Looking first at what hasn’t changed, and that’s Charles Wraith returning as coach, and Myles “Blinky” Irvine along with Jayke “Jayke” Paulsen as their bottom lane. Retaining Wraith, to me, is a case of “The Devil You Know” as he has been decent enough without blowing me away with his efforts. Avant’s own AV Life production has on occasion highlighted deficiencies in his approach. That said, he does have the marquee victory over Legacy that I personally attribute a great deal to his preparation as a great feather in his cap and I know for a fact the work and effort he has gone to in order to attempt to develop as a coach. that sort of commitment to improvement can be infectious which is perfect for a young team like Avant’s.

Jayke will be entering his third OPL year and has made a name for himself as sound leader of young men. He has quietly developed as a support over the last year after spending 2016 with what I called the worst ADC in the league in each split. With the stability to continue to grow alongside Blinky for another year and what was a breakout performance at League of Origin, Jayke is a sneaky-good option to step up into the pantheon of top 3 OPL supports with the departure of EGym and the unknown status of Destiny. Jayke held a perfect pocket pick Malzahar throughout the course of 2017 but had an indifferent record on his most played champions. This will be the final piece missing from his play to take that next step.

The retention of Blinky is a move I would describe as “Okay-plus” which may be damning him with faint praise but I think Oceania’s ADCarries are probably our deepest position, talent-wise. It’s a competitive field that he is neither at the top nor bottom of. He was below 50% win rate on Varus, by far his most played champion (10 more than second and third most played), and not even in the top 5 best-performing champions, per best.gg. He also had underwhelming performances against competition that he should have done better against, as we’ve written about previously. All this being said, it was his debut year in the OPL and he did show flashes on certain champions, particularly Kalista, so with a more productive trip to Korea and a dedication to training we could see a much improved Blinky. I don’t think we’ve yet seen his final form.

Moving into the positions where we actually saw changes, adding Jackson “Pabu” Pavone to the top lane is a massive upgrade and, at the risk of calling it early, the most impactful move that will be made this offseason. For every great game Avant got out of Ceres they received at least two complete stinkers in return. Before Pabu came of age, your team either had Chippys, Swip3rr or Tally, or your top laner was irrelevant. The closest anyone came to breaking the holy triumvirate was Paradise/ZZZ. But with Pabu you have a competent top laner who has room to develop into something so much more. The only concern is that I think as the season wore on, Pabu and Abyss lost sight of what makes him a special prospect, but I’m backing Avant to correct this pretty quickly. This was going to be the best top laner on the domestic free agent market outside of the big three, and Avant have done a tidy piece of business securing his services.

Looking at the jungle we find an odd roster move to assess. The change of Sybol into Jordan “Only” Middleton I would classify as an investment in talent rather than taking the best-producing player, which may have seen Avant retain a player like Sybol. To peruse Only’s Gamepedia match history would be to paint a bleak picture of 7-29 in OPL games over the course of his 2017 season. But it is often said that one’s W/L record is not reflected of their skill at the best of times and being attached to the sinking-without-trace TM Gaming roster is far from the best of times. His gameplay throughout the year belied the mere wins and losses in that stat. He had a standout League of Origin and started freshly in split 2 before becoming “patched out” and tailing off to an extent while the TM staff were unable to set him up to transition him to success. In the immediate term this swap is a downgrade but I’m backing the Avant staff to do a much better job of shaping the talent that Only displayed at his peaks into a competitive jungler. I like the pickup, I really see it paying dividends as the season plays out.

It can’t all be sunshine and lollipops for this roster though and so with all this said we move to their midlane pickup in Leon “Frae” Lee. In fairness to the Avant leadership, they were losing one of the top 4 (top 3 with the retirement of Phantiks) mids in the region, so unless they managed to land Swiffer or Ryoma to replace Triple, they were going to downgrade. There is absolutely no shame in being worse at League of Legends than Triple. Most of us are. My area of concern is that he has been a standout player on a number of very bad teams and I have questions as to his impact on those teams. Few who have watched him doubt his mechanical prowess, but trailing after his wake are stories of a player who is less than pleasant to deal with when things turn south. It will be up to his (ample) abilities and the rest of Avant to keep this from happening and if they can’t it will be up to Frae to show that these stories were either wrong or a thing of the past. I’m extremely hesitant about this pickup from a “fit” standpoint, though it does bare mentioning that if Avant wanted the most talented free agent available to fill Triple’s void, then Frae is certainly towards the very top of that list.

