I already used the “It’s the most wonderful time of the year” opener last year but IT’S SO TRUE. Offseason in League of Legends esports is just so exciting.
Watch the video version of the power rankings on YouTube
We’ve had major shake-ups all around the world in the aftermath of DAMWON Gaming winning the 2020 World Championships, from C9 Perkz to G2 Rekkles to LPL Nuguri and Tarzan and the return of Khan and Bang to the LCK. The LCS has assigned “resident” status to every Oceanic player, too, opening the floodgates on last year’s Oceanic influx, especially after the success FBI found with the Golden Guardians.
In the LCS, only 15 out of the 50 starters from the end of this season are continuing with the same team into 2021, with five teams replacing four or more of their starters.
I’ve slogged through the entire LCS shake-up and formed my unshakeable opinions about how well each LCS organization played their cards, and where they’ll stack up competitively over the year to come. Read on, if you dare!
For an even deeper look, watch the VOD of my live-streamed presentation of the power rankings for an in-depth discussion of all my rankings, offseason grades, and more.
Power Rankings Explanation
Each team has been assigned a power ranking number that predicts where they will finish in the LCS standings by the end of 2021.
Teams also have a +/- modifier that gives an idea of how much higher or lower they might be able to finish depending on how things “click.” In other words, the +/- is both an indicator of my confidence in my prediction, and also an estimate of the roster’s volatility: how good could they be if everything comes together perfectly, and/or how bad might they be if everything falls apart?
Offseason Grade Criteria
I judge the quality of a team’s offseason on several criteria, including:
- Existing resources (players under contract, estimation of available budget)
- Spend vs. value gained
- Opportunity cost (by making a certain transaction, what other potential transactions were they not able to make?)
- Clarity of purpose (is the team trying to win this year, or build up for the future, for example)
- Organizational depth
The team’s grade is a summary of these factors, based on how they entered the 2020/21 offseason and what they had secured as of December 8, 2020 (with some teams’ Academy rosters not yet being finalized). The grades can range from A+ to F, with anything in the A range being great to excellent, B range meaning average to good, C range being below average, D basically meaning I’m actively disappointed, and F meaning a complete failure.
The Results
Let’s do it!
We’ll start with my 10th-ranked team, and count up from there.
Here are quick links to each rank in case your scrolling finger gets tired:
10 GOLDEN GUARDIANS
Given the team’s budget compared to the cost of “loading up” for a 2021 championship attempt (based on the huge buyout and salary numbers we’ve been seeing), it was the correct call for the Golden Guardians to get maximum financial value out of Closer, Damonte, and FBI by selling them to 100 Thieves and resetting for a rebuild.
They’ve stocked up on players with high potential, and they’re hoping three or four of them will pay off enough to retain for 2022, with one or two real breakouts.
Conceptually, I give their rebuild high marks. In execution, I have concerns. I’m most excited about Prismal and Chime, who are both going to start in Academy. I hope Ablazeolive will develop well in his LCS shot. Niles is a grade A prospect, for sure. Outside of that, the org is taking some big risks on longer-term rookie projects like Iconic and RoseThorn, and putting three rookies alongside Newbie, a fresh import, while expecting Stixxay to hold the entire thing together, with Stixxay coming off a very rough Summer 2020 performance, no less. That is a lot of risk and volatility to pack into organization’s depth chart.
I like Tally as a veteran signing out of the Oceanic scene to do a lot of heavy lifting as a mentor, and possibly take over from Niles for a few games if he struggles too much and needs a mental reset.
The Golden Guardians are going to absorb a lot of losses in 2021, and they’ll probably experiment with some different roster configurations over the course of the year. I think we’ll see Prismal, Chime, and RoseThorn all get at least a few LCS games, and I hope it does them good.
All told, I appreciate the forethought and clear mindset that the Golden Guardians management brought to this offseason, even if I disagree with a few of their individual player choices. I’ll be cheering for their project to succeed, and to inspire some other LCS orgs to develop a similar level of self-awareness in the future.
9 DIGNITAS
Up front, I want to say that I’m reasonably happy with the rebuild-style roster Dignitas ended up with. FakeGod, Soligo, and Neo are all pretty solid younger players with varying levels of experience; aphromoo is an excellent mentor; and Dardoch is a decent LCS-level Jungler to help find a few wins.
But I’m not happy at all with the route Dignitas followed to arrive at this point, and I believe the organization is very fortunate that things didn’t turn out worse for them.
