When Misfits Gaming first bursted onto the EU LCS scene heading into 2017, people were skeptical of the lineup. A lot of rookie players (specifically Barney “Alphari” Morris and Steven “Hans Sama” Liv), as well as the Korean jungler Lee “KaKAO” Byung-kwon, who had formerly been one of the best Junglers in the world but hadn’t lived up to his former reputation in some time, all led up to a roster that was considered to be middle of the pack in a competitive EU LCS Split, with teams such as G2 Esports, H2K Gaming, and to a lesser extent Fnatic expected to do very well.

They would end this split 2nd in their conference (which had both the aforementioned Fnatic and G2) and ended up placing 4th in the seasons playoffs. Between Spring and Summer, they would replace KaKAO with Nubar “Maxlore” Sarafian, and they would make their way to the finals in EU (before getting smashed by the dominant force in G2), make it out of groups at Worlds and perform very well against reigning World Champions SK Telecom T1 in the Quarterfinals.

Heading into 2019, expectations from most with their new lineup were very high, with them expected to be a potential contender to go to the Mid-Season Invitational. This didn’t happen, as the team failed to even make it to playoffs. How could a lineup that looks so stacked on paper (and was so expensive to run, apparently) fail so hard? The answer is nuanced, and there are many problems, but one of them remains King above the rest.

The thing to start with is that these are not new problems. These problems go back to the beginning of the organizations time in the EU LCS/LEC. For their first year, these problems were mostly remedied by having IgNar in the lineup. However, since he has left, we have seen this team drop off in quality as time has gone on, and their problems are

The primary issue with this roster is that it had an insurmountable fundamental flaw when it was built. The simple way to put it is that they are very similar to Fnatic in the 2017 Summer Season (a roster that also had sOAZ, though these problems are not his fault). The problem that Fnatic roster had was they were too reliant on sOAZ to provide initiation. If you look at sOAZ’s champion pool during this split, you will notice that their win rate when sOAZ was on initiation champions (most notably Gnar and Jarvan) was significantly higher than when he was on counter-engage champions, if you will, such as Shen and Galio. This led to them being crippled in their playoff series vs the Misfits lineup at that time, as in every game of the series Misfits would put an extreme emphasis on taking Jarvan and Gnar away from them in the draft phase, either banning or picking them both in the first rotation in every game of that series.

Some may be wondering, now, why Misfits simply can’t do the same thing with sOAZ now. The basic answer to that is… they’ve tried to. Misfits went 2–0 with sOAZ on Jarvan this split and 2–2 with Sion, while going 4–8 on other champions. 4–2 is not a phenomenal record, but there is also a big difference between 4–2 and 4–8. However, the issue here is that it isn’t reliable enough to only have one person do this, as it is too big of a hole to reliably draft around in a consistent manner. Someone else has to be able to pick up the slack sometimes. We saw this become a problem with Fnatic, and it has become a problem with Misfits now. Now, some may be wondering about the Jungle. This split, when Maxlore has tried to play initiation champions, the team has done poorly. They lost the only game he played Zac, the only game he played Jarvan, and they lost 2 of his 3 Sejuani games. When both your Top Laner and Jungler fail to provide initiation correctly, the only other position it reasonably falls to is the Support.

To put it bluntly, GorillA sucks at engage champions. Some may point to his high win percentage on the ROX Tigers in 2016 with Alistar, but there are so many other variables there, such as ROX Tigers playing the game fundamentally differently than any other team was at the time , Alistar being incredibly overpowered in the Spring season (probably the best champion in League of Legends during that time, in all honesty, a shame it took the west so long to figure it out), and he also only played a single game of Alistar in the Summer of 2016. When you look at his champions played in literally every single split from Summer 2016 through Summer 2018, as well as every tournament he has attended, GorillA has performed significantlly better on peel/ranged/counter initiation champions. His most played champion in the last 2 years is Tahm Kench. How do you make plays on Tahm Kench? Try to flash tongue somebody and see what happens as the enemy team turns on and one shots you. There were always other players on GorillA’s teams that provided initiation. Whether it was Smeb or Khan in the Top Lane, Cuzz or Peanut in the Jungle, Bdd or Kuro in the Mid Lane, or even his god damn AD Carry PraY would provide more engage than him, a player who is famous for his Ashe play.

I want to make it clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with being a player who can’t provide initiation. Different players have different skillsets. The problem is when you build a team of players that all have that same problem, you end up with no way to provide initiation. And when you can’t initiate, this leads directly into the next problem. Being over reliant on getting a lead through laning and snowballing.

Let me paint a scenario for everyone. You have a composition in the current meta with a control mage Mid Laner (Orianna/Syndra/Zoe), a split push Top Laner (Yorick/Jax/Fiora), a standard AD Carry (Ezreal/Kai’sa), a peel support (Braum/Tahm Kench/Galio), and a non-engage jungler (Lee Sin/Olaf). Now, imagine that the enemy team has another composition full of meta-viable champions. Let’s say their composition has all champions in the same category as you, except in the Top Lane, where they have a Jarvan instead (to clarify, if your composition is, say, Yorick/Olaf/Orianna/Ezreal/Braum and theirs is Jarvan/Lee Sin/Zoe/Kai’sa/Galio). Now, which team is easier to play around objectives with and turn on enemies who overextend to contest your taking of said objective. The answer is the latter composition example provided, and there is no argument. The first composition has no engage, meaning that if they get to posture around an objective first, then they can force the enemy team to engage onto them and they can counter engage. However, the issue with this is if you don’t get to an objective first, it is next to impossible to force the latter composition off of it. This dynamic creates a reliance on getting to objectives first, and getting to objectives first inherently relies on having advantages in pushing lanes, which leads to the conclusion that one must have a large enough gold and experience advantage that they can consistently rotate to objectives and apply vision first. To simplify all of this is to say that if Misfits doesn’t get a massive lead in the laning phase, they just roll over and die, since the compositions they are forced to craft around their initiation weakness are very fragile and have no win conditions when behind. A common criticism I see directed at Misfits is that they are too reliant on a “win lane, win game” playstyle. This is absolutely true and they are worthy of this critique. However, this is a player that they are forced to play as a result of the flaws that the players they have, and this has been the case ever since IgNar left the team.

The ultimate takeaway from this is that engage is an incredibly powerful tool in League of Legends. If you don’t have any, either in your players or team composition, it is borderline impossible to play the game from behind, and that is, as stated earlier, too big of a weakness to reliably draft and/or play around.

Statistics taken from:

Bynjee. “Games of Legends.” Games of Legends, in-Depth Stats about Lol Esports: LCS, LCK, LPL, gol.gg/esports/home/.