The 2019 season of the LPL kicked off today with 2018’s Worlds champions, Invictus Gaming, squaring off against Topsports Gaming in a best-of-three series.
If you watched Invictus at all last year, the fact that they swept Topsports probably wasn’t much of a shocker, but one champion pick in particular stood out as very strange from both the 2018 professional meta and the current worldwide solo queue meta.
Gao “Ning” Zhen-Ning, Invictus’ jungler, was the MVP for both games thanks to his stellar performance, but we only want to talk about his first game for now. Why? Because he locked in Kayn, and he absolutely crushed with him. This was incredibly entertaining to watch for two reasons. First, Kayn is not a very successful jungler in any region, according to League of Legends stats site OP.gg. And secondly, the game with Kayn, which was the first game of the series, was actually pretty close, so watching Ning carry with a champion who’s almost never seen in pro play was a breath of fresh air.
Whenever we see a champion succeed in the pro meta that isn’t typically a popular choice, it’s always fun to evaluate how we think that champion could perform if they were more popular. In this case, it seems like there could be hope for Kayn, but only on the right team comps. Curiously enough, we don’t actually think that the comp IG locked in for the first game was very Kayn-friendly, but it doesn’t matter as he was still able to get mind-numbingly fed on his own.
His high-damage Shadow form, in particular, could fit into the right comps. With a tankier top laner, hopefully boasting a good amount of crowd control, on top of a mid laner with CC as well, a blue Kayn could let his laners lock down targets for him as he scales into the mid-game. By then, in theory, they wouldn’t have to be locked down for long, because he’d be able to kill them with one full combo.
In this game, Song “Rookie” Eui-jin’s Lissandra paired well with Kayn in the mid lane, but the top lane Aatrox probably could have been replaced with something tankier. It’s hard to justify replacing Aatrox, though, as he’s still one of the strongest top laners in pro play even in 2019.
If you’re a Kayn fan, and you’d like to see Kayn more in pro play, don’t get your hopes up yet. This one game likely won’t be enough to justify taking him that much, but it could still be a sign that he’s more viable than we all thought.
