For the early part of 2016 LPL Spring, Vici Gaming played like a dormant, relegation-level team with minimal signs of life. Sparks of intelligent movement existed, but they had lost their gall. After a definitive knock down from EDward Gaming with the return of Ming “clearlove” Kai, the outlook appeared especially bleak for Vici.

In the first week of cross-conference, Vici Gaming collided with Team WE, a team whose jungler, Xiang “Condi” Renjie garnered attention for daring Lee Sin play. In Vici Gaming’s first rotation in Match 1, Choi “DanDy” Inkyu secured Nidalee for himself for the first game of the season. What followed was one of the most one-sided jungle performances I’ve ever seen in 2016 as DanDy kept constant watch of Condi, controlled his camps, and strangled him out, ending the game with a 3/0/4 score and an 80 cs lead.

Game 2 was another Nidalee game for DanDy, but he played more patiently, supporting his laners to ensure their Kog’Maw composition lifted off.

“In the first game, I wanted to prove myself,” DanDy said in the interview following what I consider the turning point that allowed Vici to qualify for playoffs. And that was all that needed to be said.

Since desk analysts at the 2014 World Championship warred over whether DanDy or Cho “Mata” Sehyeong deserved to be crowned MVP, DanDy has slowly slipped further and further down the list of top junglers. Though VG may have won 2-0 over WE in LPL Spring, Condi finished the season with the second highest number of MVP points in the league. DanDy has publicly said his ex-Samsung White teammates chided him as the only member of their once-elite club to not have attained an LPL season title.

The jungle role is an incredibly team-dependent one. Aside from support, it’s the hardest role to stand out in while playing when your team suffers overall. Losing lanes translate to more reserved jungle play, as invades and jungle control become difficult to execute. The once king of farming and counter-jungling went from a modestly positive CS lead at 10 minutes in spring to a modestly negative one this summer. Vici’s first blood timing is just shy of nine minutes, and they secure it in 44 percent of games.

Statistically and glancing at the standings, Vici Gaming and DanDy shouldn’t be listed with the clearloves, the Condis, the Liu “Mlxg” Shiyus and the Lê "SofM" Quang Duys, but when I want to just watch a jungler, to think about his thought process in the early game and learn more about situational decision-making, I rank the average Vici game above most of theirs. Jungling is incredibly context-based, and within Vici’s context, many of DanDy’s decisions are adaptive and creative.

In-game examples

Recently, Vici Gaming played against both Snake eSports and Royal Never Give Up, and DanDy has faced two of the league’s most lauded junglers. Though both series ended in 1-2 losses for Vici Gaming, DanDy’s thought processes were reactive, and logical.

For example, in Game 1 against Snake, DanDy started out on the red side red buff area, but as soon as he pathed down to his blue buff, he checked river for SofM. Upon spotting him, he instantly reacted to move to the top side to secure some control by taking the Baron scuttle.

Unfortunately, Vici had drafted lanes that pushed less effectively compared to Snake’s top lane Malzahar and mid lane Azir, which meant that both of Snake's lanes were pushing into Vici on that side of the map, restricting DanDy’s ability to secure vision. After backing, DanDy pathed to the blue side red buff area to place wards. He exerted pressure with a gank to force the enemy bottom lane to play defensively, and DanDy continued to repeat this process, playing well to his strong side, but giving his bottom lane everything they needed to obtain a lead, especially since SofM seldom plays to his bottom side.

This caused DanDy to fall behind in farm, but DanDy’s strategy here ensured the team the first dragon as well as an ability to at least determine by process of elimination where SofM wasn’t. In the instance in which SofM did invade top to look for a gank in the first ten minutes, Vici and Snake skirmished and they traded one-for-one because VG were able to react almost immediately. It's clear that even though VG didn’t necessarily take advantage of all the tools he gave them, DanDy constantly had knowledge of SofM’s location in this match.

DanDy also reacted extremely well in Game 3 after making the relatively risky decision to start on the side of the map opposite his duo lane in a lane swap. He and Loong, after being chased out, chose to immediately run to the bottom lane and push out the wave, making up some of their time and experience and slowing down Snake’s push. This isn’t the first instance of an adaptation like this, but DanDy’s immediate reaction again highlights his ability to think ahead. Both of these were games Vici ultimately lost.

