This benefits lane specialists like Huni particularly. With lane swaps a distant memory of 2016, standard lanes are now the default meta. Success and FailureĢ017 SKT will likely win a lot of games by bludgeoning their opponents to death.
When a team consists of only five players, changing one of them can fundamentally alter that team’s dynamic–remember when TSM dropped Gleeb for Lustboy? Huni/Peanut-era SKT will surely suffer growing pains as they all figure out how to play together, but that’s acceptable during the Spring Split as long as the team is learning and improving collectively. Huni getting camped by the jungler should empower Faker to make aggressive plays, and vice versa. Faker’s aggression gets him ganked a lot, so an equally aggressive top laner will force enemies to choose more carefully which lane they target. (Side note: is anyone else as thrilled as me for the new rules?)Īs much as Huni needs to adapt to SKT, SKT needs to adapt to Huni. One dimensional strategies like Juggerkog are going to be even less viable with bans to target key picks half-way through the draft. With 10 bans in competitive champion select now, players with small champion pools will find themselves getting target banned more often than in the past. His champion pool, although extensive, is sorely lacking in tanks. Opponents will predict Huni’s over-aggression and find unforseen ways to punish him. He’s going to have to adapt to a more competitive region with a jungler that doesn’t ward as much as Reignover did. On a world-class team like SKT, Huni won’t be the main carry anymore.
Huni’s unrivaled damage/minute, averaged from 43 games, Summer 2016 Only P1 Gate (support) died more times than Summer Split Huni. Huni’s aggression can also be his undoing, for one simple reason: he dies a lot. In fact, Huni led NA LCS tops in all of 2016 in the following categories: kills, damage per minute, average share of team’s total damage to champions, and average gold difference at 10 minutes.
Rather than playing tanks in traditional team compositions, Huni leads his teams to victory with damage and kill contributions. Take a look at his historic Summer 2015 Split and you’ll see he didn’t play a true tank like Maokai even once. Huni is well-known for his aggressive playstyle and preference for playing high-damage carries. Evidently the allure of playing for the defending World champions in his home country was too great, and IMT graciously voided his contract to allow him to sign with SKT. He had a monster 2016 season in the top lane, and even signed a two-year contract to play for IMT through 2018. Huni was a much bigger surprise, partially because he seemed to be settling in nicely with Immortals. When ROX Tigers disbanded after Worlds, obtaining Peanut was a “no-brainer” for SKT, filling their worst position with a fantastic player, while simultaneously denying anyone in the league from getting him. Who do you best pair with Faker, Bang, and Wolf other than the most dominant available players? In two separate tweets several days later, SKT announced they had found exactly that with their new acquisitions: Huni and Peanut. 3-Time World Champion Benji, who only played 14 games in the summer split was arguably the more replaceable of the two. Duke had a great summer 2016 split by most standards, scoring top 3 in his league for kills, KDA, and gold differential at 10 minutes. When SK Telecom T1 (SKT) announced in November they were releasing two of their own world champions, top laner Duke and jungler Bengi, surely they had a trick up their sleeves.