League of Legends
After starting out the summer season strong, going 5-1 in their first six games, European team Origen has been rather disappointing in its performance over the past few weeks. Origen holds a 4-2 record in the last three weeks of the League Championship Series (LCS), however the team seems to be in a funk. Is Origen in a temporary slump or have their opponents figured out how to play against them by now?
Origen’s losses have been widespread. In week 3, they lost to Roccat which was followed by two losses against the unbeaten Fnatic in weeks 4 and 7 and one in week 6 against Unicorns of Love. These defeats fall at the hand of good teams that have been amongst the top 5 in Europe since the start of the split. What's more, Origen is still in second place in the standings and were the closest team to nearly defeating Fnatic. Even though the results and standings show success at face value, the team’s performance has shown flaws lately.
Oversaturation of carry players
Since its first game in the European LCS, Origen has suffered from one clear problem: everyone in the team wants to carry. In the first matches of the season it looked competitive how every player on Origen was outclassing their opponents in all of the lanes and having solo carry potential. However, this became a problem once they faced the top teams, which could abuse every mistake once they figured out how to play against Origen.
The team definitely had a problem in sharing resources multiple times. Most teams build their teams around a 2-man carry system, which allows them to get their items and reach their power spikes faster while the rest of the team would play a more supportive role. However, for Origen this playstyle doesn’t seem to work since they have 3 carries in the face of xPeke, Soaz and Niels, all of which claim precious resources in the form of farm and jungle pressure. Even though the Spanish midlaner normally doesn’t get any gank pressure while in lane, he often split pushes and thus takes a lot of farm for himself, which leaves less of it available for his teammates.
When you compare this to Fnatic, you can see that they relocate their resources to their respective carries on the team. They alternate those according to their pick and ban phase. Sometimes Huni is the carry and sometimes it is Rekkles, however they always manage to get the one the resources they need to be in the position to perform their role properly - something that doesn’t seem to work every game for Origen.
If you look up the statistics of their losses, you will see that in all of them xPeke had the most impact of his team, even though he doesn’t get much gank pressure in lane and all he gets is minions to farm. The rest of the farm is split between top lane and the AD carry, instead of prioritizing one of them. Since Soaz usually plays carry top laners and Niels is often times forced into playing a supportive AD carry, Soaz would need more resources than Niels to be effective in the game and would be the obvious choice for that most of the time. As an example we can take the game against Fnatic in Week 7. Soaz is playing Ryze while Niels is playing Corki. Soaz has a total of 13.6K gold and Niels a total of 13.7K gold, so they basically have an almost equal amount of gold income. However, Corki spikes earlier than Ryze and he would only need to get his Triforce to be impactful. On the other hand Ryze needs his 3 core items to carry the game.
Additionally what happens if Amazing and Mithy go out of their supportive role in the team and start wearing their carry pants too? Often times lanes got abused by their extremely aggressive play style and Amazing trying to counter jungle at the same time. Origen’s jungler also throws their leads by becoming too greedy on plays and overcommitting to them. An example of that would be in their second game of the split against Fnatic at 14 minutes into the game, where Soaz and Amazing caught Huni off guard and managed to kill Yellowstar who was trying to save him. However, Origen overcommitted to a dive onto Huni and the rest of Fnatic was able to come in time and clean up before Amazing could get the kill. In the end he didn’t need to flash into the turret to try to get the kill onto Huni, he could have simply backed off or helped his team escape.
Origen’s Draft Phase
Another issue with Origen is its often questionable pick & ban phase. Back to the already mentioned game against Fnatic, their draft choices there made many people raise their eyebrows as they decided to pick Corki, known for his high percentage of magic damage, in a team composition which was already quite heavy in that department. They took him in combination with Twisted Fate as their last pick, creating a team with very little physical damage which would have to win the early game extremely hard, otherwise Fnatic would be able to counter them if the game progresses long enough.
To start from the beginning though, in their first rotation Origen took 2 of the current OP picks with Ryze and Gragas. Fnatic answered with Janna and Lulu, teasing a late game hyper carry composition with a lot of shields and scaling to protect their AD carry. As a follow up to that Origen took Nautilus and Corki, which is even more ap damage. I literally asked myself right there why they picked Corki if they already know that Fnatic might be going for a “Protect the Kalista” composition. A Corki can’t break through the shields in the late game, so Tristana or Kog’maw could have been a lot better here, since both could scale and provide the attack damage the team would need to stay relevant in the late game. The reason why Origen probably opted for the Corki pick is his impressive mid-game power spike and wave clear, which in combination with other mid-game champions such as TF could provide them with the tools they needed to snowball the game out of control.
