Analysis and Opinion

Academy All-Stars: Summer 2020, Jungle

Today in LCS Academy Summer All-Stars, the focus is on the Jungle.

Criteria

A reminder of my criteria for being an All Star in the Academy league:

  • Peak Performance
  • Versatility
  • Consistency
  • Growth

Get a bit more detail on those criteria in the first post of the series.

AnDa

4 Academy Standouts appearances in 9 weeks

We last saw AnDa in the LCS in Spring 2019 with 100 Thieves, but he first appeared in North America’s top league in 2017 with Immortals. He’s been up and down since then, showing promise but never quite breaking through. I picked him as the first-team Jungler again this split, after giving him the same honour in Spring. He was consistent as an enabler for a reliable bot lane, a dynamic Mid lane carry in Giyuu, and half-splits each for Huni and Kumo in the top lane, driving his team’s action with a massive 81.3% kill participation in the regular season and 77.3% in the playoffs. AnDa outpathed other Junglers consistently, generating early leads with much better farming (he put up a +9.1 CSD10 in the regular season). AnDa wasn’t able make enough of a difference in a playoff loss to TSM Academy, though, and his split ended on a down note.

The Jungler pool in Academy this year was not all that strong, so AnDa’s relative dominance needs to be taken with a grain of salt. He’ll get some consideration from LCS teams and hopefully a few tryouts but it’s most likely, in my mind, that he’ll be back in Academy in 2021 and will look to add another gear to his game.

Inori

2 Academy Standouts appearances in 9 weeks

Inori, like AnDa, has had some LCS time and is fighting to get back in that mix. He looked better than AnDa in the playoffs, contributing to a second straight championship for Cloud9 Academy with diligent objective control and team fight engages. In the playoffs he mostly blind picked Sett and Gragas while opponents spent their bans on C9A’s solo laners.

Inori had the strongest pair of solo laners to work with of any Jungler in the league, which doesn’t negate his performance but does contextualize it somewhat. I think he could run in the LCS and wouldn’t look out of place, but I’m not sure where he would be an upgrade right now.

Other Junglers of Note

Akaadian did his part for Dignitas Academy but that roster, as a whole, never seemed to function at the level it should.

Kenvi would have been top 2 if he’d played more than 6 games in the regular season and 3 in the playoffs. He earned Academy Standouts mentions in two of three possible weeks in the regular season and showed the peak performance and consistency I’m looking for. Kenvi is going to be a better player than anyone else I’ve mentioned in this article—he might be already.