There have been a ton of rumours that Dignitas were pursuing Nemesis and Crownshot to import as a pair of import carries. That gives an indication of their mindset for 2021: they thought they could field a roster that could compete for top 3 and go to Worlds. There’s no other reason that they would attempt to spend big enough to get those two players. In other words, Dignitas did not go into this offseason expecting to stock up on young talent; that was their fallback plan. Luckily for them, they weren’t able to sign Nemesis and Crownshot, because I believe a lineup of Dardoch, Nemesis, Crownshot, and aphromoo would have been a pretty comfortable 5th or 6th place team, with maaaybe a shot at 4th if they’d opened their wallets for Licorice or Impact, too. The rest of the LCS just leveled up way too much for that combination of players to break into the top 3.
Instead, Dignitas were forced into a semi-rebuild. That would be totally fine, assuming they had made the pivot early enough. Instead, they seem to have held on to their big-spend aspirations long enough that their list of options started dwindling, putting them in a pretty difficult spot.
Early in the offseason, the Global Contracts Database showed that Cloud9 had signed FakeGod for a few days, which strongly suggests that Dignitas had to buy FakeGod’s contract when they could have signed him as a free agent only a few days earlier.
On top of all that, Dignitas sold Johnsun to FlyQuest. They actually offloaded a 21-year-old player with high potential and one year of LCS experience to make room for a player with one year of LCS experience and two years of Academy experience. To be clear, I think Neo has potential as well, but Johnsun had already proven he was on a strong development trajectory. Dignitas either a) didn’t think they could re-sign Johnsun at the end of 2021 and didn’t want to lose him for free, or b) sold him before they realized they needed to rebuild, and had to pivot to Neo (formerly called Asta) afterwards. Since they didn’t announce Neo as their starting Bot laner for 2021 until December 7, making him literally the last remaining LCS starter to be confirmed, we can be very confident that Dignitas did not plan from the start to sell Johnsun and promote Neo.
By the way, Neo’s current contract also expires at the end of 2021.
To put a cherry on top, Dignitas haven’t announced any of their Academy roster yet, either, which suggests that they’re still scrambling on that front.
To put a second cherry atop the first cherry, Dignitas didn’t release their former head coach until very late in the offseason, and didn’t announce their new head coach until pretty far into the offseason, and as of a week or so ago, they were still publicly advertising for applicants to join their coaching staff. I feel very strongly that coaching staff should be in place well in advance of making roster choices.
The Dignitas rebuild shows none of the intentionality or self-awareness of the Golden Guardians project.
8 IMMORTALS
The Immortals offseason has been a dedicated rebuild, just as thorough as the Golden Guardians project but less shocking since it hasn’t involved selling off the core of a 4th-place team.
I appreciate IMT starting their youth movement, or rather continuing it, with Insanity retaining his place and Revenge making the jump into the LCS. Raes isn’t really part of that movement, since he’s 22 and has been working as a pro in the OPL since 2016. Destiny isn’t a “young” player either, aged 23 with a year in the LEC under his belt to go along with all his prior OPL seasons.
I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing either of those players based on their age. I’m also not concerned in the least that the other three players are all 21, rather than being the prototypical 17- or 18-year-old rookies with virtually no previous pro experience. Age is not important.
Experience, or lack of experience, is what makes a player a rookie or a prospect. Revenge and Insanity are still rookies / prospects. You can argue that Raes feels like a rookie since he hasn’t played in a tier 1 region before, but it’s a bit of a stretch.
We end up with an even split of freshness and experience, with both of the veterans following coach Guilhoto from Origen to the LCS, which may be a legitimate pair of moves but carries an unfortunate savour of cronyism. I can see reasons for Guilhoto to bring along two players he’s familiar with: those players know how he works, know his “systems,” so to speak, and that will make it easier and smoother to onboard the new players and bring them up to speed. It’s almost like Guilhoto is rebuilding a rebranded Origen now, rather than starting a new project from scratch.
Of course, Destiny was the one member of Origen to be replaced mid-2020, and Xerxe was the second-worst-performing player on the team. Moderate your expectations for that “veteran core.”
It won’t matter too much how well the veterans play, in the end, because this team shouldn’t be expected to make a deep playoff run. The whole point here is to develop the new players and establish systems that make it easy for Academy players to be promoted in the future.
