We just made mental mistakes, those sort of lapses where immediately afterwards you know exactly what you did wrong and kick yourself for it. CLG just has so much more experience as a team though. I would say that is the biggest difference. They have been relatively stable with their core 5 members for a long time. A lot of the other teams are only weeks old.

no offense to you guys, but goose not showing up made your bracket a bit of a joke.

Literally everyone on the team can play ranged carries. In fact we kind of like arguing over whose Corki is best (solo queue ftw).

Counterpicking seems to be a much bigger deal in arranged than in solo queue. Thoughts?

Also, why do people feel the need to talk **** to teams much better than them. Albeit there were stomps, it's good to see some competition in the NA scene. I think this gives the other top teams something to strive for... that being toppling/dethroning CLG.

We wanted to come into the game with the mindset that we had nothing to lose (as top 4 teams qualified for the final in 2 weeks, and we already were top 4). Just to try our best and have fun. Somehow we got out of that when we were faced with actually playing.

We got a bit ummm panicky I guess. Its just a bit of stage fright we have to get over. I guess theres just a mental difference between playing vs the top 1% of players pretty frequently, and playing against the top .00001%

I started playing this game like 5 months ago, after playing DotA for a long time. I knew I wanted to get good at this game after a few weeks of playing. My first step towards that was watching the best players play. I literally learned this game from guys like Hotshot, TreeEskimo, Roku, Jiji, Reginald etc. So playing against some of them in a tourney was a great, and a little scary.

Can you explain the high level Taric play? Having only watched quadrakill this weekend and the clg/solomid stream tonight, every team seems like theyd be better off with...something else. So are the people i've seen playing taric just not very experienced with him? Or is it really worth it for a team to have a lvl 8 taric running around 25 minutes into the game with no items and his ult on?

I get that his heal/stun/ult are very good, but due to current meta, he's not allowed to farm, and seems to give up his lane presence for more solo exp. This means that in team fights at the 20-30 minute mark, he is operating with very gimped lvls on his skills.

Well I am not the expert on this (Since you know, we didn't beat solomid or clg). However I am one of the people most responsible for our picks. Basically we tried to pick with a couple of priorities.

In order of the importance we weighed things.

1. Never ever let Rammus go unbanned (he is too annoying of a ganker, and actually a really risky pick, he either ganks like a boss and dominates, or fails a few ganks, farms slow as ****, and is useless by late game).

2. Try to get Shen. The single best pick in the game.

3. Ban or pick your opponents best champs.

4. Get your teams best individual champs

5. Try to be well rounded ( AP, AD, tank, support, jungle, have enough CC and damage to make team fighting viable)

6. Have an idea of what you want your team to be strong at. Early game? Late Game? Kiting? Split pushing? and pick accordingly.

In solo queue you just want to ban OPs, ban their best players champ (Westrice = ban akali) and play what you are best at probably.

I saw your commentary on Garen, and I support you.

Question:
What advice would you give to a player who enjoys combo casters but has a bit of trouble handling autoattack carries? Seriously, every time I play someone like Tristana, I get gripped by an irrational phobia that makes me afraid to autoattack.

Why did you try to play Singed vs Ashe, Nunu and Anivia >_<