Can SKTelecom Still Style on Their Opposition?

The new LCK season started off with a bang, as two of the heavily favored teams clashed on the Summoner’s Rift. After all the camera panning, dramatic music, highlight plays, and player statistics both coaches burst into the booths to lead the draft phase. NaJin e-mFire is blue side and starts off with a quick Azir ban, taking it away from Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok . Azir is a champion with a ridiculously high skill cap and if any player could reach it, it would be Faker, so he is a solid ban by Najin.

SKTelecom T1 responds by banning Janna and Kassadin. While the Janna ban is not a surprise because she is a top tier meta support (alongside Thresh), the Kassadin ban feels awkward because Kassadin should be the least threatening out of Yu 'Ggoong' Byeong-jun’s assassin champion pool (Kassadin, Ahri, and Zed). Finally Gnar, Lissandra, and Maokai are taken out of the potential top lane candidates. This eliminates a lot of the popular hard initiation champions besides Jarvan, and all of the tier 1 top laners besides Rumble.

Najin now has the chance to first pick a few options without showing their hand. However Najin immediately comes out of the gates with a Rumble pick up, who thrives in team fighting compositions tailored around early skirmishes and river objectives. However Rumble does not do well when his team lacks a form of primary initiation or a way to keep people in his Equalizer. This pick not only secures the last of the tier 1 top laners but also denies Jang 'Marin' Gyeong-Hwan his famed Rumble.

In response to the Rumble pick, I would have liked to see SKT pick up Jarvan, Jax, or Irelia to either keep their other picks a secret or to take away one of Rumble’s synergies. What happens is SKT blind picks Xerath for Faker and locks in Lee Sin for the jungle, giving some weight to their Kassadin ban. Faker’s Xerath is probably the closest a human can get to scripting when he’s on point, but Xerath as a champion brings with it a host of problems. Unlike his other wave clear brethren Orianna and Ziggs, Xerath has bad lane matchups against a few assassins but offers far more damage. Not only that but now half of SKT’s back line is immobile and Janna was banned. Outside of Lee Sin’s roundhouse kick SKT needs to be very cognizant that they have limited disengage options available.

Examining SKT’s ability to disengage fights, Najin decides to pick Jarvan and remove Sivir from the AD pool. Jarvan is fantastic when played with Rumble as he can trap people in his Cataclysm, and becomes a huge threat Xerath has to consider when positioning appropriately in a fight. When Najin begins rounding out their team composition further with Sivir; you can clearly see that Najin is focusing on diving and getting early teamfights. Sivir works well with Jarvan, assisting his initiation and benefitting from his AoE armor shred. Sivir’s spell shield can prevent some of Xerath’s damage or Lee Sin’s Sonic Wave if he tries to Insec.

Here is where SKT’s draft starts to falter as they lock in Mundo and Tristana. SKT are now in a position where they have two late game scaling champions, Xerath for wave clear, and Lee Sin for early game map pressure. With this current composition it falls on Bae 'Bengi' Seong-ung’s shoulders to control the early game, however this proves difficult when Najin’s team composition seeks to set the pace early game. For SKT they could have picked someone like Graves or Corki to be tanky enough for Ggoong’s inevitable assassin pick, Cait could have shoved Sivir out of lane and rotated around the map with Xerath taking turrets, or Ez who is very mobile.

The problem with SKT’s Mundo pick is that, Dr. Mundo is one of the few top laners who can be played into any matchup making him very good as a blind pick, or as something to pick when all other options are exhausted. However SKT still had a wide variety of decisions for which champion they could have locked in. For example Irelia, Jax, or Renekton do fine against Rumble and even beat him with jungle pressure. Additionally those champions have earlier power spikes at the cost of a little late game scaling, and they can deter Ggoong from picking Zed as those three champions can effectively counter Zed’s split push.

Zed and Annie are finally locked in for Najin adding another layer of initiation and AoE damage. These two picks create complications for SKT because, if the SKT members rush armor Rumble and Annie will do a lot of AoE magic damage, and if they rush MR Zed will very likely pop one of the squishies. Najin’s team composition was well thought out and drafted.

The only substitution I might make would be Braum over Annie, but Annie provides a layer of flexibility in that she’s better than Braum in lane and roaming, while Braum would excel at team fighting and sieging. Observing SKT’s draft they last picked their support on red side which is never a good sign. This means that SKT gave up their counter pick advantage to secure a Thresh pick for Lee 'Wolf' Jae-wan, when Najin did not even prioritize the champion. Thresh provides much needed hard crowd control and disengage for SKT’s team composition. Nami would have been an acceptable support and synergizes a bit more with Trist, however the support pick should never fall this far into the draft.

SKT could have improved their draft by first of all not instantly locking in Xerath. Against a certain echelon of teams and players Faker just cannot blind pick his mid. One example of this, is the series SKTelecom played against Samsung White to try and become the second seed for Korea this past worlds. Faker blind picked his mid lane in all three games and Pawn solo killed him every game due to having the better match up. Although Faker was not solo killed and had control of the lane, Najin built their team composition around shutting down Faker as they saw SKT really wanted this Xerath pick after banning Kassadin. Second SKT could have picked Jarvan and their support during the first rotation leaving their solo lanes for later.

This would give SKTelecom more time to think on proper counters, deny some initiation from Najin, and potentially put Watch on Lee Sin (which was only impressive during White Shield’s run through the Korean World’s qualifier) or a tier 2 jungle such as Elise, Kha’Zix, or Rengar. Lastly SKT should look to pick side lanes that can function on their own freeing up Bengi or Wolf to assist Faker middle in any ganks or skirmishes.

Also be sure to check out the video that goes with the article on my channel

*all images gathered from here