a good shot caller but I know Aznsexy isn’t super communicative in game so he’s probably not the best leader around. That communication might be a problem. Honestly I just don’t know how they’re going to shuffle their team around to fill all their roles. They could just run Aznsexy mid playing caster ADCs every game, mr phenomenon top on a hard tank like Maokai, then JJbros and Kaizen Winzor bot, with depp jungling. Depp isn’t plat but I think he’s at least a solid gold jungler.

How do you deal with these guys? Honestly I’ll get back to you when they figure out wtf they’re doing.

Tony Mei (We Roam):

The wild card team. I literally don’t know how half his team plays. We Roam is imo a highly underrated player, playing mid at least at a plat level which might make him one of the strongest midlaners in UPSL. He had breakout games last season on Leblanc and Nidalee. Nid’s been nerfed to pieces but LB is still a terror and might be worth a ban. Besides that, he has Hooin Kyoma (Mid/Top), Kabosi (support/jungler), and Westen Night (Top/ADC) who are all plat players. Rounding out his team are Sonmus Mors (ADC/Top) and Melon Mochi (Support).

I kind of liked his picking, it’s very simple, he just grabs players he thinks are undervalued, isn’t afraid to raise prices to lock a player down, and systematically fills each role with perfect cross role coverage. He ended up with 2 mids, 2 tops, 2 junglers, 2 supports, and 2 adcs. That’s soooooo good. He can literally adapt to any player not being there.

Hooin Kyoma is… an interesting player. For those of you who haven’t read my heavily censored write-ups on last year’s IvyLoL season, let me tl;dr him for you. Good mechanics, good sense of vision/objective control, absolutely pants on head retarded decision making/positioning/map awareness. I still remember that game he was playing Syndra and got hooked LITERALLY 8 times in a row by the other team’s Thresh to start fights. Also don’t forget the time he somehow managed to get into the back of the enemy team when they were pushing our mid inhib tower by like not watching the screen or something. Idk. His mechanics tend to get him through a lot of early game problems such as being too gung-ho (let’s not forget the times when the enemy jungler would gank him at 3 or 4 and he’d just instantly qewignite them to get double buffs) that come to bite him later on in the game. He can be too reckless when it comes to pulling the trigger on fights. However, I literally haven’t seen him play in like 4 months so who knows maybe all that has changed. I think We Roam got him for a very good price tbh.

Kabosi, despite being one of my good friends and in my fraternity, has only fucking duoed with me once. Like… what? Are you serious? I’ve duoed more times with Kaizen Winzor than you and I don’t think he could pick me out of a fucking lineup. So yeah. I don’t know jack about him besides the fact that he’s not very communicative in game and he rages REALLY hard. One time, he literally added the guy he was flaming after game to continue raging and didn’t stop for like 10 minutes LOL

WestenNight. Again, I don’t know jack about his playing besides that he’s an international student and he does have pretty accented English. I’m not expecting him to really be a vocal leader in game because of that.

I don’t remember Melon Mochi being that bad so I guess he’s probly decent but again, I know nothing. I don’t even think Sonmus Mors has gotten to Penn yet, so good luck to him and hoping he impresses us.

Realistically their lineup will probably be We Roam jungler, Hooin Mid, Westen/Sonmus ADC/Top, and Kabosi supporting. I think it gives We Roam a chance to step up and take control of the entire map in a leadership role while leaving the option of running a double plat bot lane. I’m not sure if they’ll tend to prefer Sonmus or Melon Mochi over the other, as Melon is a dedicated support so running him would look like Melon support, Kabosi jungler, We Roam mid, Westen ADC, Hooin top. That might also come into play if Hooin isn’t confident in his midlane champ pool *cough*syndra*cough* and prefers to default to tanky top laners where it’s harder to punish his positional misplays.

So what do you do? Take advantage of the fact that your team will probably have better communication and map control. Ward heavily and outrotate them to punish poor decision making from Hooin Kyoma. Don’t be afraid to bait Hooin into bad engages if you know that the rest of his team is too far away to catch up. Play pick champs that don’t rely on mechanically outplaying him. Figure out two different pick/ban situations for their two possible lineups. If Melon is in, you can safely ban out Kabosi’s jungler pool while leaving Syndra open for Hooin.

Jay Jung (iBisu):

Learn to draft pls. Can his and hugenoodlebrain’s mid/jungle synergy carry? Probably not LOL. Ban MVP Tom Brady’s Annie because that champ is how you get highlight reels and nobody wants to be part of the losing side of a highlight reel. Besides that, try to focus on snowballing other lanes and containing iBisu and hugenoodlebrain in mid. If your mid isn’t losing too hard, chances are good you’ve already won. He’s going to need some outstanding performances from his silver and bronze teammates if he wants a chance at the title.

Jason Tang (darth jas0n):

On the bright side: strong ADC/Mid player (capital100), really experienced support (Aloice), and a wildcard jungler (ilestgentil). On the down side: their support is playing from EU and isn’t that assertive, I don’t remember 1victus being *that* good.

On the other bright side, FunkyKitten and Nexialist were part of my first UPSL team where we steamrolled kids. FunkyKitten isn’t afraid to pull out the weird off meta picks (I think we ran Nasus mid like 4 games in a row or something) and he was probably really undervalued. If capital100 ends up being a good leader and Aloice gets sub 170 ping, they have a strong teamfighting bot lane.

I’ve never seen capital100 play before and I’ve only seen ilestgentil play one series. Admittedly our team stomped his but we were also like probably at least a full division higher rated on average. There’s going to be a lot of eyes on them to see if they can carry the rest of their team.

Benjamin Jiang (Evangelion):

First, shout out to Yu Wang/Gone Girl for drafting for me.

Secondly, smh, you thought I was gonna tell you about our weaknesses? How’s this, we have none.

Kk but actually though.

Evangelion (top/mid) has a champion puddle. If you ban Swain, he just kinda derps around on Irelia/Hecarim. He has a couple specific counterpicks (Renekton, Kennen, Kassadin, Maokai, Malphite) but nothing he’s comfortable just blindpicking like Swain. It’s pretty easy to lane swap on him tbh unless he gets Irelia in which case he’s just gonna call for his support and win 2v2. Besides that, he doesn’t ward which makes him an easy target for ganks because of how much he overextends. His teleports aren’t really at a diamond level and he greeds really easily. He thinks his calls are better than they actually are and he also picks a ton of dumb fights.

iZacc Newton has low standards of cleanliness when it comes to summer housing and didn’t manage to hold onto a 4.0 while dual degreeing smh. Besides that idk I still need to play with him.

Shrines is fucking flawless at this game. He plays every role besides top so I got that covered. His one weakness is that he can’t play multiple champs at the same time.

Rod of Ages has like 2 champs in his pool lol. Doesn’t really play the super meta junglers so you get to save those bans and throw them at Evangelion instead. He doesn’t play much ranked so it’s hard to accurately gauge his skill.

Idk about Lord Arbiter yet.

UPSL (University of Pennsylvania Summer League) 2015 starts this week; teams have been drafted, schedule created, and trashtalk started. All UPSL 2015 posts will be tagged #upsl 2015.

Important links below: 

The UPSL Charter 

Schedule/Standings/Roster/Stats

Draft Document 

Draft VOD