Hey everyone, today we'll be running you through an explosive lane phase from top laner Sword,
who plays for the new dominant rookie LCK team Griffin.
What you'll be learning today is how to go aggressive in lane to build up huge advantages
without scoring kills, but instead by building up CS leads.
It's difficult to get excited by learning how to gain a CS lead, since most players
simply do not convert on them to anything close to how they convert on kills.
However, today we'll show you how something as small as a 10 CS lead can win you the lane
if you play it out right.
We'll also be showing you how to play aggro without dying to ganks.
So regardless of what top laner you play, you'll learn stuff - but especially if you
play aggressive laners such as:
Kennen, Jayce, Gnar, Darius, Swain..
The matchup we'll be using today is from Sword on the Jayce vs Hanwha Life's top laner Lindarang
on Kennen
Jayce deals more damage in this matchup, but needs to get into melee form to land his burst.
Kennen's damage is also pretty high, but lies more in consistently landing harass into stuns.
Not really able to go for all-ins until level 6, unless he lands a ton of harass before
then.
Waveclear, Jayce outshoves easily with his ranged autos and melee form Q. Kennen has
to E to thin the wave and W after to get any decent waveclear.
For range they're pretty similar outside of Jayce's EQ combo.
The gameplan for Jayce will be to utilize his wave clear edge to shove in Kennen and
deny CS.
He'll want to convert this into either scoring kills, or ideally, first turret of the game.
So his primary missions this game will be:
Push the Wave Harass on Last Hits
Don't Get Ganked Get First Tower
Kennen needs to look for opportunities to harass Jayce when he tries to shove and/or
go for a gank onto Jayce with his jungler.
Playing safe until 6 is also good for the Kennen, who can use that to land a super easy
gank onto the Jayce or elsewhere on the map with TP.
Jayce is playing teleport and has Camille for jungle while Kennen is spell book, starting
with teleport, with a Nocturne jungle.
Let's get into the gameplay.
As the game starts, Jayce goes over to ward the tri-brush.
We're seeing this a lot lately, with the mid laner also warding up around the river entrance.
This is to deal with the meta of level 2 ganks and it also helps your own jungler see which
crab the opposing jungler goes for, with both river entrances covered.
If your mid laner doesn't ward their river entrance, then you'd rather ward the river
area instead.
Jayce ends up finding Kennen sitting in the tri brush fulfilling sentry duty.
Jayce knows he does way more damage than Kennen at level one, since he basically has two abilities
and his passive, making him perhaps the most bursty level 1 champ in the game.
Knowing this, he chunks Kennen down to 35% health.
This is an extreme example, but if you know you deal more damage at level 1 than your
opponent then go for this type of aggression, their jungler won't help out at 1.30 on the
clock with their camps spawning.
With his huge immediate health lead, Jayce tries to zone off Kennen from CS and experience.
This doesn't work out well as he aggro'd the minions and took a Q from Kennen, also aggro'ing
the melee minions which shouldn't happen.
It was a nice idea, but didn't work out this time.
He starts on mission 1 by pushing the wave.
He does this by auto'ing the minions actively, he's also looking for jungle threat right
now.
Thinking back to our video on Viper, who delay his early push on the Darius when there was
jungle threat, Sword knows he can push right now on the Jayce, as he scouts enemy nocturne
bot side.
Small thing here, but note how Jayce baits out Kennen Q by walking up, as if he's about
to go for a trade.
Then he side steps the Q and keeps pushing.
Baiting out Kennen's ability on himself and not the wave will accelerate his push, just
a nice small thing he does with his time that'll add up.
Jayce pushes to tower by actively auto'ing.
Saving his abilities to preserve mana and leaving them available for potential trades.
He sees Nocturne go top side here on the minimap but he's pushing.
This is good information for mission 3, but let's talk about a few things here for dealing
with early jungle presence.
Firstly, though this ward is nice to confirm Nocturne is coming top, he didn't need it
to know that.
The two early wards placed by mid and top make it super likely Nocturne started bot
side, because they didn't scout nocturne go for scuttle or an early gank.
So Jayce will know that between around 2.35 - 3.00 Nocturne will be top side and could
gank.
