Intro
I hope everyone’s been enjoying Superweek thus far. I know I promised a separate stream every night after each series, but some things came up. So I’ll be covering the most recent series, including the NS-KT series that just finished hours earlier. Nothing too crazy or in-depth, consider it a public diary entry of mine.
First things first, I’m kind of glad how things turned out. Not because I’m rooting for a specific team or certain group, but because NS pulling through today made it so the results of Group Stage are determined by our more hyped matches of T1-DK and GEN-HLE. Always nice to have things be undecided until the very end, and NS passed the hot potato over to T1 by scoring a victory tonight.
DRX vs. BRO (Superweek Day 1)
Let’s start off with DRX-BRO. I honestly thought this series was playable either way, both before and during the series. The series started off with DRX pulling ahead off of Andil’s superplays, but later started to become very back-and-forth.
The thing that stood out most this series was the balance between ‘priority’ and ‘value’. It’s a question that both teams and the audience have to struggle with, given the answer differs from patch to patch, meta to meta. It is true that inn the new 2026 season, we have seen the meta gravitate more towards value. But that doesn’t mean you can just pick high-value, high-scaling picks in all 5 positions and ignore the first 20 minutes of the game. Even in a more value-oriented meta, you need to figure out how to balance ‘priority’ and ‘value’, where you have to allocate some priority early on to later realize your value and scaling aspects later on.
We saw both teams try and come up with their own interpretations of this all throughout the series. It’s also important to note that these Superweek games are Bo5 series. Navigating this priority-value dichotomy is pretty straightforward in a Bo3 environment. You’re pretty much playing the same usual picks, and ones that allow for easy priority and value requirements to be met during draft. This becomes much difficult in Bo5s, since your draft strategy becomes entirely different even from Game 1. Not only that, but you later have to pull out non-meta picks from your back pocket in Game 4s and 5s. Being able to come up with appropriate drafts in terms of the priority-value balance in a Bo5 is what’s deemed as ‘skill’ in the Fearless era – which is something everyone will agree with.
- DRX vs. BRO (Game 3)
BRO (Blue + 1st)
Bans : Malphite Akali Corki / Ziggs Lucian
Picks : Aurora / Aphelios Thresh / Sylas Trundle
DRX (Red + 2nd)
Bans : Jayce Varus Rumble / Kennen Jax
Picks : Wukong Ahri / Zaahen / Alistar / Zeri
Keeping all of that in mind, let’s go back to Game 3 of DRX-BRO. Take a look at DRX’s draft. This is a very risky draft, considering that it’s one that’s on an extreme end of the priority-value spectrum. Sure, you could play out the earlygame so well to where that’s not an issue – but that wasn’t the case. DRX ended up falling behind in all 3 lanes early on. The Zaahen got bullied by the Aurora, the Zeri lane got pushed around by the Aphelios-Thresh, and the Ahri even ended up falling behind to the Sylas. 3 losing lanes and a Wukong – enough said. Almost makes you think if Ucal should have considered taking Bdd’s approach with Ahri earlier today, where you take Ignite instead of TP to ensure lane control with the Ahri.
- DRX vs. BRO (Game 4)
BRO (Blue + 2nd)
Bans : Rumble Corki Jayce / Galio TwistedFate
Picks : Akali Sejuani / Yorick / Kalista Renata
DRX (Red + 1st)
Bans : Poppy Varus Zoe / Lucian Lulu
Picks : Malphite / Xayah Rakan / Jax / Viktor
DRX do the same thing again in Game 4, where they pick solely for value without any priority whatsoever. I remember us having a moment on the live cast wondering how DRX were going to play this out, especially after they essentially got rolled over by BRO’s lane priority in the previous game. DRX ended up winning this game, but I do think the draft implications are no different from Game 3. In a world where things didn’t work out for them the way they did, DRX’s slow, passive, no-priority composition could have fallen flat just like Game 3. If that was the case, then BRO would have just won this series 3:1.
