Welcome to Snowball’s OPL Team of the Week!
Welcome to Snowball’s Team of the Week, which highlights and recognises a player from each role that played well over the weekend’s games. This week has the best of our three undefeated teams putting their best players forward into one team of week six domination.
Pabu
Jackson Pavone – Gravitas
Strong improvement across the board was the name of the week for Gravitas but first among equals in this stellar week for the squad was the play of Pabu. Pabu delivered yet another taste of the stellar potential we’ve seen since he first came through the OCS.
Pabu has made his bones this split showing us misplaced mid lane champions to great effect and he showed us that firstly with a remarkable Corki game on Friday. He was a glutton on the field, hoovering up gold and damage and using it to build a dominating display from Gravitas’ top side of the map.
His second game was not as exciting on the scoreboard but much flashier on the rift. He took Qiyana into the top lane into Papryze’s Jayce and while Papryze was able to put forward one of his better performances of the split, a Supreme Display of Talent for the ages put the trees down for the count and sent Pabu and his squad to a glorious 2-0 weekend.
Wilder
Jeong Jin-woo – Bombers
Earlier in the split there was talk around the fact that jungling for the Bombers in Split 1 was a relatively easier affair due to how well the rest of the team was playing – and maybe the more subdued start to the split from Wilder was a reflection of the adjustment the whole roster needed to make.
Bombers broke through this week and it was in no small part thanks to Wilder shouldering a heavy lift for the weekend. A pair of Taliyah games led to a pair of victories and Bombers’ first 2-0 weekend of the split.
Against the Chiefs on Friday, Wilder was a force of earthen-nature, hurling rocks and vision around the map with reckless abandon, and enabling Mimic and ry0ma to go to work.
The match against Dire Wolves was a closer affair, but huge damage from the Taliyah coupled again his ability to get Mimic and ry0ma into position to do big damage was vital to a game that was balancing on a knife’s edge tipping into the Bombers’ favour.
Ryoma
Tommy Le – Bombers
Swiffer was hard-done-by not to take this even despite the loss, but ry0ma was on another level this weekend. His Renekton was terrifying and in combination with Wilder put the Chiefs’ early game to the (curved) sword, bringing back the dreaded “Lane Claire” that we’ve seen on and off since 2017.
Tommy hit all the “one-percenters” in this game, as a cursory glance of the numbers will tell you – champion and turret damage, and even commitment to his teams’ vision game. It was a dominating performance and a great example of what he can do with a gold lead.
If the Renekton game was strong, then his Lissandra on Saturday was an absolute masterclass. Getback struggled mightily in the matchup and as BioPanther (even with some less than stellar ultimates) threatened to take the game away from the Bombers, he came up time and again on the backside of scuffles to clean up the win or recover a botched fight for his team.
K1ng
Calvin Truong – Mammoth
Mammoth were not set the most difficult of early tasks against a Legacy outfit struggling to find their gear but k1ng showed why he is still at the pinnacle of the Oceanic Ezreal with an excellent performance.
He topped the kills and gold charts while remaining deathless and showing the power of the Iceborn build in concert with Triple’s Azir, contrasting with the Trinity Force favoured by players like Raes.
Edging north of 500 gold per minute and coming up on 1,000 damage per minute is huge numbers – perhaps not unusual for Ezreal, but still a masterful outing and one you expect good teams and players to show over lesser ones.
Stepping up in quality of competition, k1ng showed us a suffocating Sivir against Avant. Withstanding an early all-in from gunkrab and Aladoric, k1ng found an early laning lead shortly thereafter and held it until he started moving around the map with his team. He finished the map with over 60 percent kill participation and plenty of contribution to objective control.
Destiny
Mitchell Shaw – Mammoth
Destiny gets into back-to-back Team of the Weeks on the back of two excellent – and mayhap his two last – Yuumi performances. He showed up big-time against Legacy, with 100% kill participation and more damage than everyone on the trees except Chazz’s mid lane Rumble.
It’s worth spotlighting his outing against Avant on Saturday. Not just for his damage output, second-highest on his team, or his incredible vision control both in terms of wards placed *and* cleared.
But the composition from Mammoth, whether by design or by fortune, was tailored for Destiny to shine. Hitting his empowered Q enables Skarner to go forward, allows for Fudge to hit his knock-ups easier, and gives agency to k1ng to use the Sivir ultimate to send the team forward. Destiny turned this composition on, and time and again Avant fell victim to his pursuit kitty.
With the Gauntlet a little over a month away, which players were in your Team of the Week? Tweet at us and let us know @snowballesports with the hashtag #TOTW.
