This Leblanc has 25 kills and is polishing off a hard carry performance. For the last
10 minutes he's just been dominating people--hard carrying every single fight.
He must have had an amazing lane phase and gotten super fed early, right?
Not so much. Leblanc was ganked repeatedly by the enemy Jungler, the enemy support, and
even Ezreal's ult resulting in numerous lane phase deaths.
Today, we'll be showing you how our Challenger, McBaze, recovered from a bad lane phase and
was still able to hard, solo carry a game. And just so you know, Mcbaze recorded the
full game with live commentary that you can find on our epic smurf commentary page. We
upload tons of full games every week where our challenger players commentate their thoughts
in real time as they hard carry teammates from hell in platinum and below. So be sure
to check us out right after this!
To, let's quickly recap some of what down in the lane phase before we dive into how
he recovered from it. Leblanc's plan for this matchup was quite
simple--wait for Anivia to use Q, trying to bait it out as much as possible, then trade
while it's down. Repeat until Anivia is within kill range and look to snowball that way.
He does find some success with Anivia hard trolling at level 6 and basically just inting
him a kill...which is nice. A bit later he narrowly misses a kill onto
Anivia which eventually turns into a 2v2 in which he dies and Trundle gets the kill.
He returns to lane and instantly gets ganked, dieing yet again in quick succession.
If we jump head to him arriving in lane, we can see our Challenger has 60 cs at 11 minutes,
only 1 kill and two deaths, and his team is heavily losing as well.
So, now that we've set the stage, let's dive into how we crawl back into and eventually
take over this game. And, the first big play comes just a little
bit later as Leblanc starts to roam top side for Kayn, eventually resulting in a kill and
a big, 400 gold shutdown. Now, this is actually a very specific strategy
that Mcbaze employs when playing assassins, and that's targeting fed tanks or bruisers
early. The idea is that, tanks will obviously outscale
your damage and you won't be able to kill them later in teamfights--so you want to cash
in on their shutdown as early as you can. Grabbing shutdowns on an assassin is a crucial
part of snowballing so thinking about how and when you can capitalize on those is crucial.
Leblanc runs back to mid lane and ends up trading kills there while the enemy support
sits mid for over 30 seconds. This eventually leads to his mid tier 1 going
down before he gets back to lane. But, speaking with Mcbaze, he actually says
that he doesn't mind this much. Why do you think that is? Take a few seconds.
So, Mcbaze said that he needs to farm some to catch up this game...and the mid tower
going down actually gives him more time to roam before he has to catch waves mid. So,
he can collect similar amounts of farm while being in mid lane less often.
With the shutdown secured, Leblanc is starting to become relevant again and picks up a kill
onto Anivia after softening her up with a combo--and finishes it all off by juking the
pants off of Kayn. Leblanc will definitely want to get his wave
to tower, but what do you think he'll look to do after that?
So, for sure he'll want to look to start roaming now that he's caught up and can start pushing
out his wave. Unfortunately his bot lane just died, but Ezreal is overstaying so he runs
down and picks up the kill. And, let's hear Mcbaze's thoughts on this
pick. 16:28-16:40
Great, so this is an awesome concept that applies to League as a whole, but let's talk
about assassins. At the end here we see Leblanc just holding
chain while Ezreal spends all of his movement going side to side.
And, this idea of holding abilities applies to more than this, it's also super relevant
at this point here. What do you think we mean by that?
So, what we mean is that, when you have an angle on your target like this, spending mobility,
like we see Leblanc do, is often sub optimal and generally a bad habit.
In this case, Mcbaze only did it because he has multiple jumps on Leblanc, but even then
it's kind of risky. For example, if you were playing Ekko here,
you would for sure just want to walk up to him and save E for Arcane Shift.
Or, on Zed, saving W to follow Ezreal's E then ulting if he flashes after that.
Alright, moving on I also want to address that this roam is the first core tenant of
how we're going to play the mid game on an assassin--looking for the squishies.