I landed on a B- offseason grade because a) I’m not convinced that the veterans they’ve assembled are going to be the strongest mentors, b) their prospects are decent but not Grade A, in my opinion, and c) they still haven’t announced their Academy roster, which is a crucial component of a rebuild. But to their credit, they’ve shown intentionality and a reasonable sense of self-awareness about the type of project they’re undertaking, and that is a good foundation to start from.
7 COUNTER LOGIC GAMING
Dignitas got a D for attempting to build a mid-tier LCS roster and having to fall back to plan B or C when it didn’t come together.
CLG get a C grade for attempting to build a mid-tier LCS roster and succeeding. And at least they actually have an Academy roster announced (Thien, Wiggily, rjs, Katsurii, and Auto).
In my opinion, this should have been a hard-reset offseason for CLG but it wasn’t. Dropping everyone except Pobelter and Smoothie was a reasonable start, and I’m comfortable with them retaining Wiggily for Academy since I think he is badly underrated and still has potential he can grow into. But the next move after that should have been to load up on prospects for the veterans to mentor, not more veterans.
You could go really aggressive in the Jungle, for example, with Wiggily as your insurance policy, and pursue Fanatiik or go ultra-rookie with nxi. Pick up FakeGod alongside ZionSpartan or Hauntzer for another rookie/veteran combo. Prismal was available to make the jump into LCS.
These are just some names off the top of my head. Some or all of them may not have actually been available, but there would have been prospects of some level of quality available somewhere, assuming CLG had entered the offseason with the intention of looking for them.
Instead, CLG committed pretty early to Broxah, then added WildTurtle. These weren’t “diamonds in the rough” who held hidden value that was overlooked by the other orgs. I doubt either player is taking home a league-minimum salary. There’s no one in the starting lineup for either of them to mentor. I love both of these players and the attitudes and energy they bring, but on this roster, on the trajectory CLG is supposed to be on right now, they both come across as basically filler. They’re serviceable, LCS-level players, arguably even a little underrated, but they don’t move the team forward either toward contending for a top 3 spot or toward growing more talent for the future.
Finn is, under the circumstances, a somewhat redemptive acquisition for CLG. He’s a better player than the public narrative suggests, and still has room to grow. He could be a good piece for CLG to work with over the three-year contract they signed him to. The question is whether he is good enough to justify paying a buyout and using up an import slot, given the other opportunities CLG had available at this stage of their rebuild.
CLG successfully assembled a mid-tier LCS roster with a single “young” player. They don’t have a realistic chance of going to Worlds and they don’t have the same set of future-oriented possibilities as Golden Guardians, Dignitas, or Immortals. I can’t help feeling disappointed.
6 FLYQUEST
Licorice, Johnsun, and Diamond are all Canadian but Palafox is American and Josedeodo is Argentinian, so the best I can give FlyQuest is an Eh-minus.
Aaaaanyways, it’s a little tough to step back from FlyQuest’s offseason moves and judge them impartially, given the total implosion of their 2nd-place-finishing, Worlds-attending roster. FlyQuest did so many things right in 2020, loading up with the right players at the right time to make a run to both LCS Finals, playing in Worlds for the first time, and executing some great marketing projects to build out a solid brand identity.
With Santorin walking in free agency and PowerOfEvil opting out of the player option on the last year of his contract. FlyQuest found themselves in a tough spot, though, unlikely to replicate their 2020 success without really breaking the bank, something they likely didn’t have the option to do even if the right players had been available.
They pivoted into a semi-rebuild by selling IgNar and WildTurtle and using the proceeds to help fund buyout packages for the Cloud9 trio of Licorice, Palafox, and Diamond as well as Johnsun out of Dignitas. That’s two rookies, one second-year player, and an excellent anchoring veteran, and probably for a lower price than you might expect, given the financial pressure Cloud9 was under based on their Perkz deal, to go along with the bottom falling out of the market for Licorice.
Josedeodo is an intriguing final piece of their puzzle. He’ll bring along a rabid Argentinian fanbase, and he’s highly hyped by the North American community as well. My time watching him suggests that he’s a measured, low-mistake type of player, which might fit well with a roster that features so little pro experience. And if he can find a few opportunities to pop off mechanically, so much the better.
In Academy, FlyQuest have a mix of hits and misses, in my opinion: nxi could develop into a great prospect in time, and Tomo has potential; Dreams should push Diamond a little and the two Supports might end up trading off some games, with the hope that Diamond will defend his spot but with Dreams providing a pretty solid fallback option; but Triple hasn’t shown that he’s likely to break through into LCS level, and Kumo is a redemption project that I don’t personally think has much chance of bearing fruit.
