I’ve Become Lazy

As of right now (3/18/2025), I’m the highest ranked Ivern player. I’d also consider myself the best Ivern player on any server in terms of skills by a decent margin. However, this isn’t a title that I’m particularly proud of.

To put it bluntly, it’s because I don’t think I’m good. This isn’t some kind of overly humble self deprecation either. If you look at my gameplay objectively, I make so many basic errors that if I were to make a compilation of them it’d make even platinum players point and laugh.

If I had to describe my play, it’d be “good enough to beat challenger players”. In fact, for a while now I’ve strived for gameplay that’s “good enough to win against challenger players”. To become a truly good Ivern player, I’ll have to adopt a less apathetic goal.

Perfect Play

In order to play a game perfectly, it would imply not only mechanical perfection (every possible skillshot dodged and all abilities hit) but also map omnipotence and being able to read minds. If you’re able to play even a single game perfectly, you’re probably the best League of Legends player in the world.

This is obviously not realistic, so let’s scale back to a few guidelines for our humanly obtainable perfection. The main points are:

• Every decision has well-founded reasoning and thought process.
• This reasoning doesn’t have a better alternative (analysis based, not results based)
• Every decision considers both risk and reward, meaning that coinflip plays are less perfect than ones that can afford to go a bit wrong.
• Mechanics are only scrutinized when it’s because of something unexpected rather than reaction speed.

Believe it or not, it’s much easier to notice where you’re falling short of these while smurfing in low elo. Maybe it’s just an Ivern thing, but I’ve found that my play feels much less clean when subjected to the increased variance of an emerald game. With how complicated of a game League is, being able to perfectly play an emerald game even under my “humanly obtainable perfection” guidelines would make you the best.

The Project

So with that being said, I’ve started a new account from Platinum (Emerald-ish MMR) in order to see how much I can polish my gameplay. In short, I’ll play games on this account and then do full deep-dive reviews. All of this will be recorded and put on a YouTube channel.

I’d also like to establish some ground rules for the challenge:

• Builds need to be something I’d run on my main. No ego builds that take advantage of the low elo enemy’s lack of skill/knowledge.
• Plays that rely on the opponent being bad should be avoided. These will be evaluated as negative even if the results are positive.
• A play that uses teammates’ strengths to “properly” win will usually be valued higher than one which only considers self.
• Excessive shotcalling through chat is not allowed. Forcing the team to your way removes the skill expression of having to deal with whatever they come up with themselves.

With that, here are the reviews: