Hey everyone and welcome back.
We left off in the series with Dopa winning game 1 by punishing Faker's over forced gank
set up, and Faker winning game 2 by just hard out playing Dopa even in a bad match up.
Let's get into the final game.
Our final game is Faker on Syndra and Dopa once again falling back to his trustworthy
Twisted Fate.
In the last 2 games both Faker and Dopa ran teleport.
This game will be a bit different.
Dopa has a Lee Sin as his jungler.
This combo is deadly with the threat of flash gold card into a guaranteed Lee Q. Faker needs
to run cleanse to avoid that combo.
This will change the goals each player has for this laning phase.
Dopa will want to look for a recall timing which lets him teleport back to lane to punish
Faker.
He could set up a freeze, or keep Faker in lane with low mana and eventually force him
to recall to make him miss a ton of experience.
Faker will want to force Dopa to recall then shove the wave.
This will force Dopa to use teleport to catch the wave, while Faker gets a clean reset off.
Let's get into the game.
As the lane begins, they both immediately look to trade onto the other.
Faker looks to land his Q as Dopa is stuck in his auto animation, but he's a bit off.
Therefore, it ends up being a perfectly even trade since they both got 2 auto attacks off.
Faker then moves forward for another Q, so Dopa will respond with a gold card of his
own.
Faker once again moves forward to pressure since Dopa is about to last hit this melee
minion soon.
Dopa moves back far enough to force Faker to back off.
If Faker kept trying to move forward and pressure, the minion would eventually die and the 3
creeps that were hitting it would all transfer their aggro to him.
But Faker just hits him with a random Q anyways
This prompts Dopa to walk forward while Faker's Q is on cool down, but he took a bit too long
so it comes up as Dopa is throwing his blue card.
Dopa corrects this mistake by instantly popping a corrupting potion when he sees the Q. Since
he's running Time Warp Tonic, this gives him just enough movement speed to dodge it
Dopa begins cycling his cards.
As he's walking forward while the card is on blue, Faker tries to read that Dopa will
stand still to auto attack to get mana back.
That wasn't Dopa's intention whatsoever, so he misses.
Now that Faker's Q is on cooldown again, Dopa moves forward to zone him for a bit before
locking in red and throwing it on a caster creep to extend the range of the damage which
tags Faker and thins the wave at the same time.
Afterwards, he falls backs since Faker is about to hit level 2
This lets Faker clear the wave uncontested, which gives him a timing window to go place
vision.
He manages to find Lee Sin doing raptors, and based on the game time, we can easily
assume that he's done the Red, Krugs, Raptors route.
This means that Lee will path to his blue side after raptors, since he wouldn't be able
to vertically jungle without being spotted by the ward Faker just placed.
Finding the jungler like this is insane value for his team.
Faker's top laner can now play aggressively, and his bot lane knows what to expect within
a minute or so.
In low elo, where your teammates don't know how to use this information, you would still
benefit from it.
All you'd have to do is play the left side of the lane to keep yourself safe since we
know Lee will be on the right side of the map now
Faker gets back to lane and continues to play aggressively and fish for harass whenever
Dopa stands still to last hit
He makes a really smart play here to run at Dopa with his W. Although he doesn't reach
him for the damage, the threat of the W made Dopa run away, which forces him to miss this
caster creep.
Dopa uses this window of Faker's W being down to try and thin the wave a bit, so that he
doesn't completely lose lane control.
His mistake was using Q.
Now, he'll have no way to last hit this cannon without standing still and auto attacking.
He tries to be sneaky by snap picking a card to catch Faker off guard to potentially avoid
this punish.
Dopa forgot that Faker is unfortunately Faker who can instantly react to stuff like this
and gets punished hard.
Dopa doesn't take this damage for free though.
Once again, he moves forward to establish some lane control while Faker's abilities
are on cooldown.
Faker counters this by auto attacking this melee creep.
Once it dies, the minions would aggro to Dopa, so he has to back off.
Dopa then moves forward with his E stacked and cycling towards a gold card.
This was a bait, he was just trying to make Faker waste his abilities.
Soon after, Dopa sees both junglers fighting and moves immediately to help.
He's put himself in a bit of an awkward position though.
He can't really walk back mid through this corridor since it'd be very easy for Faker
to land his spells here, and he's down a level.
Sadly, he's punished for trying to help his team and he's forced to go around which makes
him miss some experience
Faker at this point will continue with his unrelenting pressure since Dopa is out of
potions and starting to run low.
