TL;DR: Cabochard is the one who created Lucian top
So as you probably all know, yesterday in the battle for first place in the NA LCS between Cloud 9 and Echo Fox, C9's toplaner Licorice picked Lucian as a counter to Huni's Gangplank. After the game, Inven Global did an interview! with Echo Fox's jungler Dardoch, in which they wrote:
C9 Licorice put everyone on the edge of their seats with Lucian top. A pick that Huni himself had created.
Which is just plain wrong. That's obviously not a big deal and I don't want to be petty, but I decided to use it as an opportunity for a little LCS history lesson, or a TIL, whatever way you want to put it.
So this Huni Lucian thing, everybody knows about it and it's kind of a meme, but he was not the first person to come up with Lucian toplane. In the Season 6 Spring Split EU LCS game! between Elements and Vitality on the 4th of February 2016, Vitality's toplaner Cabochard picked Lucian into the Steve'sSTEEEVEEE Gangplank. At that time, both GP and Lucian were considered 100% pick-ban, so Vitality tricked Elements into thinking it was Lucian ADC. Cabochard smashed Steve and VIT won the game pretty convincingly.
Fast forward two moths to the S6 NA LCS Spring Semj Finals between IMT! (Damn Shen and Zed cutting onions) and TSM. In the first game! of the series, IMT drafted a teamcomp with 3 Marksman, one of them being Lucian toplane for Huni. Note that he also blindpicked it and ended up playing versus Maokai. Huni didn't really get an early advantage in lane due to the laneswap meta, but IMT got ahead as a team yet eventually threw the game and got ouscaled by TSM's comp. IMT proceeded to lose the Series 0-3 and Huni's toplane Lucian became a meme.
Then, Lucian top disappeared for the rest of 2016. In Season 7, we had 5 games of Lucian toplane. He lost one game versus a Renekton, 3 times Lucian was used as a counterpick to Kennen by Huni, ssumday and V with Lucian winning all 3 games. Also there was a troll game between MSF and ROC where Hans sama picked it and went 0/6 but I'm not counting that one.
Despite Season 8 being so young, we have already seen 5 games of Lucian top so far. 4 times, it was used as a counter to GP, but only Huni managed to pick up a win with it. Cabochard also returned to his pick and used it against a Vladimir in Vitality's game versus Fnatic and even though they won, he had little to no impact on the game.
This is not to discredit Huni, he's the one who popularized it and ruined our SoloQ, but as I said just a litte piece on the pick and it's origins.
As of today, Lucian toplane is sitting on a 54,5% winrate with a W/L record of 6/5 across all 5 major regions. It is an exciting pick and I'm looking forward to seeing it more often again, which is likely since, finally, Gangplank returned to the meta.
Bonus: Lucian mid
However, Cabochard was not the one who had the idea to play Lucian in a sololane. It seems like that was actually xiaohu in Season 5. However there were only 3 competitive games of Lucian mid before xiye made the pick popular in their match against SKT during the MSI 2017.
If I made a mistake, please let me know and I wil correct it. Data from gamesoflegends. Edit: Yeah it was the Semi Finals, my bad. Some formatting, as per usual.
