Tectonic received a bit of grief online for their plan with coaching staff, despite it more-or-less resembling what you would see in major orgs overseas, at least as far as structure goes. The team has assembled positional coaches that you may have seen around on the internet in the coaching arena. While this is akin to the staffing structure that Team SoloMid had at one stage, dedicating positional coaches to midgame and teamfighting and getting a separate coach for early game seems to be a bit of cross-pollination of focus. It’s this “too many cooks spoil the broth” risk that saw them catch a few jokes at their expense. The point of bringing up this coaching fiasco is that it all seems to leave little responsibility to their retained Head Coach Jonny “Saiclone” Weatherly. Known as an innovator of unique ideas and strategies, one would hope that it will be his job to solely focus on the strategical play of his team and that his positional coaches will handle the player skill development. By all accounts I know of Saiclone is a popular coach with his players which is an important trait when it comes to a roster such as this. The trust they build between each other will be vital when it comes to facing the challenges that inevitably come the way of inexperienced rosters. The one standout critique of Saiclone is that TM Gaming had a mechanically sound roster in Split 2 that utterly stagnated as a unit and collectively was not any better when they finished than when they started. It will be up to Saiclone and the rest of the staff he has assembled to show Tectonic fans that he has this capability with this newly retooled roster.

Looking first at their carry-over players, and their AD Carry Omar “Low” Abouelkheir, Low was one of the few successes of TM Gaming and it is nice to see him retain his place for the new season. Indeed, even the Dire Wolves noted that he had…well it’s hard to say exactly what they meant but the approximate point is that Low was the only player who seemed to improve at all over the split. It’s a testament to the hard work he put in, and no small amount of credit can be given to what he learned from his former botlane partner in tgun who also brought similar improvement out of Raid and Crayzee in their first splits with the Esports veteran now playing StarCraft. Low had a couple strong Twitch games and only seemed to consistently struggle to farm lined up against FBI and SIN so has all the makings of a competent if not flashy secondary carry.

Slightly more perplexing is retaining mid laner Ari “Shok” Greene-Young. Shok’s highlights included a couple of highlight Orianna ultimates, giving rise to the “Shok-wave” line that followed him around during Split 2. But overall these moments were few and far between and he was dealing nowhere near enough damage to be relied upon as a carry threat, and lost lane far too hard to counteract the utility he provided on the Karma and Galio picks that were frequently his. If Tectonic wanted to retain a control mage player who has a decent Orianna and Karma and has a pocket Zilean, then they already had Wzrd in Split 1 2017 and he rode the bench all last split for TM Gaming…and Wzrd is strictly better version of Shok. Make no mistake, Shok is in this team as a New Zealander representing a New Zealand-based org. There’s nothing wrong with putting a New Zealander on an NZ org in the abstract, on the contrary I think it adds a wonderful identity to the org overall. But when it comes to putting the strongest possible roster onto the rift, then for my money it’s not a good selection metric.

Joining Low in the botlane is Isaac “Tilting” Bellamy. Historically we’ve seen Tilting on mage supports and he is famous for his pocket Sona pick. Tilting returns to the OPL after last appearing on the 2017 Split One Tainted Minds roster, replacing Broler and was uninspiring in his performances. He spent Split 2 with Legacy Genesis in the OCS and was at the forefront of the blow-up involving stand-in coach Burstfire while the rest of the org was away at Rift Rivals. It is hard to judge that team’s performance too harshly, as an incident like that is sure to destabilize any team. It will be up to Tilting to show that with preparation for a full split rather than just the fill-in duty he’s performed in the past that he is more than just an OCS player.

Tectonic completed their roster with two additions from the highly successful Abyss Academy OCS roster. I don’t know a lot about these two players, jungler Ryan “Swathe” Gibbons and wunderkind top laner Daniel “Papryze” Francis. I have watched Papryze a bit in Solo Q and he is rightfully touted as the next Pabu – a pro-ready top laner who has a wide skillset that if develops could fill the void of talent that exists in Oceania once you get past Swip3rr, Tally and Chippys. For Swathe’s part, he didn’t blow me away in the OCS finals that I watched, but he seemed to have a reasonable sense on how to play the pro-style game, more so than a lot of high-elo SoloQ junglers I watched. This is what I’d assign his reasonable Rek’Sai performances in that series to. The other thing I thought he did well is that he got his laners into the game, which is great when you have such a dynamic threat like Papryze on the team. From a roster construction standpoint, the pair coming in together makes a little sense – when the team is likely going to time and again turn to Papryze to need to solo-carry the game to win, it makes sense to have a familiar face in his back pocket coming out of the jungle.

All in all, this Tectonic roster is underwhelming. I hope I’m wrong, because I am super intrigued to see Papryze in the OPL and I’m very curious to see if Low can take the step up and be a leader and show that he’s an OPL-calibre AD Carry all at the same time. I worry about Shok, and I hope this team doesn’t just become a doughnut – solid at the sides but nothing in the middle.

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.