IEM NYC Tourney summary

MajorX17

MajorX17

Member
So over the weekend, there was a big qualification tournament in North America, where the best 3 teams qualified for a major, international tournament taking place in NYC. See the spoiler for an overview of the actual tournament's organization, if you're interested. If you're not into LoL tournaments, hopefully you will find the rest of the post somewhat interesting.
IEM stands for Intel Extreme Masters. The IEM tournament is a worldwide tournament with 3 stops that I know of (Germany, New York City, and Guangzhou, China). There has already been one round of the tournament played in Germany, in which USA teams Counter Logic Gaming and Team SoloMid took first and second. Qualification rounds are played in each of the different regions (North America, Europe, China, maybe South East Asia) before the actual tournaments at the three stops. The tournament I'm talking about in this post is the North American qualification round for the NYC stop of the whole IEM tournament. Confusing, I know.

In this leg of the tournament, Rock Solid picks up their first first-place victory in a tourament, Team Rez (fairly new team) takes second, and Team SoloMid (a veteran team that's been around for a while) takes third; all three qualify for the actual tournament in NYC. Rock Solid consistently played crazy teams, one time going for 5 single-target DPS champions (seriously, they had almost no AoE damage and zero AoE CC) and completely owning top-level competitive teams.
In this particular round of the tournament, team Rock Solid basically went undefeated. What's really interesting about this is that they rarely, if ever, played a true support or a ranged DPS champion. For those who don't know, the current "best" style of gameplay is for one tanky or mage champion to solo top, one mage to solo mid, a ranged DPS and a support to duo bot, and one champion to jungle. Rock Solid pretty much ignored the conventional style of play and picked by their own rules, often with the only ranged champion on their team being a mage (Ryze was their favorite, which is interesting on its own since this is the first time I've seen Ryze in competitive play in a long long time). Some interesting picks incldue solo-mid AP Galio, bot lane support Gangplank (yes, you read that right), and bot lane support Maokai. If Rock Solid is able to keep this up, there could be drastic metagame shifts in the near future, including, but not limited to, aggressive DPS/mage champions playing the role of bot lane support and champs like Soraka, Taric, and Janna being ignored.

You can see the tournament tree here, and I'll post a link to videos of the games later, once they're available. You can find some of them here, just look for videos with IEM New York in the title.

Quick recap:
  • Big worldwide LoL tournament going on right now
  • Newer teams are proving to be tough competitors in North America
  • New team comps can be very effective (who needs ranged DPS anyway?)
  • Gangplank makes a strong support champion... or something
  • Basically, a team that never won a tournament before went undefeated with insane new team comps, cutting out roles that were previously considered essential
  • Possibility of new metagame taking over very soon, with support and/or ranged DPS being a thing of the past
I would have put (a lot) more into this post, but I was afraid of turning it into a massive wall of text. If something here isn't making sense, leave a question in the thread. I'll check it semi-frequently.
 
It's nice to see things shook up once in a while. I doubt that supports like Janna will start to get ignored, but it is very viable to use unconventional tactics on occasion. There's been plenty of times we went 5 tanks or some other nonsense and still won against a traditional comp. Good players will find that way to maximize the benefits they have, even if they aren't the normal ones.

I myself love to play support with non-support champs. It's fun :) Over time you see which champs play support come and go a bit. For instance, I like more supporty builds on both zilean and cho'gath and would be raged at by pubs that i didn't go straight AP carry or HP tank, respectively. We already had those roles, why not build hybrid or support? It just might catch the enemy team off-guard.
 
Please do not miss the point of this post.
This was a high level tournament, not some scrub pub game that I get stuck in , being in ELO gehenna and all. the winning team went undefeated vs. some of the best the world has to offer...
I have tried to convince otheres that the conventional is not always the 'best' way, but a good team with good strategy can pull off a win.
 
eraserhead17 said:
Please do not miss the point of this post.
This was a high level tournament, not some scrub pub game that I get stuck in , being in ELO gehenna and all. the winning team went undefeated vs. some of the best the world has to offer...
I have tried to convince otheres that the conventional is not always the 'best' way, but a good team with good strategy can pull off a win.
Click to expand...

I've been trying to convince my friends that this is the case since I started playing League with them. It's actually why I started playing Karma... Nobody wanted to play support, and since I was really new I got stuck with it so I was all like 'Screw you guys I'll play Karma then' -not realizing just how underrated and beastly she is. All our matches seem to be Karma support, tank, jungler, range AP mid, essentially dead standard. Drives me nuts sometimes.
 
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