In Fnatic’s last rotation of picks, they lock in Nunu and Viktor, which are very strong at zoning enemies. This shows that they are looking to fight around neutral objectives on the map and split the team fights in their favour. It
also favours the synergy between Nunu and Kalista in securing drakes and barons as with Nunu’s consume and Kalista’s Rend, Fnatic is able to burst them extremely quickly. This also means that Origen won’t be able to fight Fnatic after 25 to 30 minutes into the game. Since Origen decided to pick Corki they won’t have a reliable source of AD damage that can pierce through a tanky Nunu and the amount of shields provided by Janna and Lulu in the late game teamfights.
It would have been perfect for Origen to pick a poke heavy AD for mid lane and if we look right now at options available, Origen could have opted for Varus or Jayce. Since Varus was banned the perfect option would have been Jayce. If Origen picked him right here they would have been able to reliably brute force turrets or sieges with their huge amount of poke in the mid game. Also with the combination of Corki and Jayce they would have had a huge damage output as soon as Corki finishes his Trinity Force and Jayce his Manamune and Last Whisper and that would have given Soaz’ Ryze enough time to scale. However Origen decided to pick Twisted Fate, which is an extremely interesting and risky pick in this scenario. Not only does Origen lock a fifth AP damage source, they also chose a very snowball reliant champion for their team comp. The Twisted Fate pick forces Origen to make plays around the map before it is too late. Even though they have mostly AP damage in their team comp, Origen has a stronger spike during the transition from early to mid game against Fnatic. So they would have a time window to snowball out of control during the 10-20 minute mark of the game, but after that Origen will be playing against the ticking time bomb that is Fnatic’s team comp.
Let’s also take a look into one of Origen’s drafts in the first week of LCS against H2K (the match was played on patch 5.9). xPeke's team first locks in Gragas, when Rek’sai is banned. It is a safe first pick and you get yourself one of the best junglers right there. H2K answers that in their first rotation with Maokai and Evelynn. It’s interesting how they prioritize Evelynn here, because on this patch she was only played in Korea and used as a counter to Nunu. Since they picked her into Gragas, Evelynn might find it a bit harder to snowball the early game.
In the second rotation Origen locks in Annie and the OP Leblanc. Annie is Mithy’s champion every time Thresh and Alistar are banned. He only goes for playmakers, so he didn’t have too many options available there. At this point Origen is going for a pick comp around Leblanc, with a certain ability to start teamfights by having Annie. Meanwhile H2K decides to answer those picks with Sivir and Janna. They get themselves high mobility champions and a good disengage against Origen. Another synergy would be that when Sivir uses her ultimate Maokai could lock down Annie before she gets her stun out. In their last rotation Origen locks in Vayne and Rumble. Now it is clear Origen is going for teamfights, they want to lock down targets with Annie’s stuns over a good Equalizer by Soaz’ Rumble. Vayne is very good here because she counters Sivir and has a good amount of self peel, so Annie can go for the engages anytime.
H2K picks Kassadin to round up their high mobility comp. Their plan is basically to disengage Origen’s engages and re-engage with Sivir’s on the hunt right after, followed up with a flank by Evelynn. Overall both teams drafted really well here, so is Origen’s draft even a problem?
I would say yes, you could see in the Fnatic game they had the chance to pick better, have a stronger all around composition and not be as snowball reliant as they were with that team comp. The draft of Origen shows a few problems, but is not the only reason why they had their defeats.
Throws & Mid to Late Game Shotcalling
In addition to the problems already mentioned, a big factor in some of Origen’s losses is throwing. In week 7’s game against Fnatic, Soaz and company managed to get a lead in a drake fight and take a baron out of it at 23 minutes into the game. Fnatic misplayed their positioning at drake when Rekkles decided to enter the pit and Origen took that chance to win the fight. They didn’t do a lot of plays during their power spike at 10-20 minutes, however they managed to snowball a respective lead after the baron at 23 minutes. Regardless they still managed to throw that lead back to Fnatic around 28-30 minutes into the game. As soon as the clock was around the 30 minute mark, Fnatic just outscaled them. The reason they lost in week 3 to Roccat was also a mistake in the early game from which they never had the chance to come back. In their loss against UOL they also threw their small lead around 28 minutes in the game and UOL took the game from there.
