With the beginning of Season 3 just around the corner, I talked with MeyeA, the support player for The Brunch Club, who recently changed his name from Ellie Beee. We discussed the changes in the support role and items with the Preseason 3 patch, the North American qualifiers that earned The Brunch Club their place in the LCS circuit, and what we can expect to see moving forward.

You very recently changed your name from Ellie Beee to MeyeA. Can you tell us why you were named Ellie Beee and why you decided to change it?

MeyeA: So before I was even "Ellie Beee" I was known as "Mister Fissures". I was your typical solo queue troll. Eventually, I met Judy Monica while on the team Chuuper's Troopers. He set such a great example of a positive player to me that I decided to emulate his beavior, and so I started by choosing a name similar to his (feminine, two words).

I got kind of tired of being mistaken for a female because of my summoner name though, and decided to go with "MeyeA". For context, let me explain that I lost my left eye when I was a child. I'm currently in the use of a prosthetic/fake eye as a result. The name is read "M-EYE-A". I used to feel really self-concious about my eye. I would meet new people and follow their eyes to see if they noticed my fake one. It was always like this until I started using humor to explain it to people. In middle school I used to rotate the prosthesis like 90 degrees, which made the pupil of the prosthesis stare straight up at the ceiling, like a demon eye or something creepy like that. Soon enough all the people in the school knew about my fake eye so I never had to feel self-concious about it.

Congratulations on qualifying for Season 3. Since there were few spectators at the live event, can you tell us a bit about what the offline competition was like?



MeyeA: They packed us into a small corner and had bots simulate the games. We got Ryze bot though and cruised to a 2-0 victory over team MRN.

As your first LAN event, was it what you expected or somewhat different?

MeyeA: I was expecting a lot more good players.

But really though.

What are some of the challenges you are facing as a fairly new team with a short timeframe between finding out you qualified and the start of Season 3?



MeyeA: Challenges we've had to face: finding a house with trees tall enough for Brunch to graze on and finding a place where the drains have catchers so my fake eye doesn't meet the plumber.

What kind of advantages and disadvantages do you face when compared to a more veteran team?



MeyeA: We're not as familiar with the bot tier list so drafting might be difficult. With time though, we'll learn which bots are the strongest and start to form team comps with them.

How do you think the item changes impacted the support role?

MeyeA: Fuck league of giant's belt. That item makes peeling bruisers difficult since they just won't die. It's super stressful to watch an elise with sunfire+warmogs+giants belt rappel to your adc and proceed to kill the both of you with no way to fight back.

What items are very strong on support champions right now, and which feel underwhelming?

MeyeA: Sightstone is seriously the best thing since sliced bread. I'd say it was better than sliced bread but who am I kidding, everyone would see right through me.

I actually don't like shard of true ice. The item feels all over the place. You buy it for the active slow ability (so in situations where you want to full engage), but the item includes a mana regeneration aura (only useful in poke comps, and even then, 6 mana regen per 5 seconds is negligible once the poking characters buy tear of the goddess, so really you're buying wasted stats)and the range of the active is really short which forces you to be very close to the front of the teamfight while providing you with no tanky stats.

You are known for the slightly unconventional support Fiddlesticks. Do you think Fiddlesticks or any other champions work better in the bottom lane in Season 3?



MeyeA: The support changes focused on improving gold values for supports. Support Fiddlesticks however relies more on levels in Q to be effective, so he was largely unaffected by these changes. The s3 changes haven't affected which champions are played as support (high utility with low gold/exp values) and I don't expect that to change.



Are there any supports that are significantly weaker after the item changes?

MeyeA: Yes, since AD is a cheaper stat now, Janna's AD steroid was indirectly nerfed. Conversely, since AS became a more expensive stat, Nunu was indirectly buffed. It really showed at the LCS NA qualifiers, Nunu was a huge point of contention.

Have the recent buffs to Alistar been enough to bring him back into competitive play?



MeyeA: Probably not. The range increase to W (600->650) is huge and so is the buff to his movement speed (325 ->330), but the current NA supports have little to no experience on support Alistar and so are going to be very hesitant to pick him up. What'll probably happen is nobody plays Alistar until Madlife shows that Alistar is worth playing again.

During the qualifiers, you played an unusually aggressive Soraka support. Can you briefly explain why you chose this (pretty successful) strategy with a traditionally passive or zoning support champion?

MeyeA: Ever since Riot re-worked Soraka, I've preferred playing her hyper-aggressively. Her damage output is really high. I also had vision of the enemy jungler so I knew I could abuse this. I guess you could say the stars aligned... hue.

Do you have any shout outs?



MeyeA: Firstly thank you for the interview. Shout outs to my teammates who are seriously amazing, the Riot staff which is made of incredibly nice and helpful people, and my friends and family who support me through this crazy journey.

Thank you for the interview, and good luck with your upcoming matches!

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