Avant did good, early business to secure these players overall. I don’t have the on-paper roster cracking the top 3. So until we see these teams play some League of Legends my personal take is that they’re “the best of the rest” and are the most likely team to cause a ruckus among the top 3 of Dire Wolves, Chiefs and ORDER.

This time we look at the action from Week 1 of the Oceanic Pro League Split 2, 2017 in what turns out to be a very mid-and-ADC focused edition!

Trending up: Claire, Mid, Legacy

Claire had, in my opinion, a borderline disastrous split 1 saved only by some incredible team-fighting on Viktor in an iconic victory over The Chiefs. But the Claire we saw against Sin last weekend looked a far sight better than the Claire who tied Seb for most first blood deaths given up during the regular season (in six fewer games, no less).

After game 1 Sin might have had fair cry to say that they had been cheesed. But execution matters and the mid-lane Fiora that Claire produced gleefully accepted an early lead by punishing a clumsy Sin collapse, then used it to draw pressure around and away from objectives like few things other than a fed Fiora can. Game two saw a bit of a return the “oopsie” Claire that we’d seen in the beginning of the year, but game three was the important game. He started with an importantly quiet first 15 minutes, staying even with Ry0ma’s Syndra and more importantly keeping him in lane and not letting the one-shot machine roam around the map and pick up gold on unsuspecting (or suspecting and helpless) bot-laners. So while Carbon and Tally accelerated the early game, Claire picked up contribution after contribution and ended up one of four unkilled Legacy players with a 72% kill participation on the final game.

Trending down: Blinky, ADC, Avant

This might feel a bit harsh to a member of the only team sporting three shiny points but I really expected more out of the AV botlane and specifically Blinky this go-around. It’s not just the abnormally large number of “High, wide, and not very handsome” Ashe arrows including a couple of truly baffling misses at all-but-point-blank range, though that is significant at this level. It’s not just the damage discrepancies, which though i’ll give a Varus-pass for game 2, there was a mere 900 damage to champions advantage for Blinky in game 1, though that was also significant. My disappointment with Blinky this past week was the early deficits he faced in lane. They were small, collectively only around 300 gold at the 10-12 minute mark. But when you have a split’s worth of experience in the league, including playoffs and you’ve just returned from spending several weeks in Korean solo queue, you don’t expect narrow leads and break-evens in the first 15 minutes against lowskillplayer on his debut. You expect more. I expected more.

Trending up: Triple, Mid, Avant

On the bright side of Avant’s 2-0 over TM is Triple. Triple is really good at League of Legends, news at 11. Clearly the best-performing player on his team and a really good shout for the best performing player of the week. Triple really brought it all this week – good laning, pressure right round the map, good farming (nearly finished on a flame horizon in game one) and impressive basic statistics. Triple’s gold lead over Shok really jumps off the page in game one in which he’d built up a 1000 gold lead at just eight minutes and the direct comparison had ballooned to 2.4k gold immediately before the disastrous baron call that turned the game on its ear.  A less spectacular but more workmanlike game 2 saw him bring home a just under 78% kill participation and honestly it is this ability that you really crave on your mid laner. We’ve all seen Triple pop off. What I loved about his game 2 was his ability that despite Ceres being the one to be the flashy playmaker on his Renekton-with-a-side-of-Lee Sin, it was Triple who dealt the most damage and Triple bringing the highest kill participation. Triple showed us both sides of being a carry – the spectacular, and the subdued. Though subdued almost feels disrespectful to the great showing he put on.

Trending up: Raid, ADC, Abyss

After this last week of games I have this vision of Looch in my head that is less of him as a great mid lane player than it is him as a literal security blanket that Raid wraps himself in so that the bad monsters don’t hurt his ADC gameplay because we haven’t seen Raid like this all year. This was a real return to split 2 form where he was arguably robbed of the Rookie of the Split by the aforementioned Looch. Abyss’s ADC was absolutely phenomenal against a surprisingly strong Regicide lineup. He put out comfortably over 700 damage to champions per minute across the whole series and just shy of 1000 per minute in the final game. These are super-giant-doggy-sized damage numbers. He added to this a huge flame horizon on Chenyboy in a losing effort in game two and only 7 deaths in the series, the fewest in his team. Although his damage numbers are admittedly a little augmented by three Varus games, this is itself encouraging in a different way as he spent almost the entirety of last split on Ezreal and Jhin and it’s nice to see something new from him. Looch himself was impressive so if these two can put forward this kind of showing consistently, Abyss will not just compete, but threaten, every time they hit the rift.