To deal with that, he could play back in the lane, look to ward, don't push as fast.
That type of thing.
In this case, he could even 1v2, with his health lead, large wave and high damage champion,
a level 2 Nocturne gank would be incredibly risky.
Anyway, Jayce continues to push all the way to tower.
Once he's reached the tower, he actively autos it for mission 4, which is the most important
mission.
But with towers taking 50% less damage until 5 minutes, his main goal here would be to
harass for mission 2.
He's looking to hit an EQ combo as soon as possible, so he's waiting for his Q to come
off cool-down, then he'll go for it while Kennen goes for a last hit.
Kennen goes for the last-hit and then gets EQ'd.
This perhaps seems fairly basic, but the discipline here is essential.
Going for harass that costs a sizeable amount of mana, like it does for Jayce, you only
want to fire when you have the highest possible chance of landing your skill shot.
So waiting for Kennen to push up to get this caster off the tower shot was essential.
Jayce now correctly positions in this area here, which is further from the tower than
the top half of the lane, allowing him to land an auto and getting out of tower range
as we see here.
Let's speed it up while he continues to shove the wave for mission 1.
Alright, now at this point we can see Nocturne show on the tri brush ward, so he's just cleared
scuttle.
Sword immediately pulls back for just a second and likely panned his camera over to Nocturne
to see what's up.
He'd have seen no red buff on the Nocturne yet and Nocturne still being level 2.
If Nocturne tried to gank at level 2 with the Kennen on half life, they wouldn't be
able to get the kill and could die to the Jayce.
In lower elo, they'd probably try for this gank anyway though, as we've seen recently
from Hector's Riven smurf game, where you can turn it.
Moving on as Jayce continues pushing, we can see that his Camille ends up invading Nocturne.
If you were the Jayce here, would you use your lane priority to help out - or would
you stay in lane?
Think about it.
The correct choice is to stay in lane.
Camille is a strong early jungler who won't need help with this invade.
Galio could followup if the Talon roams and Jayce can stay in lane and keep Kennen here.
There's no reason to give up lane pressure to help someone that doesn't need it.
If the tables were turned though and it was the opposing jungler invading bot side jungle:
it'd be a no brainer to use your lane priority to close in and help out.
So, Jayce keeps pushing and shoves in this next wave.
Everything's going great so far.
He's pushing, he is harassing, he's not getting ganked.
But it doesn't seem like he's gaining a big lead right?
Nothing that can carry the game at least.
At this point in time he has a 7 CS lead over the Kennen.
This may not seem like a lot, but it's about 130 gold and should allow him to get an item
advantage on his first recall.
We'll talk more about that in a moment.
For now Jayce is in melee form and starts to auto for mana, so he can harass again when
he shoves this wave.
Kennen actually does a good job at punishing this, demonstrating how much harass he can
pull off, as a lane dominant champ himself, especially vs melees.
This obviously isn't great for Sword, but he's done such a good job so far it doesn't
really matter.
He still has a potion and he has enough mana to land more harass when he shoves.
Now we're about to see a cool way of trading that we'll run you through here.
As Jayce is about to go for this last hit, Kennen is going to look to harass.
This is something we teach ALL the time right, harass when your opponent goes for a last
hit.
However, if you suspect your opponent will harass you on a last hit, which Jayce does,
then you can reverse engineer it and skip going for the last hit and take a great trade
(providing you're stronger) which Jayce still is.
He takes a great trade by using Q on a minion to land the AoE onto Kennen, autos, knock
back, autos into EQ.. just barely missing the kill.
He could actually flash to the bot side of the turret here for a kill, but it'd risk
trading flashes with Kennen if he reacts in time.
He'll hold his flash for a later all-in, or to stay aggressive and use it vs ganks.
Anyway, Jayce shoves and recalls.
Currently he's got a 10 CS lead.
He uses this advantage to buy a doran's shield, long sword, control ward and health potion
as his new purchases, alongside his starting doran's blade.
Kennen has an amp tome, control ward, refillable alongside his starting doran's shield.