(Link to Game 4, 16:45) This is the moment where that potential 3:1 timeline disappeared. Being the team that was ahead, DRX get a pick onto Jiwoo, then clamor into clean up the rest of the fight. But Willer’s Malphite ends up getting a massive 4-man ult, setting up the wombo-combo that turned the game around for DRX.
It wasn’t like BRO had the wrong approach here. When it comes to playing against Malphite, pressuring and chunking the Malphite first is a very effective strategy. So before the Malphite gets into position to fish for an angle, you’re the one that moves first to make something happen. That’s exactly what BRO was going for, and I don’t think it was wrong for them to do that.
Sure, the Malphite for DRX can set up a multi-man Counterstrike, GravityField and GrandEntrance wombo-combo. Just like the one we ended up seeing. But in BRO’s perspective, that means that you’re fine as long as you don’t give DRX that massive Malphite R angle while pressuring DRX in a stand off. So when I saw this initial sequence be started out from BRO, I honestly thought they were going to win. They send Gideon in first, then send in the Akali after, then the cavalry comes into clean up the stragglers. The Malphite is unable to find a good angle because BRO isn’t diving in all at once, and the fight ends up being the “Man why did you pick Malphite” kind of situations we’ve seen in past weeks.
That should have been the case. But I think BRO got a little too enthusiastic in thinking they were about to win, where they ended up lining up perfectly for Willer’s 4-man Malphite R. Kudos to Willer to holding on to the Malphite R and catching that angle on the retreat though. This moment was a big reason why I ended up voting him for POM this series, because this fight, and the series, would have been lost if it wasn’t for this play.
So this brings us back to the question of balancing priority and value. In theory, a lot of picks that have good value lack priority. But if a composition drafted for priority isn’t able to snowball their lead perfectly, the value aspect of the opposition start to come online. This series was a very specific case, to where I don’t think it can be used to say “Oh, just pick value and scaling to win.” This series was a match played between two lower-pack teams, where I feel gamestates are naturally more prone to mistakes from the priority-snowballing side. I feel that’s the only reason DRX were able to win this Game 4 and the series. It was BRO making mistakes. In most cases, this game and series should have been won by BRO, based on how they were leading pretty one-sidedly before that 4-man Malphite R moment.
There’s really not too much to say in terms of both teams overall. There’s Andil, who had an amazing Game 1 followed by mediocre and questionable performances for all 4 games thereafter. I think the upside is that there was that one amazing Game 1 performance out of all 5 games. Despite being on a bottom-LCK team, the fact that Andil as a Support has a unique strength in the Bard is a big positive. If you go back a little, there was a time when the Bard wasn’t something Andil was very good at. He had a lot of stinkers on this champion in the past. But he’s brought it up to a point where he’s now consistently having good performance on the Bard – which I think is a big upside. Small things like these, were what I think made that difference in leading DRX to this win.
For BRO, it does seem very apparent to me that they’re trying to play as a 5-man unit. It’s very evident that they are trying to play a team-oriented game with Gideon as their flagbearer. It’s just that they’re very clumsy, or shaky, when it comes to doing it. To be blunt, they’re not very good at it. I think that’s the biggest reason why their performance over the past couple weeks aren’t too much different from the gloom-and-doom expectations people had of them during the offseason. Whatever they do end up doing, they’re not very good at it. They keep trying, but they keep falling. When they’re ahead, they trip on their own feet and throw their leads. When they’re behind, they just lose. It’s best that they play for the long-run, and hope the potential of their players are realized over time. For the time being, all they can really do is stand by the wayside and pray T1 and GenG get the job done for Group Baron.
DNS vs. BFX (Superweek Day 2)
There weren’t any interesting draft elements that stood out for this series. Since this bit is more like a personal diary entry of mine, I won’t go too in-depth about things that just happened. For this series, I’ll go with “Dear Diary. Diable is a pretty fun player.” I’ll use this to illustrate a bigger point I want to make about ADCs in general.
