Oracle's Elixir

Academy Standouts: 2020 Spring Week 4

Tim Sevenhuysen

Academy Standouts highlights the players who performed best in the most recent week of NA Academy play.

Previous Academy Standouts:

If you want to track your favourite team’s Academy performance throughout each split, you can also check out the Academy stats pages, starting with 2020 Spring regular season player stats and team stats.

Ablazeolive, Mid, Golden Guardians

Ablazeolive is back for his third Standouts feature slot in four weeks, and this time his team had the results to show for it, taking down CLG Academy and then pulling an upset on DIG Academy. With powerful control play, Ablazeolive has been making a very strong case for himself as one the best Mids in Academy this year.

Ablazeolive Stats, 2020 Spring Week 4
Numbers in parentheses are rank within own position.

  KDA KP GXD10 DPM DMG%
W4 23.0 88.5% +168 542 34.8%
Total 3.6 85.4% +222 593 34.1%

The Cassiopeia performance Ablazeolive put up against DIG Academy was a highlight. After going even in lane against Damonte’s Rumble, Ablazeolive took advantage of his team’s scaling to step up in team fights, getting out his damage with ease and applying his ult proactively to draw out key engage ults and protect his team from any possible DIG comeback attempts.

His Azir against CLG Academy was also good, featuring some big-time team fighting behind a Sett Sejuani front line.

Credit goes to ZionSpartan, Hard, and huhi for giving Ablazeolive room to work, but ultimately Ablazeolive gets the feature nod.

Fudge, Top, Cloud9

In week 4, Cloud9 finally saw the quality Oceanic Top laner they were hoping they had signed. He showed up big on Ornn against EG Academy and Aatrox against TSM Academy.

Fudge Stats, 2020 Spring Week 4
Numbers in parentheses are rank within own position.

  KDA KP GXD10 DPM DMG%
W4 12.7 80.9% +262 430 19.5%
Total 4.4 60.7% +181 388 20.2%

Fudge’s Ornn moved very well around the map, making plays onto other lanes and finding team fight engages.

In his Aatrox game, Fudge could have done even more if his team had played better around him. His split push wasn’t able to get quite as much as it should because C9 Academy misexecuted the 4-man portion of the 4-1 split push. But Fudge did his part, found mistakes to punish, and performed well in team fights.

There was a lot of hype from the Oceanic scene about Fudge in Summer 2019, and if he keeps playing like this, that hype will start to grow in North America, too.

Yusui, Mid, Team Liquid

On a standard Mid lane stat line, Yusui doesn’t look great in week 4, but deathless games on Ornn and Zoe in a low-econ role showed a different side for a player who has historically been a pure primary carry.

Yusui Stats, 2020 Spring Week 4
Numbers in parentheses are rank within own position.

  KDA KP GXD10 DPM DMG%
W4 23.0 59.0% -323 445 21.9%
Total 2.9 59.4% +43 382 21.6%

Yusui’s utility with Zoe bubbles and Ornn engages powered TL Academy to a 2-0 week and put them back on track for the split. He worked well with Cao‘s Nautilus in both games and bought time and space for Tactical to soak up farm and pump out damage.

If Yusui can continue to show flexibility, and grows into more synergy with Shernfire, he and TL Academy will be a team worth watching by playoff time.

Additional Standouts

The following players, in alphabetical order, also caught my eye.

Photos courtesy flickr.com/lolesports