Team Jerry From The Block — Season Review
Roster: Madsen © (1), Dota (2), DNC (2), Karma (3), Maus (4/5), SockarMedSmor (4/5)
Time to stop feeding, win SUN and bounce back next season in WED.
Me, 4 days ago, at the end of my WED season review. Yikes.
Welcome to the fourth iteration of my silly stream of thought rants disguised as season reviews. I’ll skip the brief introduction on my thoughts and feelings going into the season — you’ll find that in the WED post, if you so desire.
This was my first season in SUN, and having become one of the division’s admins before the season, I felt that it was pretty important I play in it to get a feeling for the atmosphere and overall state of the division first hand. That’s another writeup, though — this is about the team itself. And full disclosure, this team was possibly my worst captaining performance, especially in the draft, which I pride myself on. Speaking of which…
Draft Review
I was very nervous for the SUN draft. I found myself in a very awkward draft spot at 14th pick — this was similar to my position in WED, but WED has a larger number of high MMR players, so I was definitely anxious about the possibility of missing out on a star player, and having to get a low 5k first pick at best — which usually wouldn’t be awful, but like always, I’m an underwhelming core player, and I have to make up for that in some way with my first pick. There were many people I wanted to pick but had no realistic chance of getting (like Boelens, KTZ, look alive, Crayon; hell, I even had Cvaekt pretty high up), so I had a couple of pocket picks that I thought would do really well, especially Waloo and XWZ.
Turns out, all of the above were gone well before my turn to pick.
I looked at the pool and the decision was pretty easy to make. DNC, the recent 7k, at 14th pick. Seemed like a good idea at the time; the numbers just make sense, right? Yeah. Well.
After this, I was stuck motionlessly at last pick for each and every subsequent round, missing out on many players I wanted to pick, like ElNino, Pawel, Rusko, Kevin, Ayano, and later Dazza, mitsu, Sorano and some others. I did manage to snag Karma second pick which is decent all things considered. This is where my usual draft philosophy fell apart. I usually try to get a high impact first pick, get a highly consistent value second pick and pad the rest of the team out with players I knew were valuable for their MMR or fulfilled other certain criteria I always have in mind in a draft (which is all something I want to talk more about, but again, that’s a different post). DNC suggested grabbing Fancy 2nd round to maybe help out with the pick order, which might not have been a bad idea, but in hindsight, having two banned players would’ve been depressing. Either way, I ended up subsequently getting Maus and Sockar, who, while being great guys, weren’t on my shortlist for the draft, for one reason or another (mostly because I planned the draft differently and intended to be earlier in all the rounds).
This all created a very awkward team, where I’d rely on DNC to be a star core player (he isn’t), or on myself to take that role (won’t even comment on that one lmao), because realistically, even from the get-go, this wasn’t the kind of team that would win games through being balanced and having an innate, teamwide understanding of the game and how to play it (though this is much harder to achieve in SUN than in WED — SUN is usually just the core player show). I won’t lie and say that I wasn’t somewhat hyped to play with DNC, because I knew that if nothing else, this team would be a great opportunity to learn someone who understands the game well and is usually surprisingly good at transferring that knowledge, but at the end of the day, that’s likely all I should’ve been striving for in this team, and realistically ranking it as high as I did just screams cognitive dissonance.
This isn’t to say the team was bad, or unfun to play in, or that I didn’t enjoy the season. It’s to say that my heat of the moment decision in the first round probably ruined it a bit — and with all of that in consideration, top 8 is pretty damn decent. Though, really, there’s a very specific, reason we got top 8. More on that in a bit.
Player Reviews
DNC — I don’t know where to start, honestly. I guess I’ll start with the obvious — DNC is a good player. A bad player doesn’t reach 7k MMR, no matter how much Bane they’re able to spam. What DNC isn’t, however, is a 7k core. This is fine, though, and it makes sense, and I was fine with this — if he plays a mid 5k level core, that’s still a good first pick for me, and while it might sometimes be arguable if even that might be generous, I think it’s definitely a fair assessment, and he can definitely perform as a core. Another really nice thing about DNC is that he’s pretty committed to helping people learn — he has a good understanding of the game and he likes to talk about it, and he explains concepts very concisely, especially to lower MMR players. Now, this all falls apart (or rather, fell apart in this team) is the mental aspect. I can nigh guarantee you DNC’s reaction to getting picked by me was an exasperated sigh, and this translated into his attitude in games, as well as into the whole shittalking me at every given opportunity on random Discords — but I don’t really mind that too much; after all, I am pretty garbage, but it affected, I feel, his play in a significant way, and he came into games already having given up often. Now, I’ve ignored the elephant in the room, and that’s DNC being a prick and doing utterly idiotic shit, which eventually netted him a ban. I’m not going to lie, I felt pretty sad about this, mostly because I really didn’t perceive him to be like that. But, either way, it happened, and this is about him as a player on the team, not his personality. Comment behavior not personality and whatnot, right?