All of Origen’s losses have something in common - as soon as their opponents get an advantage over them, they never managed to come back. Either teams aren’t making mistakes against Origen for them to capitalize on or they aren’t good at that, or they can’t create opportunities to come back into the games. If you consider that the team has 4 veterans with years of experience, including at worlds, they should be able to know how to create a situation which would help them come back into the game and even win the game after that. Even the old Fnatic lineup was famous for cheesy tactics to make a comeback, but it doesn’t seem to be working out for Origen’s mid to late game shotcalling as soon as they start losing.
Soaz - a big factor in Wins & Losses
One thing I noticed while going through some of Origen’s matches was the size of the impact Soaz has compared to other EU LCS top laners. In the games Origen won Soaz often has a high percentage of Origen’s damage to champions. A lot of times he did almost, if not an equal amount of damage to enemy champions as Niels. What is so interesting about this is that most of the times the top laner has less resources available than the AD carry, but still the same impact in the games.
Soaz is also a huge factor in Origen’s losses. Almost as often as the Frenchman can win games, he can also lose them for his team . In 3 of their losses he has negative stats and only a small impact on the game, when we compare the damage statistics. This begs the question: is Origen only able to win if Soaz snowballs? The answer to that is no, since xPeke and Niels often show up big for Origen in their wins and while simultaneously also being huge threats when they are losing. Could Origen’s top lane be their weak spot after all?
Conclusion
In the end, is Origen in a slump or did teams start figuring them out? They might not be drafting perfectly and lost last week's match against Fnatic but that’s not enough to cause an alarm. What matters is that they take those performances and drafting mistakes and improve upon them until the playoffs. They also might want to work on their shotcalling here and there to avoid throws, so they don’t drop out of the playoffs earlier than expected. Origen still has 2 weeks to work on those issues, come out strong and make it to worlds.
If you enjoyed Alexandre “DrPuppet” Weber’s analysis on Origen, be sure to check out his twitter @AleWM9 for more League related content.
Sources:
loleventvods, lolesports, oracleselixir, pelonarmy, Riot Games flickr, Esportspedia
Origen’s losses have been widespread. In week 3, they lost to Roccat which was followed by two losses against the unbeaten Fnatic in weeks 4 and 7 and one in week 6 against Unicorns of Love. These defeats fall at the hand of good teams that have been amongst the top 5 in Europe since the start of the split. What's more, Origen is still in second place in the standings and were the closest team to nearly defeating Fnatic. Even though the results and standings show success at face value, the team’s performance has shown flaws lately.
Oversaturation of carry players
Since its first game in the European LCS, Origen has suffered from one clear problem: everyone in the team wants to carry. In the first matches of the season it looked competitive how every player on Origen was outclassing their opponents in all of the lanes and having solo carry potential. However, this became a problem once they faced the top teams, which could abuse every mistake once they figured out how to play against Origen.
The team definitely had a problem in sharing resources multiple times. Most teams build their teams around a 2-man carry system, which allows them to get their items and reach their power spikes faster while the rest of the team would play a more supportive role. However, for Origen this playstyle doesn’t seem to work since they have 3 carries in the face of xPeke, Soaz and Niels, all of which claim precious resources in the form of farm and jungle pressure. Even though the Spanish midlaner normally doesn’t get any gank pressure while in lane, he often split pushes and thus takes a lot of farm for himself, which leaves less of it available for his teammates.
When you compare this to Fnatic, you can see that they relocate their resources to their respective carries on the team. They alternate those according to their pick and ban phase. Sometimes Huni is the carry and sometimes it is Rekkles, however they always manage to get the one the resources they need to be in the position to perform their role properly - something that doesn’t seem to work every game for Origen.
If you look up the statistics of their losses, you will see that in all of them xPeke had the most impact of his team, even though he doesn’t get much gank pressure in lane and all he gets is minions to farm. The rest of the farm is split between top lane and the AD carry, instead of prioritizing one of them. Since Soaz usually plays carry top laners and Niels is often times forced into playing a supportive AD carry, Soaz would need more resources than Niels to be effective in the game and would be the obvious choice for that most of the time. As an example we can take the game against Fnatic in Week 7. Soaz is playing Ryze while Niels is playing Corki. Soaz has a total of 13.6K gold and Niels a total of 13.7K gold, so they basically have an almost equal amount of gold income. However, Corki spikes earlier than Ryze and he would only need to get his Triforce to be impactful. On the other hand Ryze needs his 3 core items to carry the game.