Our goal is to just follow vulnerable targets we can kill around the map, pick them off,
and snowball that way. And, we can hear Mcbaze saying this clearly
here. 17:40-17:56
And, that's exactly what we do, roaming bottom and grabbing another two kills for the team.
So, our first tenant of assassin midgame play is to roam to weak, vulnerable enemys.
But, what happens when you're forced to group up and teamfight around an objective, like
we see happening here a few minutes later. What do you think? How will Leblanc play this
out? Let's watch and listen.
24:38-24:54 Great, so this is our second core tenant of
assassin play--which is to avoid approaching the enemy team from the front--looking for
flanks instead. But, I also want to mention that walking into
fog of ward like Leblanc is doing here is potentially very risky.
If the enemy team has serious threats who can just one shot you, like a Zed, Veigar,
Syndra, etc. then you would not want to face check tri until you see the threat somewhere.
So, you would just stay here, with your vision, waiting for either them to come to you or
for them to show, at which point you can continue to wrap around.
Anyway, Mcbaze continues to hunt squishies in the side lanes...despite his team inting...continuing
to pick up kills and becoming extremely strong. A few minutes later, though, he's forced once
again to group up with his team around the objective with top inhib down.
How would you play out this situation? So, I know we just said to not approach from
the front, but that's only because you want to navigate around the enemy front line and
get on the back line. Here, Ezreal is front lining, so we punish
landing a nice chunk of damage. With Volibear teleporting in and Ezreal moving
into the backline, what would you do now? So, at this point, with a more front to back
fight forming, we're going to see Mcbaze move around the back of the pit just like before,
sweeping on the way, which is always crucial when flanking.
Now, with Morde back in base holding top wave, and with the blue side having three dragons
already, Mcbaze is just going to try to steal rather than fight this time, which unfortunately
is not successful. Now's where things get devious. As the enemy
team moves up into their Jungle, Mcbaze jumps behind them into the pit.
With his W up and seeing the front line way too far away, he goes in, finding Ezreal and
just barely failing to finish him off, which Trundle thankfully does for him.
Now we get to our third and final tenant of assassin play--patiently waiting for your
combo. Watch as Leblanc does not even auto attack,
doesn't do anything, is just completely afk until her full combo is back up at which point
he instantly rejoins the fight. This is...really important. It can seem temping
to auto attack, stay in the fight, and be active. But preserving your health and lurking
in the shadows, maintaining the element of surprise, is just a far more effective plan
almost every time. Two minutes later the red team is pressuring
the mid lane, and we see Leblanc jump in, doing only very little damage.
But, this is really the beauty of this type of assassin play. Even tho Mcbaze missed his
chain and didn't get much done, he's still pulling two back onto him, causing chaos,
etc. If he were playing backline with his team and missed his abilities, he would be
useless. But, with this style of play he's still highly effective no matter what.
Moving on, we once again see Leblanc patiently waiting for cooldowns just staying on the
edge of the fight so that he's in range. Then, he strikes.
-33:03 At the next dragon fight, we get to see how
things can get messy. Leblanc is once again looking to engage from
behind the enemy team, which he does, but he realizes that there was an unnacounted
threat, anivia, who he had no vision of when he engaged, leading to a very sticky situation
he's lucky to survive. This is just a good example of the trouble
you can get into flanking when you don't account for all the threats first.
At this point, he has successfully become disgustingly fed and can just completely start
to 1v9 the game, eventually resulting in an elder dragon powered push to end the game.
But, this was only possible, after Mcbaze's shakey lane phase, because he followed this
games 3 core tenants of assassin play. All three of these concepts were absolutely
central to Leblanc's recover and eventual hard carrying of this game.
Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
Alright guys, remember, if you want to catch the full game with commentary and hundreds
of others just like it, then you can do so at Skill-Capped! That and so much more is
waiting for you so you can ACTUALLY start climbing in League of Legends. Thanks for
watching!