Ranked Game #26

I gotta start studying for exams today, as it is finals week for me. I got a game in before I hit the books, and it was a good one. I ended up jungling with a champ I had never jungled with in a real game before, so it was bound to be interesting. This was a solo queue game.

I was the captain of my team and had first ban:

Nocturne, Shen, Malphite, Rammus


Draft:

Brand
Amumu, Morgana
Warwick, Dr. Mundo
Tryndamere, Caitlyn
Janna, Xin Zhao
Kassadin


Our team was interesting in terms of composition. We had two AD carries and two AP carries, with me being the only real bulk on the team. It certainly isn't a recipe for disaster, but also not ideal in my mind. Having a Tryndamere also makes me kind of nervous due to the usually horrible early game that they have. Given that though, we had a large amount of damage output, allowing us to easily counter their moderately tanky team. They had no real dedicated source of AD, just a bunch of crowd control and AP damage. The amount of crowd control they had was pretty significant compared to ours though, a suppression and two knock-ups is pretty scary.

Lane Matchups
Top: Tryndamere vs Dr. Mundo
Middle: Kassadin, Caitlyn (yep) vs Brand
Bottom: Morgana vs Janna, Xin Zhao
Jungle: Amumu vs Warwick


Early Game
So yeah, we had two people go in the middle lane. They were both too stubborn to leave, so they just went for it.  First blood happened about three minutes into the game when Brand roasted Tryndamere in the top lane. Tryndamere complained almost the entire laning phase about how "OP" Brand is. Soon after that Brand switched to the middle lane. As a result of overloading the middle, their tower ended up getting destroyed at around 6 minutes, which helped us get a bit of momentum and map control early. People started roaming around at that point. The bottom lane got a bit of help, but then the enemy team overloaded it and managed to get their first tower kill a few minutes later. After this, a lot of the action happened in the top lane where each team was trying to take the first tower up there. It was a lot of small teamfighting where we ended up falling behind in kills a bit, as Kassadin and Tryndamere would get themselves killed in easily avoidable situations.

Mid Game
Fortunately, Tryndamere hit his "critical mass" once he got a Phantom Dancer and we started taking back the momentum. An important teamfight happened in the bottom lane where we danced around dragon for a while, and then stepped into the lane to stop a push. We ended up acing them by targeting them in the ideal order of Warwick, Brand, Janna to eliminate as much damage as possible early. With the ace, we took down their outer bottom tower, and half of the inner one. Another great successful teamfight got us the next middle tower, thanks to the incredible presence of Morgana's ult to ruin entire teams. There was a bit of a lull in the action at this point, involving a lot of warding and counter-warding of Baron to try and get an advantage. Eventually another teamfight broke out in mid, where we were able to ace them by picking them off one by one with our AOE snares. This got us their middle inhibitor tower and inhibitor, but we unfortunately got aced in our retreat thanks to Mundo's cleavers. Their kills were spread far enough apart so that they really couldn't do anything with the down time.

Late Game
We launched another offensive on their base, gradually taking down their side lane towers. Upon getting to the base, we managed to secure another ace, getting us another inhibitor and one Nexus tower. We were pretty poor at retreating once again though, as all but one of us died while running away. They took that opportunity to get Baron buff without real contention, forcing us to defend for a while. Upon waiting it out, we made a push bottom and took out all three inhibitors at once. Given that they then had three lanes of super minions to worry about, we took Baron down once he respawned. This allowed us to make the killing blow by taking out the Nexus at 52 minutes.


Post game scoreboard:

Replay link: Ranked Game #26 - Amumu


What I learned:
- Tryndamere isn't the greatest solo laner...but he is also the best at recovering from a bad laning phase to dominate
- Some people are too stubborn for their own good, but it helped us mount an early lead
- Warding may be the most important thing that a jungler does early on
- Kassadin needs to farm to operate at his full potential, as in he needs to be able buy a mana pool
- Dr. Mundo is incredibly irritating when chasing someone

My Score: 5/8/22
My Build: Aegis of the Legion, Mercury's Treads, Banshee's Veil, Sunfire Cape, Null-Magic Mantle (and 7 or 8 wards)
Summoner Spells: Smite, Flash

Current ranked record: 14-12 (0 leaves)
ELO Rating: 1294

So my first real jungling venture with Amumu was successful, and this was a really uplifting game compared to the last few. My next game will come either today or tomorrow. Thanks for reading, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

-Chickenmoo