Importantly for the organisation, they have retained the services of head coach Luchio “Soulstrikes” Park. Soulstrikes adds supreme gameplay knowledge, an eye to innovate without torpedoing his squad with off-meta picks, and OPL experience as a coach which is a rare combination among coaches. He’s added international experience with his appearance at Rift Rivals with Legacy. My take on Soulstrikes is that he is naturally a collaborator and this approach is perfect to build a young squad from the ground up.

2017 was a Jekyll-and-Hyde year for Brandon “Claire” Nguyen. Had he spent split 1 in an org that had Legacy’s expectations but was perhaps not as dedicated to player development as Legacy is known for, he may very well have not made it to split 2. Claire paid off Legacy’s faith in him with a significantly better latter half of the season. Retaining Claire gives the Legacy some much-needed organisational continuity as they rebuild the rest of the roster. Ask anyone with any background in high-elo Oceanic league of legends and they will tell you about the monster Claire, the scrim god that haunts the mid lane. He also has his signature series to his credit which came out of Split 1, a masterful Viktor that was some of the most sumptuous teamfighting you’ll ever see out of a control mage.  This is the Claire that Legacy are banking on seeing. Claire is now the local centrepiece that they intend to build around, and the starting point for the dominant solo lane play of days gone by for the green and black legion.

The addition of Lachlan “Sybol” Civil into the jungle is an intriguing pickup. With long-time development prospect Babip heading to eternal rivals The Chiefs it seemed that Legacy were content to let Claire and Raid to provide the leadership from the traditional carry roles. Not the easiest of tasks. Legacy’s great fortune was having veteran jungle presence Sybol fall into their lap after Avant pivoted to their youth movement. At least, it would have been incredibly fortunate 12 months ago. Sybol went through a true period of adjustment in 2017 as it started being released from the Dire Wolves for a crime no more sinister than being not as good as Shernfire, a description that arguably describes every jungler on the server. He started brightly for Avant, but as the year progressed his consistency abandoned him. With that said, he has incredibly high peaks and some frightening champions in his pool. All Sybol has known before 2017 was stability and if Legacy can provide him that I would tip his experience to lead him once more towards the top of the oceanic jungle pile that he has previously called home.

Joining Claire after an inconsistent year of his own is the former Abyss ADC Julian “Raid” Skordos. Over his career Raid has played one very ordinary Split 1 and two absolutely stellar Split 2’s. Despite taking flak for being able to only carry his team as far as the line without getting them over it, with the declining spiral of Looch’s performances he was playing with some of the heaviest Rock Lee training weights since the Chiefs tried to carry lqdcheese. Raid’s strengths are safe laning and consistent damage. He has consistently among the best numbers outside the big 4 oceanic AD Carries – (FBI, K1ng, Raes and Lost) and was arguably the “best of the rest” outside these four. To the credit of his critics, he hasn’t shown the “pop-off” tendencies that have been seen from examples such as the hero play to close out Sin in the split 1 gauntlet from his Legacy predecessor in Lost, so Legacy will need to account for this. They will have entered free agency knowing they were not going to get as complete a player as Lost, and Raid is the best player to fit the aims of their roster construction, which is built around their solo laners.

Joining Raid in the bottom lane is Daniel “Decoy” Ealam. This move increases Legacy’s Elam/Ealam counter to two. Decoy came into a Regicide outfit that was kind of spinning its wheels with a subpar Kpop and after being fed to the wolves in his first match against the Chiefs was impressive on a team that began to ramp up through the two-man support rotation between himself and Chenxuan.  His win/loss rate was quite poor, but so was Regicide’s, and his efforts in-game showed that there’s some talent that Decoy brings to the table. There’s not much more that can be said about Decoy’s young career, but given that Legacy needed to go to the Free Agent pool for a support there was probably only one or two other names that were on the same level of ability, so this addition locks up a solid if unspectacular botlane, and that’s frequently all you need when you build around your solo laners.

The last of these solo laners is Legacy’s shiny new import, Min “Mimic” Ju-seong. Mimic has a career path that has only spanned two full years but has plumbed the full range from the mighty KT Rolster all the way to the national leagues of Europe. Mimic was most recently on EU CS team Millennium where they endured a shocking time, winning only a single series and the roster disbanded before the org failed to requalify for the summer split of the Challenger Series. Mimic’s play in EUCS was best on tanks, though it is hard to pick out performances when he only won three games out of ten. He has been trying to augment this with some strong recent SoloQ play on Camille, Jax and Jayce in low KR master tier. Legacy have acknowledged in this pickup that they want to be able to control the game through solo lane play and have looked to the example set by Sin in 2017 that and concluded that importing was the best way to do it. Being able to secure even a journeyman import like Mimic is a huge boon for Legacy and the OPL as a whole and Legacy will be hoping his diverse experiences will fill the hole left by the departing Tally.

As a collection of names the players Legacy have picked up don’t fill you with the confidence that they will live up to the…institution…of success that the organisation has displayed. But what I like about this roster is that it’s been created with a plan in mind. They believe in their solo laners, and they secured a veteran jungler who prefers and looks best when he is ganking for his laners over controlling and being a teamfighting presence. Add into that a safe and solid botlane that you only want them not to overbalance the map and it’s clear to see Legacy’s path to success. All that’s left now is for Soulstrikes to get them firing and hope that talent doesn’t let them down.

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.