my cl team can’t be this cute Season Review

This is the 3rd or maybe 4th team in a row I’ve had go out in the final couple playdays of an event despite being poised to go all the way and it’s uh, pretty rough. Thinking back on all those series I’d get eliminated in, I had mediocre performances in all of them and it uh, does things to your confidence.

Is what I thought and then I realized all of them had some bozo clowns, no fucking wonder.

Wait, what do you mean they’ve all separately won seasons without me in the same stretch of time?

The draft didn’t particularly go as planned, at least in the sense that the final team I had at the end of it wasn’t one that I’d pictured, but by and large worked off the same ideas that I generally have about drafting based on who I am as a player. I think my drafting style is somewhat unique in that it heavily emphasizes putting together a fairly “even” team, in the sense that the goal is to obtain veterans who I feel understand how teams in Clarity operate, are able to contribute to the progress of the team and work toward team play by bouncing off each other, and I usually do this by holding off on highly contested players and generally finding opportunities to secure high value picks by draining other captains resources. It produces this situation where my teams look pretty mediocre after the draft, but end up working better than average out of the box and we end up looking like a contender very early on. Most of this is based on my read that my ability to contribute to a division 1 team comes from being adaptable and receptive to ideas about game states and just generally bouncing off of other people on the team.

I think this approach worked out okay here but I’m definitely starting to spot flaws in it, particularly in that I find myself letting go of players I really want to play with because I’m afraid of having to make more sacrifices down the line, and this is something I’m starting to feel doesn’t particularly happen very often with how people draft nowadays, as I always find myself looking at the late cheap pickups people get and thinking “huh, I could’ve just hard committed for that player and still comfortably get great picks later on”.

Anyway, back to this season. Waloo is someone I’m more or less down to have on any team I play on, so it’s no wonder he’s now tied first for people I’ve played on the most teams with (the other being Nsphere — hence the commentary on why my approach to drafts may require tweaking (this is a joke and I will begrudgingly admit I like to have Nsphere on my teams)). Waloo is really easy to play with and I trust him a great deal, so he’s a very easy person to start team construction with.

Maff is someone I’d heard a lot of great things about and committing to picking him was largely scratching a name off the bucket list of people I wanted a season with — he also rounded out what I’d deemed a strong enough tricore in a situation that still left me with decent support options.

Dredi was perhaps the pick I hesitated on the most — he’s definitely one of the more polarizing players, but Waloo was on board with the idea so I was okay with it. From there my feeling was that nfd was likely the best possible 5 pick in terms of being good enough and fitting into my vision for teams as described previously.

The players I was strongly interested in ahead of the draft were a lot of the usual suspects for a Madsen team — Crispy Bacon, Harb — then as is the case with every season also about half of the people I had to sadly watch commit to a captain role — Snufkin, eisi — and then finally the occasional vet I haven’t gotten to play with — Debowy, Zakke, mint.

Overall I was content with the team, but perhaps apprehensive in expecting too much (albeit largely because of where I was personally with my relationship to the game more than anything else).

Madsen — I’ve found myself at this point sort of being just the stock image equivalent of a middle of the pack carry player. I won’t win you seasons, I will very rarely singlehandedly lose you seasons. I exist to fill a slot and allow for resources to be allocated to having better players in other roles while giving you a pretty consistent mid 5k level carry. Not much more to say I think.

Waloo — I’ve gushed about Waloo in multiple previous season reviews so I’ll keep it pretty brief. Waloo is an amazing cornerstone for teams; he’s a good drafter, incredibly stable player skill wise, contributes to good comms. Honestly I don’t have any major complaints about him — which isn’t to say that he’s a perfect player, just that I’d have to reach a bit and force myself to come up with negatives.

