Ranked Game #22

Ugh...this was a horrible game. This is the first ranked game I've played where I genuinely got mad at my team. I was pissed off, and it affected my play as I starting playing way too aggressively. Hopefully my next game is fantastic, as I need to get this one off of my mind. This was a duo queue game with my friend 534N7R0N.

I was the captain of my team, and I had second ban:

Shen, Nocturne, Rammus, Amumu


Draft:

Urgot
Morgana, Singed
Sona, Lee Sin
Garen, Xin Zhao
Warwick, Cho'Gath (my friend)
Ashe


I didn't like this team composition very much, setting up a wonderful prelude to the game to follow. Sona and Lee Sin did not communicate with us at all...they pretty much just said "i'm gonna pick x" and didn't really contribute much to the team composition discussion. Sure, we had a tank, jungler and support, but having two AD-central champs is not ideal, especially when one is Lee Sin. Did I mention I hate people who are dead set on playing a certain champion? Anyway, their team was pretty scary, it was incredibly balanced and quite bulky. Garen is always irritating with his giant sword from the sky, and Singed flinging everybody all over the place. Fortunately, it looked like that I would lane against Ashe, which is a matchup I should win every time.


Lane Matchups
Top: Cho'Gath vs Morgana, Singed
Middle: Urgot vs Ashe
Bottom: Lee Sin, Sona vs Garen, Xin Zhao
Jungle: Warwick vs


Early Game
The bottom lane was a huge disaster for our side, Lee Sin and Sona were outmatched from the word go. Sona died for first blood pretty early after getting exhausted. Each of them died several more times without getting any kills themselves. I did ok in the middle lane against Ashe. I didn't get any kills, but she didn't get any either. As the laning phase went on, they tried ganking me a few times from the side lanes, but were only successful one time when I stupidly walked into Xin and Garen in the river bush. I wasn't as aggressive as I should have been in the early going, as I easily could have gotten a couple kills by burning my summoner's spells. As a melee champ going 1v2, Cho'Gath was at a disadvantage in the top lane. He was backed up to his own tower constantly only getting some relief when Warwick ganked once or twice. He was able to get a couple kills in those situations, but obviously he couldn't push at all. Warwick didn't gank much, he mostly had to cover for the bottom lane when they failed spectacularly. When he did gank, he was usually able to make an impact and get a kill. As a result of bottom lane getting dominated, our tower down there was the first one to fall.

Mid Game
We fell apart even more at this point. When the tower fell, most of the fighting moved to being concentrated at the middle tower. There was a lot of dancing around for a while, pushing and counterpushing back and forth. From time to time one or two of them would split off to try and push another tower, so we would have to go defend it. We tended to be able to pick them off when that happened, but our resulting pushes went nowhere.  Our team was too hesitant when it came to teamfights and we also had no real solid plan of who to kill first. As a result, we pretty much got destroyed whenever one happened. At one point, we got ourselves aced in front of our middle tower, resulting in its quick destruction but a failed surrender. Our poor play continued until another huge loss in a teamfight in the middle, where we voted to surrender at 28 minutes.


The post game scoreboard:

Replay link: Ranked Game #22 - Urgot

What I learned:
- Urgot is meant to be played aggressively, which I did not do. That was a factor in my failure to do anything useful in this game
- Lee Sin is horrible, he has very little utility. Sure, two blinks are nice, but only if you can do damage along with it
- Garen is pretty freaking dangerous when damage is built on him, he turns into a whirling dervish of death and destruction
- Junglers need to be able to gank to be effective, plain and simple
- Morgana seems to be pretty underrated, her ult can be devastating if coordinated well with the rest of her team

My Score: 0/5/4
My Build: Manamune, Ninja Tabi, The Brutalizer, Cloth Armor, Null-Magic Mantle

Current ranked record: 12-10 (0 leaves)
ELO Rating: 1291

Yep, that was my worst and most frustrating game so far. I promise that I will do better next time, it was just inexcusable. Comment if you would like, thanks for reading.

-Chickenmoo