Hey everyone and welcome.
Today we're going to be breaking down a teamfight from the perspective of a control mage, where
we'll analyze an exceptional example for how to play your role correctly.
In our next teamfight guide, we'll contrast this one showing you how to play it out as
an assassin.
Since every teamfight is different, our focus is going to be on the thought process and
general concepts you'll want to follow when you get into teamfights.
Today we'll be focusing on a teamfight played out by Froggen's Anivia.
Anivia is a control mage, which basically means you control a certain area of space
around your champion.
If your opponents wish to invade your space, they'll have to pass through your crowd control
and burst.
For Anivia, her key tools to control her space are her ultimate, q stun and w wall.
But if this was a syndra, it'd be her stun and ultimate range, if it was lux it'd be
her root ultimate, if it was viktor it'd be his w and ultimate and so on.
Stuff that is scary and difficult for people to walk through.
So with that in our minds, let's jump into seeing how Froggen leverages his space to
control the fight on his infamous Anivia.
To give you context of where we're at in this game, it's just under 17 minutes into the
game and Froggen's team is down 700 gold, a tower and 2 infernals.
So they're too far behind and the upcoming big teamfight will be game changing.
Froggen himself does have a nice lead however vs the opposing Orianna.
With a large CS lead and 2 levels ahead of her, he's up about 1300 gold.
Froggen's Caitlyn however, is very far behind the opposing 3-0 Jhin.
After clearing up this second infernal, the red team marches top side to engage onto the
blue team who are trying to trade neutral objectives via securing rift herald.
They dance around herald a little and the fight officially starts when the fed Jhin
uses his ultimate to assist his team with engaging.
At this point, Froggen has nothing to do besides get out of range of the jhin ultimate, but
it's where he goes which what we should pay attention to.
By kiting up into this choke point, he now has two pillars of strength that he can leverage
to optimize his damage and control output in the upcoming fight.
Firstly, he's positioning behind a wall, which is usually something you want to look for
in jungle fights, as firing your skill shots from out of vision dramatically increases
the chance they'll hit.
Secondly and more importantly, by positioning here, it means that his control area will
be this jungle entrance.
The opposing Sejuani has already hopped over the wall and is fighting Froggen's GP, Nautilus
and Rek'Sai, so these guys are looking to follow-up and will have to cross through Froggen's
territory to do so.
In this type of situation, many players would maybe throw out a spell or two here and walk
around to try and help their teammates who are currently being engaged on.
While that may be an okay choice, it's far better to control this space here and completely
zone off the enemy mid laner, with the space that Froggen is currently controlling.
Swain and Alistar pass through, but this Orianna is now isolated in Anivia's controlled area.
She's trying to juke Froggen's Q, but he holds it and they score the kill.
This is made possible because Anivia is pretty tanky and is also ahead of the Orianna.
You can do this same type of play if you have the range advantage or you're simply strong
enough to go toe to toe with the champion you're trying to isolate and kill.
But if Anivia was behind and this was a fed Viktor or something, then Anivia would probably
just look to delay the viktor and join the teamfight to play it more safe.
Anyway, with Orianna dead, it's now a 3 vs 4 in favour of the opposing team, as Rek'Sai
is dead and GP has just died in the other half of this teamfight.
Froggen paths down and hits a 3 man stun with ultimate.
This is really nice and isn't too difficult to land when you cast it over a wall as we
mentioned before, since the opponents don't have any time to anticipate or react.
Sejuani drops incredibly low and has to flash out, making it more of a 3v3 at this point.
Alistar, Swain and Jhin are all passing through Froggen's controlled space and he's now starting
to kite back into his original choke point while he waits for his cool-downs to come
back up.
As jhin begins to exit into the river, Froggen looks for an opportunity cut him off, he uses
wall and ultimate and is looking to land a Q if he continues to path out, Jhin correctly
steps back to avoid this and Alistar looks for a flash re-engage while Anivia's spells
are down.
He looks to get the knock onto Anivia, but froggen kites back a little and stuns alistar
in the brush.
Sejuani returns after regenerating a little health from the red buff and this is now froggen's
queue to flash out before he gets stunned.
The great thing about this is that he didn't immediately flash when Alistar flashed, and
instead made the opposing team work harder to force froggen's flash.
This of course was enabled by excellent mechanics and Anivia's Q, but if you do have tools and
space to force an engager to work harder to force your mobility, then playing to your
limits like this can really pay off - rather than just respecting every engage from your
opponents.
It should also be noted that Anivia's Q is up right now, because she didn't use it on
the potential catch on Jhin earlier, as Froggen was patient with it and didn't throw the Q
out randomly.
He'd have only thrown out the Q if Jhin committed to walking through his ult and out of the
river.
Anyway, unfortunately the Caitlyn does end up dying here and with the Sejuani back in
the fight, it's now a 2v4 with Nautilus and Anivia super low on health.
There's nothing to be done for the Anivia now besides back off, unless the red team
tries to chase and dive them.
Jhin does overstep, which is a huge misplay by him but definitely not uncommon and Nautilus
catches him with a nice hook.
Remember, Jhin is easily their most fed player and Froggen follows up and picks him off.
So far, Froggen has been playing out the fight calmly and patiently, controlling certain
areas of the terrain while he kites back and gets a number of rotations out as his cool-downs
refreshed.
We've learnt pretty much everything we can here from a knowledge perspective for how
to control space and what we're about to see are mostly super impressive mechanical outplays.
Froggen cuts off Sejuani's exit with a perfect wall, into a stun securing the kill.
Then, he actually folllows the retreating swain alistar, knowing that if he dodges swain's
E, which he does, he can catch this swain and land yet another kill.
He locks him up into his ultimate, but waits with his wall.
This is anivia specific, but by waiting with his wall, he can see what direction swain
will go to get out of the ultimate.
If he goes forward towards anivia, he can wall here, and if he walks away, he can wall
off his exit.
Swain tries to move forward, so he walls at the last moment, now he has to walk all this
distance to get out.. and dies.
This of course was masterful play from Froggen perfected over thousands of games.
But, in just a matter of minutes, we did learn a lot from the fundamentals behind his positioning
and spell usage, which we can apply to every control mage in the game.
Let's take a look at the fight in full speed before we jump into the next teamfight!
When the fight broke out, Froggen immediately pulled back into a choke point, where his
control space would be hyper effective, as his opponents would have to funnel through
to reach him or his teammatesFroggen played the fight out slowly and patiently, not taking
any huge risks and let his opponents chase him, rather than him trying to force thingsIn
doing this, he was able to get off a number of spell rotations, constantly pressuring
isolated targets and landing skill shots over walls.
In the end, his opponents ended up over extending to dive and he was able to capitalize on their
mistakes with super strong positioning, decision making and of course mechanics.
That's it for this one, thanks for watching and it'd be great if you let us know how we
did on this teamfighting guide and we'll be looking at assassins for the next one.
Catch you next time.