With the start of the LCK pro season has come a stagnant and predictable meta where the same champions are routinely picked, and Caedrel is begging Riot to “nuke” the meta to add some variation to pro play.
The LCK is underway, marking the start of the season for what has historically been League of Legends’ strongest region. We did just have an all-Korea world final, after all. Korean pros often dictate what happens in the meta, and how they draft often reflects where the meta is.
At some times, their drafts are all over the place. Drafts can be very diverse when there isn’t a clear strategy or set of champions that will consistently win you more games.
But that isn’t where the current League of Legends meta lies, and the same six champions are being consistently traded in pro play. Caedrel’s had no problem predicting almost every draft so far, and he’s hoping we see some changes soon.
Caedrel calls out the current LoL meta
It’d be disingenuous to say the current meta doesn’t allow players to have any innovation on The Rift. We’ve seen some more inventive players in pro play trying a few off-meta strategies.
For instance, we’ve seen Kang ‘TheShy’ Seung-lok play Nidalee top in the LPL. It’s an exciting pick, sure, but this player is known for experimenting. The same could be said of Kim ‘Life’ Jeong-min picking Jhin support in pro play and winning with it, but it’s known dark technology as a Heimerdinger counter pick and was a strategy pioneered by Cho ‘BeryL’ Geon-hee. There are a few exceptions to the rule here.
That said, most drafts go the same way on the current patch: Teams decide whether they want Zeri paired with Lulu/Yuumi or Lucian/Nami first and will first pick Nami or Zeri; it’ll get answered by the other team essentially handshaking bot lane picks and taking whichever combo the enemy team didn’t. Then, they’ll take one of a select few junglers (most of the time Vi or Maokai) and complete their bot lane combo with Lucian or Lulu so their bot lane duo can’t get targeted in the second phase.
We’re only a few days into pro play in the LCK, and we’ve already seen many drafts play out exactly like this, with the first six picks being nearly identical.
Here you can see Caedrel almost perfectly predicting the draft of a game he’s spectating in real-time. With Ashe needing to be banned from most games because she’s OP, Heimer, Sejuani, and Elise catching bans for being extremely strong, and Ryze being banned alongside Caitlyn because of how strong both champs are right now, there’s not a whole lot of room for variation.
At the end of his sarcastic rant, Caedrel had some choice words for the current meta.
“Can you grab this meta and just f***ing nuke it, please? The bot/jungle meta, just f***ing nuke it.”
Caedrel isn’t the only figure in the LoL community that’s tired of current drafts. IWillDominate weighed in on the issue, saying that these drafts are more painful than the kidney stone he just passed.
Patch 13.2 has some big changes in store, with Phreak revealing massive ADC buffs and other meta-changing balance changes on the horizon. Hopefully we’ll get some more variation in drafts soon.
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