Season 11 – Placement Games 2/10

Season 11 has started! So I played three games from my placement series but one of them was a remake so that doesn’t count really. Alas, here’s an update:

In the first game, we had a promising comp. My duo mate’s Jhin got picked by the enemy so he went Miss Fortune instead. Since we already had a lot of AP damage in our team and since the enemy team had three melee-champions, I decided to pick Senna to keep them at bay with Glacial and my W and to poke them from afar. The enemy team was rather beefy with both Tahm Kench and Swain but they were mainly AD, so I had high hopes for this one, especially as the Jhin picked Magic Resist runes against a double AD bot lane… alas, I started poking him out of lane but Swain apparently didn’t connect yet so we got a remake, sadly. While I would have loved to play that game, I’m also kind of glad that we didn’t since our top laner was auto-filled. 

The next game went horrible. My duo mate and I were playing Jhin and Vel’Koz which is great since the enemy team didn’t have too much range and since Jhin is super strong right now. My Vel’koz is not too shabby either, so I had high hopes for this game in champ select… if it weren’t for our teammates. Our Top Laner and our Jungler were premade, too, and played Teemo and Vi. Teemo lost early against the Irelia, so that wasn’t good… Irelia quickly snowballed and became close to unstoppable. Vi is a great pick in the jungle since you can gank rather early with your Q and since your ultimate as Vi is incredible in team fights. The problem was that Vi just didn’t gank at all, resulting in us having a hard time in bot lane with Orianna roaming a lot and Kayn ganking way too much. This would be no problem if it weren#t for this annoying Draven+Lulu lane that we had to face. Draven can snowball really hard if you don’t shut him down early. We missed opportunities to get kills on him and eventually he kept one-shotting me and Jhin. At the same time, Draven would use his flash and heal all the time but we’d still get no jungle attention from Vi… I mean, nobody really did get any ganks from Vi. 

Alas, the enemy Kayn was three levels above our Vi, got all the dragons but one, and was super strong, too. Our Gragas mid went full damage but didn’t really have an impact. Our Bot Lane was super behind. The Vi went full damage as well, despite being behind, and since Orianna, Irelia, Draven and Kayn would constantly roam and kill us in our own jungle, I amassed a lot of deaths. This game was horrible. We were not able to do anything while our top laner and our jungle were constantly flaming us. It was not fun at all, especially since Draven would also go invisible after every kill. The biggest problems were Irelia, Kayn and Orianna, though… so it was too much to handle, and alas, I lost my first game.

The third game that I played yesterday was a Nami+Lucian game. We had a Malphite Top against an Akali that got super fed. Our Yi got some early kills… Yasuo refused to play an AP champion, so I was basically the only AP champion in our team, especially with Malphite going full tank. We got some good kills early so things were looking good. I was sure that we’d be able to stop the Akali later on in team fights with our Malphite’s and my ultimate ability. Sadly, though, Ezreal ended up getting a bunch of kills and… Lux kept one-shotting me with one Q+Auto.

Welcome to the League of Oneshots where Yasuo is able to flame you even when he’s 2/8 with barely any kill participation and where Lux one-shots you harder than Akali – who btw was always there to clean up as well.

In the end, I had to mute everyone but since Lux and Akali were so fed I couldn’t ward anything. Yasuo and Yi kept dying right when Drakes were about to spawn. Meanwhile, Lucian was falling off, Ezreal got a bunch more kills in our base before they ended up finishing. It wasn’t fun at all.

So, that was my last game of the day. I was a bit frustrated with the quality of the games. The placement games so far ended up placing me in Silver III… which is fine. I can climb out of that. If I win some of the next games, I’ll place higher though, so I’m going to try to focus more on my positioning in the next ones. 

Again, most of this post sounds like I’m blaming my team or whatever but I know that I played like garbage, myself. Sure, my team’s decisions at times weren’t optimal but in the end, what counts is that I play better, or else I won’t be able to reach platinum.

Goals for the next games:

• Get some good bans in. Samira is less of a problem compared to all the assassins in the game.
• Watch my positioning. I need to die a lot less, especially with my current champ pool!
• Mute everyone. I just gotta do it. Everything that has to be communicated can be communicated via pings. I don’t need the chat for anything but the “gl hf” I type at the beginning and the “gg wp” at the end of the game. 
• Focus. The longer games continue and the more frustrating they are, the more I lose focus. These past two games were lost at minute fifteen but we could have had good team fights to turn the game around, potentially.
• Stay positive. Again, just do it. “Oh, we’ve got a Yasuo who’s never played the Champion before? I’m sure he’s smurfing. Oh, he died five times already? He’s not gonna be worth any more gold!” I gotta stay positive and focus on the goal of the game: Winning. I only gotta get upset at my own mistakes, as always.

I did the latter part quite well in those games but I eventually lost focus, especially when teammates started flaming… I should have just muted them.

So, uh, in case I wanna keep my post-streak up, I’ll post more on this in the near future! Hope you enjoyed this post. Did you start playing ranked yet? The grind tends to be rough at the beginning and at the end of the season but I’m sure I’ll get some good games soon!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!