Which eventually leads us to this exact moment.
One of these 2 players is about to make a really intelligent move and put the other
in checkmate.
We'll show you the complete map state, their items, and their gold.
If you can tell us who wins based on this information, give yourself a pat on the back.
If you manage to figure out why, your mom will be proud she raised such an epic gamer.
You might want to pause if you want to try and figure it out.
If you guessed that Dopa wins, you'd be correct.
Dopa throws his red card and Q to last hit the minion and also damage the other 2 melees.
Then he falls back to recall.
Okay, let's break down why this recall is so good, and why Faker loses no matter what
he does.
First, Faker could just sit here and freeze the wave.
Dopa would just recall get full health, mana, and buy items then teleport back to lane.
Faker is doomed at that point, since he'd either be stuck in lane at no mana forever,
or be forced to recall at a terrible timing.
Secondly, he could just back off and recall safely.
The problem with this option is that Dopa still has a minion dematerializer left.
He could just cancel his recall, use it on the cannon and he still has enough mana to
blue card and Q the caster creeps to clear them quickly.
Faker has 2 options off this.
Finish his recall and lose the cannon wave, or stay and let Dopa teleport back to lane
with full hp and mana like we previously discussed, both obviously bad.
Faker's third option is to begin casting his recall immediately.
He could use this as a mini mind game to try and bait Dopa to cancel his recall, then cancelling
his own which would waste a lot of Dopa's time.
There's a couple problems with this option.
For one, the last time he saw Lee Sin was at 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
His team didn't place any vision while they were invading.
For all Faker knows, Lee could be coming mid at the moment to help Dopa.
Recalling in the middle of the lane is asking to get ganked.
Even if Faker has a good read of where Lee is, Dopa can just counter this on his own
anyways.
All he has to do is cancel his own recall when he sees Faker do this, and then begin
channeling it again.
This allows him to react to what Faker is doing and waste the least amount of time.
If Faker does the mind game cancel, Dopa can just finish the recall, buy, and teleport
to lane.
I think we all know by now that Faker is doomed in that position.
If Faker doesn't cancel and recalls in the middle of the lane for time efficiency, Dopa
can once again cancel his recall and shove the wave, denying Faker all that experience.
Faker goes for the safe option of shoving the wave.
Dopa can now cancel his recall and catch the cannon wave and the next wave.
Normally this is fine.
Dopa can save his teleport, but Faker got a clean base off and a Syndra can usually
keep the pressure on a Twisted Fate anyways.
The issue was the gold back timing.
Faker based at 35 CS with 1000 gold
Meanwhile, Dopa based at 33 CS with 1180 gold.
Despite Faker being ahead 2 CS, Dopa gets to base with slightly more gold due to extra
passive income from basing later and Twisted Fate's passive.
This is another huge win condition goal you can achieve in specific match ups.
For example, let's say you're playing Ryze vs Lux.
In that lane, a strategy you could do is play really aggressively and force a back timing
at 500 gold.
Since Ryze starts Sapphire Crystal, he could buy Tear and all Lux would be able to buy
is Amplifying Tome or Dark Seal.
Despite having the exact same gold, Ryze would be significantly ahead.
Compare Faker's 2 amplifying tome buy to Dopa's full Merc Treads buy and you have a clear
winner.
Faker ideally wanted to force Dopa to base at around 900 gold, where Dopa only gets tier
1 boots and null magic mantle, while Faker would still get the exact same buy.
Merc Treads hard counters Syndra in lane making it hard for her to land spells, and even if
they do land the Magic Resist mitigates the damage quite a bit.
This lets Dopa have complete priority in mid lane, which lets him clear vision and take
honeyfruits without consequence.
Even this flash Reksai gank isn't enough to stop him, since Faker never managed to force
out his teleport.
He just comes back to lane, has full priority and gets a free ultimate timing to roam.
The ultimate wasn't the best though, since he miscalculated Xayah's recall before he
got there.
Regardless, we're giving this lane win over to Dopa.
His Merc Treads base timing allowed him to win lane on his own, and the fact that he
got such an uncontested roam timing speaks to how well he played.
Now, we're in no way saying Dopa is better than Faker.
Faker was playing multiple champions practicing for worlds, whereas it's no secret that Dopa
spams Twisted Fate and Orianna almost exclusively.
He just happened to win a mini best of 3 in solo queue and take a bit of Faker's lp.
We hope you enjoyed, and thanks for watching.