I started playing Fantasy LCS during season 5’s summer split with members from my guild Obsidian. It was good fun, as I already watch the LCS regularly, and it gave added incentive to root for teams/players I might not normally root for. I ended up coming in second place in my league, only because of a three way tie for first and because one of my players got suspended during the last week and I didn’t notice until it was too late. I had slightly less points overall so the tiebreaker went to another player. This year we decided to play again, and got started during the spring split, which began last week (Thursday/Friday EU, Saturday/Sunday NA). Previously I was calling this column “Fantasy LCS Thursdays” because that just happened to be the day I started it up, and posted on each thursday. I decided to rename it to the “Fantasy LCS Review” because I don’t want to have to stick to that Thursday schedule. The Ongoing Series page has been updated to reflect this change, though I’m not going to go back and rename the old posts from last year.
So we saw some wild things over the course of the weekend. The NALCS looks absolutely stacked with talent this year, having a bunch of imports from various regions joining new and existing teams. Surprisingly, TSM looked rather unorganized despite having an all-star team. Cloud 9 was shaky in their first game, but gelled very well in the second. Immortals and NRG both look to be hot teams, and are the only two that finished the weekend 2-0, not to mention that Immortals set a new record for the fastest LCS win with their sub-18 minute victory over TiP. As I mentioned in a recent post, I was rooting heavily for TiP last split, but with their decimated roster I don’t feel like I can do it this year. I’m staying team-less for now, but rooting for Immortals and NRG both to go the distance during this split.
We drafted our fantasy teams a few days before the split started. We ended up with another four-team league: ELO Hell (my team), Dankest of Memez (run by Derpydoges which was Nertle last split), Judentus (same as last split) and Black Speech (run by Tacktix, who also runs Tough Love Critic that I’ve mentioned here a time or two before). Judentus is the team I lost to last split, but managed to get some revenge this week. It came down to the wire, but I managed to win, by exactly .01 points. That’s a single CS. I was laughing my ass off. Despite getting the win, I had about 40 less points overall than Derpy, so I’m currently in 2nd place in the league. However, I play him next week, so all I need is a win to take sole possession of first. I managed to stay in first place most of the summer split last year, so there’s a good chance I manage to stay there if I get a win this week. It appears that I’m the only one really micro managing my team, and I’m hoping that means results. Anyway, here’s the matchups from week 1:
European teams this year are not very impressive. I drafted everyone here outside of Froggen and KFO, and despite Origen looking like the most stacked EULCS team they flopped horribly for me. I swapped out one of my players for Froggen because he is a very good player, but he didn’t put up very good numbers this week. Neither did Rush, but only because Cloud 9 was trounced in their first game. He will definitely perform, he was the NALCS MVP last year after all. I drafted Impact from NRG as my top laner but the projections were updated and he was only going to play one game over the weekend. KFO was definitely an unknown but he’s from the Korean solo queue, so I assumed he might get me some decent points. It turns out that Impact actually made more points in just one game so I should have left him in. I have since made some quality of life changes to my line up for next week:
Impact is back in. I trashed that crappy Origen team and decided to stick with all NA players. I also swapped in NRG for my team slot, and picked up Apollo who did well for me last year when it came to fantasy points. He actually had a good 1st week, even after Dignitas went 1-1. Even if they aren’t a dominant squad, I foresee good points coming out of him. If not, I can always fall back on Froggen, or perhaps pick up someone else that has been overlooked. One advantage of having a four man league is that there are plenty of free agents floating around. That’s really I have right now, but let’s take a look at the top players of the split so far:
Coming in at number one is Shiphtur, and that’s rather surprising considering the performance of his team compared to the performance of others. Also surprising to see a member of Renegades coming in at number three. Either way, I managed to own the #2, while Derpy owns the bottom 2, both of which will likely see more time on the top list. We’ll see how it changes next week.
Me Vs. Myself and I 