Breaking down these item differences:
Jayce is considerably stronger with the early game item doran's shield making him much tankier,
alongside the extra DPS from his blade and long sword.
While Kennen's combat item is just a component, that won't add much power to his lane phase
in comparison.
He makes the aggressive choice to recall straight back into lane, which aligns with mission
4.
He wants to pressure and get the first turret.
He places his control ward at the tribrush.
He has to start worrying about Nocturne's point of power, level 6, while he's trying
to push working on missions 1 and 3.
This ward is great, because it'll likely scout Nocturne's level 6 ulti which doesn't have
a ton of range and most Nocturnes do it from jungle.
Kennen comes to place his own control ward, getting both harassed and denied.
This is excellent play from the Jayce and will apply a ton of gank threat pressure now
as he moves forward.
He then places a deep river ward to scout Nocturne from another angle.
Now Sword heads back into lane, what we're about to see is a very visible difference
between two types of players.
The few who convert on small CS leads and everyone else.
Now this, is what a CS lead can be converted into, if you base, buy and get aggressive.
Let's roll it back and see what types of champs you can do this on.
Jayce waits for the next red wave to connect to his blue wave before going in, this is
something you always want to do, so you don't immediately tank minion damage by going in.
The minion wave looks huge, way too large to trade into.
But as a lane dominant champ with the extra tankiness from his item advantage, he can
go for this play.
Kennen decided to kite away to tower, with Jayce following, so Jayce actually took next
to no minion damage via kiting the wave as he chased Kennen
Had Kennen stayed to utilize his wave, he'd have gotten Jayce low, but wouldn't have had
enough damage to kill him at level 5 with no ulti.
Champions you can do this really aggressive forced trade into big waves with a similar
item lead, would be Gnar, Kennen, Swain, champs who can push up and just deal a lot of burst
damage.
If Jayce had used his W here, he'd have scored the kill.
With the unfortunate missed kill, Jayce shoves and recalls.
He gets a larger CS lead from this which allows him to buy another long sword, with a control
ward while Kennen buys boots.
As Jayce gets back into lane, he's immediately looking to utilize his continuous item advantage
to convert on his CS lead.
He goes for a very aggressive play by sneaking into the middle brush while Kennen is clearing
a ward and doesn't notice.
He sits and waits as Kennen pushes up.
Again, this is a giant wave, let's see how this plays out.
That was super close despite the item lead, let's find out why.
So this works because he landed his EQ from out of vision.
The reason it's close is because of the wave, kennen being level 6, but mostly because Kennen
summoner swapped to ignite.
We don't think sword accounted for that and perhaps wouldn't have went for this had he
known.
Anyway, speeding it up as we're reaching the end of today's guide.
He shoves into a recall.
He did risk dying to nocturne with this shove, but it paid off.
He places his trademark tribrush ward for the nocturne and continues with all four of
his missions.
He's shoving looking for harass and will get to work on the tower when he pushes all the
way.
At this point, Camille is looking to give top lane some attention, so Jayce goes in
and hits a full combo, to which nocturne responds and they trade positively 2 for 1.
More importantly, this gives Jayce the first tower, completing mission 4.
Even if this didn't happen, Jayce would've rinse and repeated his missions and got the
first tower by himself, thanks to his unrelenting pressure.
Let's get you today's takeaways.
Alright, so Jayce went into this matchup knowing he dominates the 1v1 with superior waveclear
and burst.
He used this to crush Kennen in the tribrush and then shove, but shoving makes you a target
for the jungler, so he was vigilant about Nocturne ganks.
Thanks to smart wards and also his Camille pressuring the Nocturne, he was able to take
an isolated lane phase vs Kennen nearly the entire time.
Gaining so much pressure that Nocturne wasn't able to gank while he was top side.
Jayce was unfortunate that he didn't score early kills, but he did score a CS lead which
he was able to translate into huge results.
He did this by shoving the wave when he was low on resources, buying, then turning up
the heat when he had an item lead.
He rinse and repeated until he was finally able to score a kill, into another kill, then
finally the tower.
But he would've got first tower thanks to his CS lead alone.
Alright, so that's it for this one.
Thanks for watching and we'll catch you next time!