Additionally what happens if Amazing and Mithy go out of their supportive role in the team and start wearing their carry pants too? Often times lanes got abused by their extremely aggressive play style and Amazing trying to counter jungle at the same time. Origen’s jungler also throws their leads by becoming too greedy on plays and overcommitting to them. An example of that would be in their second game of the split against Fnatic at 14 minutes into the game, where Soaz and Amazing caught Huni off guard and managed to kill Yellowstar who was trying to save him. However, Origen overcommitted to a dive onto Huni and the rest of Fnatic was able to come in time and clean up before Amazing could get the kill. In the end he didn’t need to flash into the turret to try to get the kill onto Huni, he could have simply backed off or helped his team escape.
Origen’s Draft Phase
Another issue with Origen is its often questionable pick & ban phase. Back to the already mentioned game against Fnatic, their draft choices there made many people raise their eyebrows as they decided to pick Corki, known for his high percentage of magic damage, in a team composition which was already quite heavy in that department. They took him in combination with Twisted Fate as their last pick, creating a team with very little physical damage which would have to win the early game extremely hard, otherwise Fnatic would be able to counter them if the game progresses long enough.
To start from the beginning though, in their first rotation Origen took 2 of the current OP picks with Ryze and Gragas. Fnatic answered with Janna and Lulu, teasing a late game hyper carry composition with a lot of shields and scaling to protect their AD carry. As a follow up to that Origen took Nautilus and Corki, which is even more ap damage. I literally asked myself right there why they picked Corki if they already know that Fnatic might be going for a “Protect the Kalista” composition. A Corki can’t break through the shields in the late game, so Tristana or Kog’maw could have been a lot better here, since both could scale and provide the attack damage the team would need to stay relevant in the late game. The reason why Origen probably opted for the Corki pick is his impressive mid-game power spike and wave clear, which in combination with other mid-game champions such as TF could provide them with the tools they needed to snowball the game out of control.
In Fnatic’s last rotation of picks, they lock in Nunu and Viktor, which are very strong at zoning enemies. This shows that they are looking to fight around neutral objectives on the map and split the team fights in their favour. It
also favours the synergy between Nunu and Kalista in securing drakes and barons as with Nunu’s consume and Kalista’s Rend, Fnatic is able to burst them extremely quickly. This also means that Origen won’t be able to fight Fnatic after 25 to 30 minutes into the game. Since Origen decided to pick Corki they won’t have a reliable source of AD damage that can pierce through a tanky Nunu and the amount of shields provided by Janna and Lulu in the late game teamfights.
It would have been perfect for Origen to pick a poke heavy AD for mid lane and if we look right now at options available, Origen could have opted for Varus or Jayce. Since Varus was banned the perfect option would have been Jayce. If Origen picked him right here they would have been able to reliably brute force turrets or sieges with their huge amount of poke in the mid game. Also with the combination of Corki and Jayce they would have had a huge damage output as soon as Corki finishes his Trinity Force and Jayce his Manamune and Last Whisper and that would have given Soaz’ Ryze enough time to scale. However Origen decided to pick Twisted Fate, which is an extremely interesting and risky pick in this scenario. Not only does Origen lock a fifth AP damage source, they also chose a very snowball reliant champion for their team comp. The Twisted Fate pick forces Origen to make plays around the map before it is too late. Even though they have mostly AP damage in their team comp, Origen has a stronger spike during the transition from early to mid game against Fnatic. So they would have a time window to snowball out of control during the 10-20 minute mark of the game, but after that Origen will be playing against the ticking time bomb that is Fnatic’s team comp.
Let’s also take a look into one of Origen’s drafts in the first week of LCS against H2K (the match was played on patch 5.9). xPeke's team first locks in Gragas, when Rek’sai is banned. It is a safe first pick and you get yourself one of the best junglers right there. H2K answers that in their first rotation with Maokai and Evelynn. It’s interesting how they prioritize Evelynn here, because on this patch she was only played in Korea and used as a counter to Nunu. Since they picked her into Gragas, Evelynn might find it a bit harder to snowball the early game.
