‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

I hadn’t originally planned to write anything about who I thought the MVP of OWL was, but it turned out that my choice of JJoNak was a hipster pick. However Halo of Thoughts released a bunch of OWL MVP Nominations from various different writers. They chose players such as Fissure, Fleta, SeaByolbye, Carpe, and Libero.

So here is my case for JJoNak above all of the rest of them. It’s true that he is enabled more than other players. However think about it this way, plenty of players are enabled in this league. None of them have delivered on a consistent day to day, patch to patch, meta to meta, and stage to stage as JJoNak does. On that basis alone, none of these other players match him.

If we’re talking about culture and changing a team, JJoNak has changed the entire game and league. Fissure brought leadership to Gladiators. JJoNak changed the entire way people thought Zenyatta could be played and started multiple internal civil wars between teams as other Zenyatta players tried to also get themselves pocketed.

This brings me to my second point, all of them failed. Four stages later, no other player in a similar role has matched what JJoNak does. We can talk about being enabled or setup, but the reality is that every other team has failed to emulate the style of NYXL.

This comes to the third point against the other NYXL players. They are all incredible in their own right and at least top 3 in their own specific roles. But at the end of the day, the player most unique among all of these star players is JJoNak and that’s why the game has been built around him. Without JJoNak, their entire color as a team changes. They’d be forced to play a style that is more easily studied and countered without him and be far more vulnerable as a result.

JJoNak has broken the paradigm and in four stages, no one has gotten close to catching up to him. If we were to set a draft now of all of the NYXL players, I’d say the first pick everyone should get is JJoNak because every other player on that team has a comparable, JJoNak does not.

JJoNak broke the paradigm, he set the team identity, he is miles ahead of the rest, completely unaffected by the meta, has improved himself as a player, and has the best consistency of any player in the league across all four stages. The entirety of Overwatch League tried to figure out a way to stop or emulate him and have failed. That’s why he’s my MVP.