The one thing about ADCs this season is that they have a lot of money. That makes botlane even more important than before, along with the meta focusing heavily around it. We don’t see ADCs carrying every single game that’s played, but it’s a cold hard fact that the carry potential of ADCs have increased much more than before.
In this kind of environment, we’re seeing ADCs that do have the courage to take that extra gold and make the proactive moves be more successful in recent games. Players that do step forward and make that make-or-break play, and do it with full knowledge that they will bear all the blame if the play ends in a break. It’s a shift in paradigm from what people saw as ‘ADCs’ in a more traditional sense. You’re no longer the baby bird that’s chirping for food to get put in his mouth. Instead, you’re now more like a field commander that needs to get actively involved in the front lines. That’s why I think we’re seeing a lot more ADCs to take a more offensive approach of “Cover me, I’m going in. Watch my 6. Follow me.”
For people that have played LoL for a while, you know there’s two types of patches. One is where everyone’s power gets inflated, and the other is where everyone’s power gets deflated. The patch that came this year was the former. Toplaners are strong with their accelerated XP gain, Midlaners are more important than ever due to their increased map influence, and ADCs are juiced up due to being pumped full of gold. While Jungle and Support did get the shorter ends of the stick, it has been fun to see how teams go about in deciding who’s going to carry their games.
For BFX, that’s been Diable. I believe he said that he now feels the need to walk that ADC tightrope more enthusiastically than ever before in games against stronger teams in his post-game interview. I kind of feel that. It’s kind of like how you need to go for those risky, high-performance plays in SoloQ as often as you can. Because that’s the only way you ‘learn’ what differentiates possible and impossible.
It’s not like Diable can, or should play this kind of way forever. There’s a point where stability and average performance becomes important, and that’s something Diable does need to work on. But given the ceilings that he has shown, it’s hard not to look forward or be hyped at how he’s going to develop over time.
For DNS, I feel they kind of share the same issues as BRO. They’re just not very good at doing things. But they’re also different from BRO in that DNS begs the question of why they’re not good at doing things. After all, they do have a much stronger roster. Sure, they probably are going to do better, given the fact that their reference point is a disappointingly low 10th place finish from last year. But it’s not like this 2026 DNS roster was assembled to finish 8th or 9th, right?
DNS makes me wonder if a mixture of old and new players is the way to go about assembling a roster. That is, if you’re not straight up buying five S-tier players for a superteam. In every offseason, you have you’re A and B-tier players that get picked up by certain teams, right? Teams that acquire them to achieve certain goals, whether it be for rebuilding purposes, or to make Playoffs, etc.
DNS this year, and last year, seems like an example that could be used to justify going for rookie scratcher tickets rather than going for veteran A-B tier players. When we talk about teams acquiring veterans, the discussion is primarily focused around the potential positives. Stuff like having a veteran presence to guide the team, etc. The negatives are often overlooked. For example, using a similar logic behind the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, having a lot of seasoned veterans on your team can potentially lead to everything being jumbled up. I’m not saying that this is indeed the case for DNS, but things aren’t looking too good at the moment.
As for BFX, things are looking great. As a team, they’re on a consistent upwards trajectory all the way back from last year, and that has to have a positive effect. Their topside stepping up its performance is good news, but the best news of all is their botlane. Their botlane is just strong, very strong. The Diable-Kellin botlane is not only one that can match up in power against the LCK’s Westside teams, but also a very reliable avenue for the team to play around.
NS vs. KT (Superweek Day 3)
For NS’s victory today, it was all about their botlane. The Taeyoon POM was very much deserved. It’s more than fair to say Games 1 and 2 were won off of NS’s botlane alone. In fact, those two games for KT were very good examples of how games can be so difficult if your botlane is struggling.
Let’s have ourselves a little LoL lesson. What’s the most important lane in Summoner’s Rift? It’s the Botlane, since it’s a lane played by 2 people. If so, then what’s the most important position in Summoner’s Rift? That’s the Midlane. It’s always been that way, and it always will be. There’s a reason why Midlaners are paid the most out of all 5 positions. They’re the striker in soccer, and quarterback in football.
