For years, Europe has been known as a Mid lane Mecca, home to multiple world class talents and a horde of young up-and-comers continually challenging to become the next xPeke or Froggen. The 2016 Spring split has seen some power shifts in the Mid lane talent pool, with Froggen leaving for North America and xPeke stepping back, temporarily it seems, into more of a management role. Who has come in to fill the void?
Yesterday I released my NA LCS Mid Laner Power Rankings, and today I’ve done the same thing for the European LCS, putting all 10 starting Mids in order based on how they’ve performed this split.
At the center of the map, two isolated 1v1 duelists square off in a battle for lane dominance, probing for openings to either all-in for the glorious solo kill, or shove the wave and disappear into the fog of war to roam to their side laners’ aid. The Mid lane is a crucial battleground on Summoner’s Rift, and has always been the home of some of the world’s most talented LoL players.
This split the North American LCS has fielded perhaps its strongest ever crop of Mids, with the addition of big-name imports like Froggen and GBM and the growth of holdovers like Jensen, Fenix, and Pobelter. Who’s really the best Mid in NA, though? And how does everyone else stack up behind them? That’s what we’re going to explore here, in a full 1 to 10 ranking of NA LCS Mids.
When the reigning World Champions are sitting in the bottom half of their league’s standings halfway through the Spring split, it’s bound to stir up a little conversation. When that team goes out and wins an international tournament using their backup Jungler… Well, that’s bound to really fuel some discussion.
SK Telecom T1 were thoroughly convincing at the IEM Katowice tournament, winning all seven games they played and forcing Fnatic to surrender in the deciding Game 3 of the Finals. The natural response is to wonder if they’ll be ready to translate that success into their domestic play. And in SKT’s unique circumstances, we have to wonder whether Blank showed at IEM that he can be a better solution for his team than the veteran Bengi as they play out the rest of this split.
Before we can draw any inferences about SKT’s level of play with Blank, and whether they should use him moving forward, we have to look at the context of the IEM tournament, the play of SKT’s opponents, and—of course—the stats.
