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.

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.