I’m giving out an A- because of some favourable assumptions about the price FlyQuest paid to restock their system, and because I believe players can develop more quickly and effectively when they’re picking up some wins along the way.
5 EVIL GENIUSES
This offseason has been a major feels-bad for Evil Geniuses, based on what could have been compared to what actually happened. But even so, they’ve managed to do very well in setting themselves up for long-term success without completely sacrificing their chance to compete in 2021.
The big story of EG’s offseason is the trade they had agreed to with TSM that would have, in effect, sent Huni to TSM in exchange for Lost. That deal had been arranged based on the assumption that TSM was going to close their signing of SwordArt and use that acquisition to keep Doublelift around for another year.
Instead, TSM fumbled their negotiations with SwordArt, triggering a dramatic chain reaction that led to Doublelift retiring, which meant that TSM no longer had the luxury of selling off Lost.
The effect, for EG, was that the Bot laner they wanted was taken off the market very late in the process, leaving them high and dry since the rest of the Bot laner shuffle around the league had been completed already. FBI had moved to 100 Thieves, Johnsun had gone to FlyQuest, WildTurtle was on his way to CLG, and even Raes had been picked up by IMT if they had been considering him. A couple of other players, like Cody Sun, appeared to carry some type of baggage that EG weren’t interested in acquiring — whether that’s related to his in-game performance or something else isn’t clear.
The next best option would have been K1ng, from Cloud9 Academy, but he doesn’t appear to be available, with C9 preferring to retain him for another year either to give them more options for 2022 if they want to move on from Zven, or simply to preserve his value and try to increase their return on him in the future.
In the end, EG settled on promoting Deftly from their Academy team, which should be a more stable option than signing someone like Prismal.
The whole scenario is a real shame for EG, both because it wasn’t their fault — how could they predict that TSM would basically screw them over this badly? — and because the rest of EG’s roster was being set up as a legit contender. I was prepared to power rank a lineup of Impact, Svenskeren, Jiizuke, Lost and IgNar third in the LCS, assuming TSM had retained Doublelift. Lost is that good, Jiizuke is a stronger Mid than many people believe, and I think the stability, utility, and playmaking coming out of Impact and IgNar will help Svenskeren return to form.
Without that star carry in the bottom lane, though, EG is really going to struggle to keep pace.
I can’t give EG better than a B+, even though I think their Academy and amateur teams are going to be super strong as a talent pipeline for the future. They did make themselves vulnerable by committing so hard to the Lost deal, and the risk backfired. But B+ is a good grade and the fans should be prepared to see all kinds of long-term positives out of EG over the coming years.
4 100 THIEVES
I’m honestly pretty torn about how to feel, and what to say, about the 100 Thieves offseason. There are obviously things to be excited about, with Ssumday finally having a roster around him that offers a second reliable laning pressure point (though it’s coming in the bottom lane instead of mid, which is fine). I’m happy to see 4/5ths of the Golden Guardians roster stay together to make another run at attending Worlds, too.
Frankly, though, I think 100 Thieves bought high on all 4 players, paying huhi the raise he had earned while playing for Golden Guardians and purchasing the contracts of the other three players at the peak of their value. The hope for 100T will be that Closer, Damonte, and FBI all have even higher ceilings to achieve, and that the price of their buyouts and salaries will end up looking like a bargain a year or two down the road. I think it’s more likely that those prices will end up being either fair deals, or slightly player-favoured.
It’s obviously not a problem to be paying the players the amount they’re actually worth. As an LCS organization, though, you’re always going to hope to find ways to get more value than you’re paying for. That’s just good business.
When you consider that 100T had a player like that in Contractz, one who had shown good fit with Ssumday in 2020, and that you had Poome starting in the LCS and ready to continue growing in 2021, you can start to see why I have some reservations about how 100T played out their offseason, right?
On the one hand, 100 Thieves now have a strong LCS roster and an Academy team that features three strong prospects in Kenvi, Tenacity, and Poome, plus Luger and Ryoma. On the other hand, the only way any of those prospects will get play time for 100 Thieves in the next three years is if the current starter either bombs out (which would be bad for 100T) or gets sold onwards to another team (which is only a “win” for 100T if they earn more on the player than they initially spent for them, which would require either an overperformance or a big climb in the market).