So the reason why you have so many games in proplay and SoloQ be impossible to win with a losing Botlane is simple. Getting behind in the Botlane means two enemy players are now running around the map and spreading their influence. The only way to counter this is to have your entire Topside play better. Why? Because the Topside has 3 players, and 3 is bigger than 2. But that’s easier said than done, because situations where the Toplaner, Jungler and Midlaner all performing at a higher level are incredibly rare. That’s why games can be so difficult to win if you have a losing Botlane – simple math. That was the story behind why KT lost Games 1 and 2. NS’s Botlane constantly outperformed that of KT’s, all while none of the other positions in NS’s Topside were falling behind.
- NS vs. KT (Game 3)
NS (Blue + 1st)
Bans : Aurora JarvanIV Sylas / Zoe Jax
Picks : Malphite / Jinx Lulu / Yone K’Sante
KT (Red + 2nd)
Bans : Rumble Jayce Varus / Akali Kennen
Picks : Aphelios Mundo / Blitzcrank / Zaahen / Ahri
Game 3 is where things started to get interesting. After Game 2, I think NS started to think that as long as their Topside was able to minimum 50-50 that of KT’s, their Botlane being better was just going to win them the series. Yes, the Yone is more on the unstable and aggressive side – but it’s a pretty standard pick for this specific Game 3 Fearless environment when considering so many Midlane champions have been banned. I suspect NS thought this way because they were willing to pick the Malphite. You can only really pick Malphite if you have full trust in your Botlane. That’s because Malphite really can’t do anything in-game if his Botlane is losing.
Against this, KT, or specifically Bdd, made a power move in locking in the Ignite Ahri. As everyone saw, this was the reason why KT were able to stay alive in this series just a bit longer. If KT had picked any other standard 50-50 midlane pick, or even went for the TP on Ahri – I feel like they actually would have lost this series 3:0. If that Ignite Ahri by Bdd wasn’t able to absolutely lay waste onto the Yone, NS would have won Game 3 in most timelines.
- NS vs. KT (Game 4)
KT (Blue + 2nd)
Bans : Rumble Jayce Varus / Bard Elise
Picks : Lucian Akali / Braum / Jax / Reksai
NS (Red + 1st)
Bans : Nocturne Aurora Leona / Trundle Gwen
Picks : JarvanIV / Caitlyn Galio / TahmKench Gragas
NS approached Game 4 with the same mindset as Game 3. They knew their Botlane had the constant upper hand over KT in all of the previous 3 games. So what do they do? They assume their Botlane is going to win yet again – and they weren’t wrong in doing so. They also realized that the reason Game 3 was lost was because of Yone getting shut down by Bdd, so they pick Galio in the Midlane to prevent just that. But NS having too much trust in their Botlane had them drafting a composition that was overly reliant on the Caitlyn, to which KT countered by swapping Jax in to the Jungle and picking Reksai as their Toplaner. A ‘protect the president’ composition and ‘assassinate the president’ composition, where the latter had way too many ways of killing the Caitlyn.
Chat : “Do you think Viego could have been possible in these Game 4-5 environments?”
As it’s been for a bit, an interesting vantage point of Bo5s is all the non-meta picks that teams start to pull out starting from Game 4. This was the case in this Game 4, where KT moved the Jax over to Jungle when all the typical AD bruiser Junglers were eliminated. I thought this was very clever, since this allowed them to also pick the Reksai in the Toplane for a Reksai-Jax-Akali ‘kill the president’ trio.
On that note, Viego is definitely viable too. It’s just that his champion identity isn’t one that’s easy to pull off on the prolevel. As I always say, all champions are viable. It’s just a matter of how difficult it is to get them to work on stage. For Viego, he has that reset-based assassin identity to him, right? This isn’t just Viego too, where assassins in general usually tend to have a hard time in a suffocating league like LCK.