In the first game of the RNG series, DanDy again showed creativity and adaptability in small decisions. Once again starting on his team’s weak side in a lane swap, he saved his trinket to warn him of the enemy’s duo lane invading. Then, throughout the game, DanDy moved seamlessly to sides of the map where his lanes were pushing, first by ganking for his top laner, then later to force a skirmish over blue buff on the bottom side. DanDy’s ability to identify where his team has an advantage is part of what makes Vici so devastating with a lead and ultimately allowed the team to win Game 1 against one of the league’s top teams.

Even when DanDy made a mistake, he immediately reacted by compensating his mid laner for setting him behind. In the second game, DanDy spotted Mlxg with a bottom side ward, apparently assumed Mlxg would continue to path in that direction, and attempted to invade Mlxg’s blue buff jungle only to encounter Mlxg. After dying to Mlxg and Yu “xiaohu” Yuanhao, putting Easyhoon at a disadvantage, DanDy respawned, placed a pink ward in the river bush on the bottom side of mid lane, and pathed to the top side of his jungle to ensure Easyhoon was covered from both sides.

In this game and the next, Mlxg attempted several reckless invades, and though he frequently escaped, his invades in the first ten minutes never went undetected. When he chose to invade DanDy’s krugs camp after seeing him and two other members of Vici on red buff, they managed to kill him.

Finally in the third game against Royal Never Give Up, DanDy forced both of xiaohu’s summoner spells early, allowing Easyhoon to exert a lot of pressure on the lane. Though Vici could not catch out Mlxg effectively in this game, when DanDy would spend time invading just to ward on the top side, he was able to use Rek’Sai’s ultimate to head back to his bottom side jungle, where his team had more of an advantage, and farm safely, ensuring he wouldn’t fall behind.

In almost every game in these two series, DanDy varied his jungle behavior. Also in both series, though Vici played two games on the same side of the map, DanDy didn’t start in the same quadrant of the jungle, keeping himself somewhat unpredictable and also showing his jungle starts are reactive based on the situation. Seldom did DanDy play as if he didn’t know where Mlxg or SofM were, and I found myself continuously more impressed by DanDy’s early game decision-making than either Mlxg’s or SofM’s.

The carry and the servant

Since coming to China, DanDy has undergone several changes in style, which have made him both a contradiction and multi-faceted. I also believe this is a major reason many have defaulted to labeling him as inconsistent.

“Previously, I hated farming the jungle slower or getting to a lane slower than my opponent,” DanDy explained during the 2016 LPL Spring split. As a jungler, for Samsung, DanDy was much more likely to dwarf his opponents in farm and move to lanes strictly to turn the tides and countergank.

As DanDy adapted to his new environment, he had to make the decision to change his priorities. “Chinese teams focus a lot more on ganking lanes,” DanDy said. Over time, and especially last split, DanDy began ganking much more proactively, especially for his duo lane. “I think that right now if I played a style that waited for an enemy jungler to come gank first,” DanDy said, “my teammates would die easily. Then if my teammates die, it’s easy for the enemy jungler to invade and get vision or other advantages.”

As a jungler, DanDy’s philosophy seems to be that, if his lanes are performing well, his job becomes much easier, so it’s important to prioritize their success over his own. This thought process is very different to SofM’s and Snake eSports’ approach, given that SofM has said he thinks he can only help his laners after ensuring his own development in a game.

In an interview in 2013, DanDy said that he believes he’s suited to his role in the game because he has the “servitude of a jungler,” which has facilitated some of his more recent playstyle changes, but has also been something he appears to struggle with as the main carry for Vici Gaming.

Despite both his solo laners, Zhu “Loong” Xiaolong and Lee “Easyhoon” Jihoon mater-of-factly telling theScore esports this Spring that their job is to pick champions with wave clear and facilitate DanDy to develop and carry, Dandy only said, “I don’t think it’s about me carrying or a jungle carry style. It’s more about me getting a certain lane ahead and using that lane advantage as a team to end the game efficiently.”

In the final crucial series between Oh My God and Vici Gaming in the regular 2016 LPL Spring season that ultimately determined which team made playoffs, DanDy played a patient, vision-oriented Game 2 Graves match. He purchased a Tracker’s Knife and focused on placing defensive wards while his team fell further and further behind. In Game 3, he took matters into his own hands, rushed a level two mid lane gank, took the kill, and built a Skirmisher’s Sabre.