Again, I’m a little torn on how to feel about all this, because my issues with the “clogged talent pipeline” for 100T are just an efficiency problem, which feels nitpicky. Maybe 100T don’t care as much about being efficient as they do about straight-up winning. That’s fair. And if they end up finding decent success with this roster and having to sell one or more of their prospects for cash, they’ll probably be pretty happy with that outcome, too.
I can’t bring myself to call their set of moves an unequivocal success, though. It’s tough to get past their unnecessary replacement of Contractz, and the signal they’ve sent to their talent pipeline by wholesale purchasing four veterans and demoting Poome without promoting any players internally (except, arguably, Tenacity, if you want to stretch the definition of “promote”).
As long as 100 Thieves keep up their work in talent development with 100 Thieves Next and get some real value out of the potential that exists in their prospects (which Goldenglue will have to accomplish as a rookie coach, coming in to replace Kelsey Moser), then they’ll end up in good shape by the end of 2021, regardless of whether or not their LCS team goes to Worlds. I have to throw that minus on their grade, though, because I think they could have been in just as strong a spot organizationally by relying on their existing resources and internal talent development and avoiding that big spend to bring in the Golden Guardians players.
3 TSM
Like Dignitas, I think TSM unintentionally backed into some good decisions, but unlike Dignitas, that has them ranked in the top 3 of the league, rather than the bottom 3.
I’m specifically referring to their change in the Bot lane position, with Doublelift retiring and Lost being promoted from Academy to LCS. Based on the information that has come out, specifically the deal that had been agreed on to send Lost to Evil Geniuses, it’s clear that TSM’s Plan A was for Doublelift to return and play with SwordArt in the bottom lane, with the Huni/Spica/PowerOfEvil top side trio remaining the same.
I understand why TSM would want to keep Doublelift around. He’s the greatest North American player of all time, and just helped TSM win the LCS and return to Worlds. He even showed some personal growth during that run, adapting to play more of a weak side role and making Senna one of his best champions, after starting out 2020 by being memed for how poorly he played Senna. With Bjergsen retiring, too, TSM surely didn’t want to lose both of the LCS’s most recognizeable faces at the same time, from a branding perspective.
But competitively, Lost was the better choice, both because he is a stronger performer than Doublelift right now and because he is probably quite a bit cheaper, which gives TSM more flexibility elsewhere.
Yes, I think Lost is a better Bot laner than Doublelift. That is my actual analytical opinion.
To be as clear as I possibly can about my opinions on Lost vs. Doublelift as options for the TSM roster: I have power ranked this roster 3rd, but if Doublelift had stayed, I would have ranked it 5th.
That has a lot to do with the actual level of the two players individually, but also a little to do with the “addition by subtraction” that I think will come from avoiding a roster that has Doublelift, Huni, and PowerOfEvil all stacked up together calling for the primary share of the resources and, most likely, clashing a little in comms.
I do think Doublelift would bring more leadership and obviously a lot more experience than Lost, but there is so much experience and shot calling in the rest of TSM’s roster that it makes Doublelift’s leadership a bit of a moot point, allowing Lost’s value to surpass Doublelift’s.
Lost obviously isn’t carrying TSM into rank 3 on his own. SwordArt is a huge signing, and as a pair these two have the potential to become the best bot lane in the LCS (though there’s some pretty stiff competition there from 100T, TL, and C9).
Spica has emerged as one of the strongest Junglers in the LCS, with lots of room to grow still.
Huni is very underrated, based on how poorly his run on Dignitas played out and how little he seemed to care during his time in Academy, even though his playoff run on EG was actually pretty good. (He was the best player on his team in their series win against 100 Thieves and their 3-0 loss to Cloud9.) He’s not going to be the best Top laner in the LCS but he won’t be a liability, and he should be able to shine a little brighter alongside Spica than he did with the Svenskeren/Goldenglue pairing behind him.
PowerOfEvil is a very strong player, but in a somewhat ironic twist, TSM’s success is going to depend pretty heavily on how well he can adapt his style to the needs of the team. He’ll get help from SwordArt and Spica, but he’s going to need to add a greater ability to sacrifice his personal laning outcomes to help out Spica and the side lanes, something he didn’t have to do much with FlyQuest since Santorin and IgNar were so independent.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with where TSM landed, and they’ve got some decent things going on in their talent pipeline. But I can’t give them too much credit since their Plan A was worse than their Plan B, and since they’re paying far too high a salary for SwordArt, in my opinion.
2 Team Liquid
Congratulations, Team Liquid. You maintained more roster continuity than any other LCS organization (tied with Cloud9), successfully re-signed Jensen for a dollar value that actually starts to look reasonable given the numbers handed to Perkz and SwordArt, and picked up two of the biggest free agent names on the market.
