Super epic series this week vs Selling Mayonnaise. Had to do some role swaps. Our offlaner is in Australia, and our carry had an emergency. Our 6th man is a support player, and our short notice stand-in is also a support player. So with four supports, this is a good week to try everyone out at new roles.

The main takeaway for me, at least in terms of moving natural support players to core, is that we should try to turn up the tempo. These guys have been playing support for a long time, and it is most natural for them to try to impact the game as quickly as possible, potentially at the cost of farm. So probably best to enable that playstyle and mentality. Practice matters too, we just don’t farm as efficiently as we would if we were all veteran core players, so trying to fight earlier reduces our exposure to that weakness.

This lineup is basically an embodiment of Ion Shell gaming, where survivable man-up heroes get purpled and go ham, with Chaotic Offering and Vac.Wall as counter-initiation tools. Really fun play style.

where survivable man-up heroes get purpled and go ham, with Really fun play style. Overall I quite like this draft, however keeping with our primary lesson I think we could have gone for more tempo at positions 1 and 2. Our safelane Riki had trouble farming against Axe , maybe we opt for something a little stronger early like Chaos Knight, Leshrac, carry Abaddon (hero pool is an issue though).

, maybe we opt for something a little stronger early like Chaos Knight, Leshrac, carry Abaddon (hero pool is an issue though). Mid Spectre is naturally very slow to get going, although I adore the pick overall and it did end up being very high impact. Zeus would have worked well for a traditional mid, comes online super fast. Statistically, KotL is another highly favorable “weird mid” that would have been way better for tempo; I’m seeing this situation come up a lot lately so I’m now itching to try it out.

Our game 2 draft had more tempo and worked quite a bit better – same results, but this time they had their 5k player (Sniper) step in for a 3k player.

Global strats are not very popular right now, but glass cannon type heroes are starting to make a comeback, and blink daggers are staple, so I suspect meta shifts may start to favor the Everyone press R approach. Worked like a charm, Haunt + Nimbus turned into easy kills on Sniper.

are not very popular right now, but type heroes are starting to make a comeback, and blink daggers are staple, so I suspect meta shifts may start to favor the approach. Worked like a charm, turned into easy kills on Of course, Spectre takes some charging to come online, so we could have opted for Slark or Phantom Assassin to get into fighting shape even faster, and of course lessen the impact of our general farm inefficiency. For offlane, a Bristleback or Broodmother would have helped us get more out of the laning phase, but both these heroes are bad right now, so not sure if it is worth.

Now that I think about it, we should probably draft to our strengths even when we are not missing players. Seems that it took role swaps to really highlight that point to me. Of course, I’m going to try not to next-level myself by say, drafting mid Ezalor and carry Witch Doctor, but I’m not making any promises.

-gg worst captain ever