Stats Corner: The numbers from Las Vegas

During the first two days, I honestly believed that Ezreal would not be on top of the “Most picked” for fifth time in a row. Champions like Cho’Gath, Olaf and Lulu were climbing rapidly, leaving Ezreal to hover around just below them. I was already imagining the luring headline “Who dethroned Ezreal?”, one I long desired to use for a stats corner.

What a fool you were, Nydra! Ezreal is not going anywhere, at least not until the Season 3 patch and even then it’s questionable. After DreamHack and IEM last weekend, he once again has a hefty lead before the runner-up in the charts. Only Diana matches those outrageous numbers, though she mostly shines in the “Most picked” and “Most contested” categories (as we’ll see below).

Support players will be happy to see Sona’s return to popularity. After she got nerfed with Elise patch, Sona was nowhere to be seen in the aforementioned two tournaments but we see now that when the best teams from all regions gather she is still one of the most common support picks.

At top, we see the departure of Irelia and the return of Shen and Jax, the latter of which kind of missed IEM and DH due to being heavily banned. With much more games being played at IPL 5, however, the Master at Arms survived the ban phase more often than not and got back in the spotlights.

All the rest is quite familiar to our readers: there’s Orianna as one of the most popular mid picks, there’re are all the ambiguous champions like She, Cho, Olaf, Lee Sin and Rengar populating the charts and there’re Corki and Vayne as runner up AD carries. To quote the popular phrase: “Nothing to see here, move along”.



Meet the new trio of soloque permabanned champions: Lee Sin, Diana and Rengar. The first two you already know from IEM and DreamHack while Rengar finally made it to a top three after all the talks of how OP he is. His Elise patch nerf obviously had no effect on him and if we take into account his high win rate of 63% one has to wonder if there is another hit to Rengar incoming. After all, how long can he stay there, giving the RIOT balance team the finger?

When so many renowned players gather at one place to play a whole bunch of games, it is expected that the graph to the left will greatly reflect targeted bans. As WE became champions, the high placement of Misaya’s Twisted Fate is easily explainable. By going down the bracket and the graph, one can easily spot few more correlations. There’s nRated’s Blitzcrank, Toyz’s Orianna, Alex_Ich’s Evelynn and Froggen’s Anivia mixed in between champions that have been subscribers to the bans phase for some time now: Katarina, Nunu, Shen, Zyra, Malhpite.