When you have such a strong roster core to start from, and as much budget space as Team Liquid, that earns you a B.
The plus part of my B+ grade comes from signing Yeon to TL Academy as well as adding coach Spawn from the dismantled OPL. Those two moves are already an improvement on Team Liquid’s woeful Academy efforts in 2020, though I’m still not convinced that they’re resourcing their talent pipeline as much as they ought to be. (I hope they’re committed to getting Spawn out to Los Angeles, even with COVID restrictions, because running the Academy team purely remotely would be very detrimental.)
As for the competitive potential of TL’s LCS roster, it’s obviously high, and they shouldn’t fall outside top 2 in anyone’s preseason power rankings, given the sheer talent level of their five starters.
I have TL ranked second. I believe they will very reliably out-skill/out-execute the majority of the LCS, but they can be beaten by teams that have greater dynamism and playmaking. CoreJJ is the only player on the team that I see as a real multiplier for his teammates. Tactical is a fairly dynamic player, but Bot lane, by nature, is not a multiplicative role.
Jensen, Alphari, and Santorin are all going to play quite effectively to the scripts that are laid out in front of them by whatever team comps they are drafted into. They strong additive players who do the right things in the right order, and most of the time, that is very desirable. It puts all of these players into at least the A tier of their position, by LCS standards, and possibly into S tier. But it doesn’t make them game-breakers, and it doesn’t necessarily make their team a championship team, or vault them into international relevance.
If you want to win the LCS and/or be relevant internationally, you need multiple players who know how to go productively off-script. CoreJJ is that player. Perkz is that player. Hylissang is that player.
That’s where my reservations about Team Liquid lie. I’m not sure they’ll be dynamic enough to be a real gestalt — to be greater than the sum of their parts. That’s okay. They’ll be good enough to go to Worlds, maybe even good enough to get out of their group with a favourable draw. But I’m concerned that even with the hype surrounding the Alphari and Santorin signings, they don’t have the right ingredients to truly be great.
1 Cloud9
Before the Perkz signing became official, I shared some reservations about the move, mostly around the potential cost of the buyout compared to the size of the upgrade that Perkz would be over their incumbent Mid laner, Nisqy. I went on record calling that specific move a potential B+.
I’ve had more time to reflect on things since then, and more information has come out that pegged the actual buyout cost a bit lower than the reported $5 million USD asking price. The reduced cost and the other transactions Cloud9 made have improved my opinion, to the point that C9 are getting my only A grade for the offseason.
I’m not going for an A+ because of some minor nitpicks, such as Licorice’s buyout dropping below its expected value and because of C9 Academy containing fewer true prospects than I would have preferred, but these are definitely nitpicks.
I’m a huge fan of Fudge. He was my pick for Academy MVP in the Summer, and was runner-up for MVP in Spring behind another C9A player, K1ng. With so much talent around him, he should be able to transition comfortably into the LCS and will be set up well for in-game success.
We know all about how good Zven, Vulcan, and Blaber can be, even though Blaber and Zven weren’t at their best in the playoffs. I’m confident that coaching staff changes will help them get back on track, especially with a cerebral Jungler like Reignover taking over as head coach to help Blaber add a bit more stability and adaptability to his game.
And then there’s Perkz. He’s instantly the best player in the LCS, perhaps only rivaled by CoreJJ. He’s a phenomenal individual player, among the best Mids in the LEC when he returned to the position with G2 Esports in Spring before swapping back into the Bot lane for another run to the World Championships Semifinals. But it isn’t even his individual skill that has me most excited: it’s his mind for the game, his ability to think and react to emerging situations and get two steps ahead of opponents. The LCS has probably never had someone as good at going off-script as Perkz.
Perkz is a gamebreaker. By all accounts, he was the soul of G2, even if you believe Caps was the stronger individual player.
When you put Perkz alongside other dynamic players like Vulcan, Blaber, and — I believe — Fudge, you have an incredible recipe for the gestalt that I believe is lacking in Team Liquid. Perkz will level up those other players around him, and together I expect them to do some pretty awesome things.
There may be a transition period and a growth curve. The added dynamism and unpredictability may cause some losses to lower-ranked teams. But in a best-of-five, once Cloud9 has a few months of practice under their belts, I don’t think anyone else in the LCS will be able to rival them, and they will be North America’s strongest international hope in years.