For those of you who haven’t subscribed yet to my YouTube channel, I’ve fallen into a pattern of releasing at least one video a week. For the past couple of weeks, those videos were of League of Legends. I’ve been playing quite regularly and practicing with the new champion select, a few new champions, and at least one who has been reworked. Joining me has been Tacktix of Tough Love Critic, and to a lesser extent my other buddy Tyvokka (who has gone by other names that I’ve mentioned before), both of which are members of my guild Obsidian and part of our Fantasy LCS league. Lately we’ve been getting together several times a week to practice while jumping on Skype while we play. We may make the switch to Discord at some point though, as the guild is planning to use it more often once we start playing Crowfall together.

I have to say, I love the changes that came through during season 6. The new champion select is fantastic, allowing you to pick two roles that you want to play and you are guaranteed to get one of those roles. This heavily cuts down on toxicity during champ select, though I have still seen some flaming during matches, but that’s never going to be eliminated entirely. I’ve noticed having at least one of my friends on and having voice comm has helped with my map awareness and shotcalling abilities. I started gravitating towards top lane during last season, but oftentimes took up the support role because that would help me to focus on objective and vision control. Having practiced support last season helped me to carry those skills over to the top lane, and playing characters like Shen with a global ultimate means paying more attention to the map. I also always run teleport up there, so that helps too. There have been many times that Shen ult or well timed TP have been game changers. Through practice this season with the new masteries, item changes and other tweaks, I’ve found a handful of champions I rather enjoy playing up in the top lane.

For a time I was picking top + fill in champion select. After being stuck in the jungle a couple of times, I’ve found that Trundle (who I’ve spammed A LOT up top) is a fantastic jungler. Now I’m picking top + jungle in queue, and have found success in both roles more often than not. Tacktix plays Thresh support primarily, and between the two of us we have heaved several low-skill teams on our shoulders and turned dire looking situations into wins individually and for our teams. It’s been a huge confidence booster, and I’m really looking forward to doing our placement matches in ranked mode very soon. Occasionally I’ll switch things up and play some ADC too, though I really only want to be in the bot lane if I have him backing me up.

So far I’ve been loving Trundle, the newly reworked Shen, and Tahm Kench up top. I have played around with the reworked Poppy a bit, along with being relatively confident with Maokai and Illaoi. I think that’s probably enough to work with. I’ve only really played Trundle in the jungle, but I think a couple of these other champions might work well there also. On ADC I’ve mostly played Corki, Jinx and Caitlyn, but I want to get some time in with Graves as well. The massive ADC rework threw me for a loop for a while there, but I’m starting to wrap my head around it.

Anyway, I wanted to share the two January Highlights videos I culled from a ton of games played over the course of the month. Going forward I can see this being a new trend, and I hope to chronicle my ranked journey via video this season. I’d say two videos per month pertaining to this subject will probably be all that will happen, due to the fact that I have to record a bunch of games and cut out the best stuff, but it will be cool to document it all. Here’s the videos for January:

Part One:

And Part Two:

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