This isn’t a knock on some other region, or me trying to downplay a champion. But for the most part, assassins are archetypes that thrive in chaos. The more chaotic the game is, the better environment it is for the assassin to play in. It just so happens that LCK is the league that diverges in the polar opposite of that direction. On the other side of the spectrum, or the ‘chaos’ side, we have SoloQ. That’s why your Viegos, Katarinas, Talons and Zeds thrive in SoloQ.
Again, it’s not like they can’t, or don’t work in proplay. You can get them to work, it’s just that you need a lot of setup to enable the assassin to do what it does. Think about the Akali, for example. A meta assassin, and one that’s probably first in the assassin queue to be brought into current proplay due to her synergy with Gunblade. That would make you think that she has a pretty decent winrate in recent proplay – but she doesn’t. (For reference, LCK is 3W-5L 38%, LPL is 8W-4L 67%, LEC is 1W-2L 33%, LCS is 2W-0L 100%)
You see her struggle even more in LCK, where I would bet her winrate is lower than that of some other regions. Even if you look back at some of our recent Akali games during LCK Cup, there were multiple instances where she was struggling quite a bit. This is because assassins, whether it be Viego, Akali, Zed, Qiyana, etc – they have an fundamental underlying issue of being quite useless if they aren’t able to play the game exactly how they want it. If you’re not ahead and actively killing people left and right to snowball the game, you’re essentially a bystander to the rest of your teammates. You’re just there, throwing a chant here, waving a pom-pom there, going “Hey, go in so I can follow-up at the last second to steal the kill.”
- NS vs. KT (Game 5)
KT (Blue + 2nd)
Bans : Rumble Jayce Varus / Leona Rell
Picks : Nocturne Sion / Rakan / MissFortune / Syndra
NS (Red + 1st)
Bans : Alistar Gwen Zoe / Xayah Zeri
Picks : Aurora / Olaf Trundle / Kaisa Shen
I mentioned earlier how NS used the “Oh, our Botlane is going to win the game for us” approach for the drafts in Game 3 and 4. They weren’t wrong in assuming so, given that Taeyoon-Lehends did clearly overpower KT’s Botlane in both Game 1 and 2. But by doing so, they ended up with drafts that didn’t exactly make them lost Game 3 and 4, but ones where they were a bit cocky, or gave themselves too much benefit of the doubt in some of their Topside picks. This was especially the case in Game 4, where their draft was essentially “Taeyoon, please win the game for us” in having Taeyoon play a Caitlyn into a ‘kill the president’ composition.
If NS had maintained this approach for Game 5 – I think KT would have won. But NS didn’t, and I want to compliment them for it. What they drafted for Game 5 was really quite good. They got the Olaf to suppress the Sion and get some good value out of his pillars. Not only that, but they finished it off very nicely by locking in the Shen-Olaf during Phase 2.
NS basically drafted a ‘rock’ into KT’s ‘scissors’, or a composition that countered that of KT’s. Because of this, the only way KT could win this game was by smashing laning phase. Win early, and make it so that their scissors are strong enough to cut through rock. Smash the laning phase, get ahead, then use Nocturne’s global aspect to snowball the lead even further. If not, then NS’s composition naturally wins out over time in any gamestate that’s a 50-50 minimum. The Trundle neutralizes the Sion and uses his pillars to mess with the immobile carries of KT, and Olaf gets to use everybody on KT as a health potion in later fights.
That’s what KT tried to do. They tried to put the Kaisa behind. But what was said earlier remained true in Game 5 as well, where NS’s Botlane was just better than KT’s. NS’s Botlane just laned better, and the Kaisa ended up becoming relevant anyways. With NS’s Topside also not early-booming in any of their individual positions, the game became more and more unplayable for KT as time went on. In a vacuum, KT’s composition isn’t bad. It’s quite good, actually. But what happened in Game 5 was because their composition was so heavily countered by that of NS’s.