A brute force selfish carry approach, though it’s something DanDy seems to default to in desperate moments from as far back as his Evelynn games in Season 3, seems contrary to how DanDy wants to approach the game. In 2015, on Vici Gaming, his team’s solo laners would follow him around the jungle on assassins, looking for kills he would initiate and allow them to secure, and this thought process has probably also lead to the farm-sacrificing, vision seeking approach DanDy seems to have developed this split and that he exhibited against both Snake eSports and Royal Never Give Up.

With Xu “Endless” Hao’s laning finally improving enough that DanDy doesn’t need to permanently hover around him, Vici Gaming’s jungler has had slightly less lane presence, but he’s gone back to his strength in an extreme way: tracking the enemy jungler. Part of what made DanDy an effective counter-jungler in 2013 and 2014 was his uncanny ability to track his opponent. More recently, DanDy has prioritized this aspect of his play, at times at the expense of his own leads and farm time.

One of the things that differentiates DanDy from a lot of junglers in the LPL in particular is a general thoughtfulness. Zhang “Zzr” Zhanran, ex-jungler for Snake, said, “When I started playing professionally, I began to realize that the thing that made clearlove different from other junglers was that most of the other junglers in the LPL, including me, just go by feel in the jungle. I think clearlove uses his brain and thinks a lot about considering different situations.”

DanDy likely has more in common with clearlove than most other junglers in the LPL

While I agree with Zzr that this is definitely true of clearlove and is becoming increasingly common for some of the junglers on the LPL’s top teams, I also believe this kind of quality is extremely obvious in nearly every one of DanDy’s games. Even when his team falls behind extremely early, DanDy’s decisions, while not always perfect, make sense in the context of a team that’s behind, and he uses vision to try to give his team the ability to take advantage of and turn invades on the enemy jungler for comebacks. That’s part of why I think Vici, despite being relatively low in the standings, were still able to take wins off teams with extremely bold and aggressive junglers.

Part of DanDy’s problem is that Vici want to set him up to carry, but their ability to create the conditions for him to do so consistently is imperfect. If two of his lanes can push out, DanDy has shown he can be like Mlxg, Condi, clearlove and SofM. He can invade, gank, farm heavily, take kills, and carry his team. Part of the reason SofM seems to succeed is that his lanes always invade with him and push out, but his pathing has been relatively predictable and easy to target lately, forcing him into more defensive farming.

This isn’t meant to read like “because DanDy’s teammates are bad, DanDy looks like he’s bad,” because for one thing his teammates aren’t nonredeemable. Both splits this year, Vici played in what most consider the much more stacked group, and while they only sit in fourth place in Group B this summer, most would agree that Vici are at worst the sixth best team in the league, if not on par with Snake and, at times, I May. Loong has had modest success as a utility top laner, this meta is strong for Easyhoon as he frequently receives three of Vici’s bans, and Endless has finally gotten to the point where spectators can start to see whatever it is that Yoon “Homme” Sungyoung sees in him. They just aren’t good enough to consistently create pushing lanes that facilitate circumstances for a carry jungler, and there are a probably many things DanDy could do himself to make the situations easier.

But for another thing, DanDy doesn’t look like he’s bad. He may not be winning the LPL any time soon, but watching nearly any of his games closely and trying to understand his thought process makes it extremely hard to strike his name off the list of the best junglers in the world.

Last split, DanDy let slip that he has considered returning to Korea and taking a break. “...the team hasn’t been doing very well lately,” DanDy explained at the time, “and I’ve been very stressed. The team atmosphere also hasn’t been very good.”

DanDy ultimately decided to keep playing for Vici this summer, and his spirits have seemed much higher. But when he looks downcast at his screen after a loss, one realizes that he’s had to repeatedly adjust his expectations, all while seeing his former teammates succeed in China.

“I originally thought,” DanDy said in a recent reflection, “if in China I can also take the World Championship, my prestige will become greater.” After Vici Gaming stagnated in fourth place after the opening weeks of the LPL, however, DanDy adjusted his goals.

DanDy hasn’t just adjusted his goals, he’s become an entirely different player, albeit still an impressive one. At least every once in a while, DanDy feels the need to prove himself with a flashy champion and a selfish carry style that he himself seems to believe is unsustainable in the long term.

He may not have earned a title since the 2014 World Championship, but to me that's irrelevant. DanDy proves every week he's still one of the game's best junglers.

Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for theScore esports. You can follow her on Twitter.