Maff — A very enjoyable person to play with, in that he’s both pretty damn good at the game and contributes to an incredibly comfy environment and atmosphere. I think he had a somewhat rough go of things on this team, because I think he’s a player who benefits from very playmaking oriented teams and when we even slightly resembled one of those he did very well. I think part of this is that I think he’d benefit significantly from a very vocal and active 4 to play around, as he seems somewhat uncomfortable being the one to make decisive calls that outline what he’d like from the team in the next couple of minutes. It’s also really hard to talk about Maff without bringing up the hero pool situation; he plays 4–5 heroes (and realistically its more of a plays 2–3 and is willing to expand it to 4–5 but not much further than that). Whenever I thought that a team has a good read on how to draft against us, it was mostly because they’d emphasize banning Maff or setting him up for a situation where he has to play into rough matchups on heroes that aren’t great in the patch, even though he generally did fine in those situations because, well, if you play only a couple of heroes you’re very comfortable with the ins and outs of them. I think he has good reads on game states, but lacks the ability to proactively tackle things — though, again, it’s hard to make a definitive statement on this kind of thing when so many of the situations I picture here are just a result of him having to deal with the hand he’s dealt by this team in particular. Super lovely guy, very happy to have had a season with him.

Dredi — A bit of an enigma. I find it incredibly difficult to not just review Dredi but even figure out how I feel about playing with him. He’s often incredibly impactful — and in that respect it’s absolutely no wonder why he’s as high MMR as he is — yet I seriously struggle to determine whether him having that impact comes at the expense of the rest of the players on his team having a much worse go of things. He’s an extremely greedy 4, lapping up waves and kills left and right (the infamous Dredi tax), and is generally a very very reactive player who rarely looks to create or set up for plays, which I think is something we lacked in the team — though I think this is something a different team could adapt to. I say this because Dredi as a 4 is a player you have to play around, and most of us don’t really default to that approach and it’s difficult to do that when you get to play with him without a conscious effort. He heavily emphasizes his own lane and early game, often to the dismay of his mid or carry who are getting crushed by dives or rune rotations that Dredi won’t really respond to because he can pressure the enemy carry and play for his own farm instead. There’s a lot of situations where we’re able to spot an opportunity for a play but, oh, Dredi’s tping to the other side of the map to get a couple waves and now we don’t have the heroes for the play. I very frequently disagreed with Dredi’s reads on the game, or his understanding of a match up, and struggled to grasp why he does a lot of the things he does, but he’s extremely good at playing the game in his own way and he’s inarguably reaped the benefits of sticking to his guns both in pubs and in leagues, so at the end of the day it’s hard to conclude anything other than I’m probably wrong about most of these things. All I know for sure is that while he’s in many ways a helluva player, he can also very easily be someone who’s very frustrating to play with, but he’s also a big tryhard who works very hard, and that innately has a lot of value which sets Dredi up to be one of the best players in the league when he’s on a team that can adapt to him entirely. He’s also just a pretty chill dude who remains at a very constant wavelength all game. Sorry for being madge that one time.

Nfd — Very quiet boy and a pretty representative example of the classic pos5 player who climbs really fast all of a sudden and you can tell they’ve worked on improving on their lane dynamics and play creation to make that happen. I honestly don’t have that much to say about Nfd unfortunately, I think much like myself he mostly just exists in the game and does his job well enough. I think he’s poised to just keep improving on his current trajectory mechanically and in terms of just seeing things that can be done better, and I suspect he’ll then run into a bit of a bottleneck at which point he’ll need to spend time working on communication, particularly in terms of vocalizing his intents and place in the game. This’ll require shedding some ghouldom but I ultimately think he’s capable of it and am decently sure we’re going to all collectively have a moment where we open a draft sheet and see nfd at like 6.4 randomly and we’ll go woah when’d that happen?

There’s more I could write but don’t particularly feel like it, fairly contentless season that we dropped out of underwhelmingly so there’s not much point to investing much more effort.

I will say I’m kinda disgusted by some of the copium I nearly inhaled when I had the thought of “eh, we went out in a close g3 against a team we 1-1d and they’re playing a team we lost to in finals so it’s hard to be upset” — fuck that tbh, I think we could’ve won the shit out of the season but choked largely due to (from my perspective) a really silly overconfidence that we didn’t reset from after winning g1 off the back of a really good scrim. Hope I don’t choke next season smile!

Thanks for the season though fellas, an enjoyable experience overall.