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General11 years agoDreXxiN

GosuAwards 2012: Astonishing innovations

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The game as we know it would become stale and boring if it weren't for the innovation of teams creating diverse avenues of play that reciprocates between the professionals and the average Joes. Sure, there's always a solid foundation of standard play to fall back on, rendering innovation a fearful opportunity, but every once in a blue moon, a team commits to something extraordinary and dawns the beginning of a fresh idea.



Diamonprox and Moscow 5 Jungle Invasion

Probably the most infamous of everything on this list is Moscow 5 changing the way jungling has been played forever. For unsuspecting victims, their jungle was your jungle and it was almost impossible to anticipate. The pressure was always high and before you know it, their entire jungle belong to you. To fight against the horror, teams have had the necessary responsibility of adapting to this belligerent style of play.

Froggen's AD mids

If you undertook this risky, flamebaiting approach in solo queue, you were likely to be trolled and reported. This was no intimidating factor for Froggen. Froggen is responsible for the dawn of bruisers mid in competitive play; with the likes of Lee Sin and Jarvan, he was capable of crushing his typical AP opponents in humiliating fashion. When you are so exceptionally ahead, team composition becomes a non-factor. It is true that the most recent patch has made this more attractive to the public eye, but it allegedly has been largely influenced by Froggen's recent tournament showings.

SoloMid Triple Wriggles Style

Though it was a brief period, a saga arose in Team Solomid's career when they would take a bruiser jungle, a bruiser top, and naturally, an AD Carry in a grand majority of their team compositions. Though noted as having particularly strong standard play, this strategy deserves a spotlight as 3 wriggles-capable champions would commence the rushing of this item and have an incredibly strong map vision advantage as well as being nearly infallible when it came to objective control. If you didn't stop them fast, whatever you were combative over would surely be evaporated.

Though it lacked any longevity, the strategy was brilliant for awhile and displayed a more colorful approach to TSM's masterful play in the early parts of 2012.

The Dawn of Zyra Support

Zyra was already a force to be reckoned with in the mid lane, but when teams started understanding the full potential of her in the bottom lane, she became quickly contested. First presented by M5 and made famous by Korean teams, Zyra support was an unsuspected phenomenon, but it somehow made perfect sense. Though not traditional, Zyra could do everything you wanted her to do. Her base damages are high, her CC is incredible, she has one of the cleanest auto attack animations of all time, and you're still a threat if you do poorly.

Oddly enough, Zyra has been almost homogenized into this role when but a few months ago, you would have been considered a troll. The dawn of Zyra support alternated bottom into a further exciting, aggressive warzone.

Promote / Teleport

Not many moments in League of Legends were as enticingly strange and satisfying as the time Counter Logic Gaming pulled out their infamous teleport/promote strategy. While they were using this in their Korea-dwelling era, it shocked viewers in the North American qualifiers for the Season 2 World Championship. The strategy was unusual, but proved to be quite formidable. CLG was confident enough in their laning phase that they could live without the assistance of an offensive summoner spell.

This brought them dominance in their game in the group stages of the World Championships against SK, where some of the sickest plays yet were on display. One of the greatest perks of this tactic? Full domination of top and middle lane in the ending phase, as a promoted minion can keep bottom shoved itself, resulting in no threat of being stripped of several waves when Baron Nashor is an objective.

"The Stanley Effect"

"The Stanley Effect" was a term popularized by Reddit during Taipei Assassins many memorable moments during the Season 2 World Championships. For those unfamiliar, the Stanley Effect is simple; it's a more successful version of HotshotGG's split push utilized in early 2011.

Stanley could pull this off without ever dying, and his team more properly adapted around this method, learning to effectively 4v5 while Stanley terrored the enemy team, bestowing far too much pressure on the map to ignore, yet executing the feat eloquently that would leave their foes without much of a choice in the matter.




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