In the second rotation Origen locks in Annie and the OP Leblanc. Annie is Mithy’s champion every time Thresh and Alistar are banned. He only goes for playmakers, so he didn’t have too many options available there. At this point Origen is going for a pick comp around Leblanc, with a certain ability to start teamfights by having Annie. Meanwhile H2K decides to answer those picks with Sivir and Janna. They get themselves high mobility champions and a good disengage against Origen. Another synergy would be that when Sivir uses her ultimate Maokai could lock down Annie before she gets her stun out. In their last rotation Origen locks in Vayne and Rumble. Now it is clear Origen is going for teamfights, they want to lock down targets with Annie’s stuns over a good Equalizer by Soaz’ Rumble. Vayne is very good here because she counters Sivir and has a good amount of self peel, so Annie can go for the engages anytime.
H2K picks Kassadin to round up their high mobility comp. Their plan is basically to disengage Origen’s engages and re-engage with Sivir’s on the hunt right after, followed up with a flank by Evelynn. Overall both teams drafted really well here, so is Origen’s draft even a problem?
I would say yes, you could see in the Fnatic game they had the chance to pick better, have a stronger all around composition and not be as snowball reliant as they were with that team comp. The draft of Origen shows a few problems, but is not the only reason why they had their defeats.
Throws & Mid to Late Game Shotcalling
In addition to the problems already mentioned, a big factor in some of Origen’s losses is throwing. In week 7’s game against Fnatic, Soaz and company managed to get a lead in a drake fight and take a baron out of it at 23 minutes into the game. Fnatic misplayed their positioning at drake when Rekkles decided to enter the pit and Origen took that chance to win the fight. They didn’t do a lot of plays during their power spike at 10-20 minutes, however they managed to snowball a respective lead after the baron at 23 minutes. Regardless they still managed to throw that lead back to Fnatic around 28-30 minutes into the game. As soon as the clock was around the 30 minute mark, Fnatic just outscaled them. The reason they lost in week 3 to Roccat was also a mistake in the early game from which they never had the chance to come back. In their loss against UOL they also threw their small lead around 28 minutes in the game and UOL took the game from there.
All of Origen’s losses have something in common - as soon as their opponents get an advantage over them, they never managed to come back. Either teams aren’t making mistakes against Origen for them to capitalize on or they aren’t good at that, or they can’t create opportunities to come back into the games. If you consider that the team has 4 veterans with years of experience, including at worlds, they should be able to know how to create a situation which would help them come back into the game and even win the game after that. Even the old Fnatic lineup was famous for cheesy tactics to make a comeback, but it doesn’t seem to be working out for Origen’s mid to late game shotcalling as soon as they start losing.
Soaz - a big factor in Wins & Losses
One thing I noticed while going through some of Origen’s matches was the size of the impact Soaz has compared to other EU LCS top laners. In the games Origen won Soaz often has a high percentage of Origen’s damage to champions. A lot of times he did almost, if not an equal amount of damage to enemy champions as Niels. What is so interesting about this is that most of the times the top laner has less resources available than the AD carry, but still the same impact in the games.
Soaz is also a huge factor in Origen’s losses. Almost as often as the Frenchman can win games, he can also lose them for his team . In 3 of their losses he has negative stats and only a small impact on the game, when we compare the damage statistics. This begs the question: is Origen only able to win if Soaz snowballs? The answer to that is no, since xPeke and Niels often show up big for Origen in their wins and while simultaneously also being huge threats when they are losing. Could Origen’s top lane be their weak spot after all?
Conclusion
In the end, is Origen in a slump or did teams start figuring them out? They might not be drafting perfectly and lost last week's match against Fnatic but that’s not enough to cause an alarm. What matters is that they take those performances and drafting mistakes and improve upon them until the playoffs. They also might want to work on their shotcalling here and there to avoid throws, so they don’t drop out of the playoffs earlier than expected. Origen still has 2 weeks to work on those issues, come out strong and make it to worlds.
If you enjoyed Alexandre “DrPuppet” Weber’s analysis on Origen, be sure to check out his twitter @AleWM9 for more League related content.
Sources:
loleventvods, lolesports, oracleselixir, pelonarmy, Riot Games flickr, Esportspedia
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