Dota — Our knight in shining armor, coming in to save the day as the FA after DNC got banned. I was very happy to play on a team with Dota again, and I won’t dwell too much on this bit, since I said many of the things I’d want to say about Dota as a player in the S15 review. He did a lot to revitalize the team, and he’s realistically the sole reason we got as far as he did, and he’s just overall an excellent player. I’ll be very honest in saying that I felt like some things were pretty different this time around, though; obviously this team wasn’t as amazing as our S15 one was, hence it’s harder for a player like Dota to use his drafting and shotcalling potential to the full extent, but he also seemed to be a bit less energized and tryhard this time around, which showed mostly in the moments where he picked himself a hero that probably wasn’t the best pick, but he just felt like playing that specific hero more at that time. This might’ve stemmed from drafts being pretty hard, as most of us had very limited hero pools with the exception of Karma, so he perceived the best way to approach the game to just pick himself a comfort hero and have the most impact he could on his own — which is a very fair decision. I also got the impression — and at one point he mentioned it himself — that his general play was skewed by the level of the stacks he usually plays in, and not being able to do the same things in this team frustrated him. I can’t really be angry with Dota for not trying too hard at certain times, because oftentimes when he did put in the effort in this team it wasn’t really worth it, and we’d end up making some bafflingly bad play or just collectively turn our brains off; most specifically, I definitely had some clashes with him throughout the games, because I’d make some bad decision and we’d argue about it until he’d just give it up, let out a sigh and turn quiet. I won’t lie, at certain times it felt pretty patronizing, and I took it somewhat personally, but overall it tended to just be me doing stupid shit and trying to rationalize it and him not wanting to argue blindly which is probably the better call and I’m sorry for making his games harder than they already were, considering his role was essentially to be our sole win condition. Either way, hugely valuable player, extremely good at the game, and I’d pick him literally any day of the week.
Karma — Karma is a very vocal and communicative player with a super wide offlane hero pool and I think that makes him very value for his MMR in the offlane. This pool also includes heroes that have always and will always be good, like Bat (which is one of his favorites and he always gets super excited when playing it) and Dark Seer. He gets pretty excited, which is always great, but paired with him being pretty loud meant he drowned out other people sometimes (including myself — there were definitely moments where I was making a call or saying something and Karma or Maus would start speaking over me and it genuinely made me feel pretty uncomfortable at times; it’s obvious this wasn’t intended or malicious though). Being a vocal player, he also did a great job of guiding his lane partner and explaining well ahead of time how the lane should go. This didn’t go super well, but I’d attribute that mostly to a mismatch when he played with Maus and they overall didn’t mesh amazingly; this led me to feel like Karma isn’t the greatest laner himself, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment and I’ve definitely seen him lane very well against much better players. Overall, Karma is a great guy, and being very committed to the team, between scouting and discussing things with the team, is a very valuable pick.
Maus — Riki is good here. Every single game. I feel bad that we never did end up giving Maus his Riki. Either way, Maus is a nice guy — bit on the quieter side, but he’d always just try to do his job to the best of his ability. There were definitely some issues in his laning mechanics, where Karma and him would lose lanes they shouldn’t due to misplays, but Maus is a pretty dedicated player, even practicing together with Sockar during the season and I appreciate this effort a lot. I’ll be honest in saying there’s something left to be desired mechanically with Maus, but he’s a very chill guy and this season might’ve just been a mismatch for him, considering I’ve definitely heard people say good things about him. He’s very dedicated to the team though, and that’s a trait that I value a lot, and I think this makes him a good pick. I’d like to see him develop a solid hero pool to play around, and I think picking a couple of heroes and playing them would let him focus more on what’s happening in the game and less on the actual mechanics of the hero, because I sometimes felt like Maus was a bit aloof and not really hearing the team comms (though this happened to other players on the team as well), but overall I’m still satisfied with Maus and think he can only improve more.
SockarMedSmor — Sockar was my last pick, and as such faced a fate many have suffered before him, and many will struggle with after him. Naturally, I mean being a low MMR core player in RD2L and getting helplessly stuck in a support role. Coming into the team, Sockar had only a handful of support heroes in his pool, some of which were pretty hard to pick, especially as he was our 5 for most of the season (we swapped him over to 4 later on, but it as a bit late). This meant he ended up playing a lot of Ogre, as well as a couple of other heroes, some of which he wasn’t too comfortable on. Sockar tried very hard to improve his understanding and play, which is commendable, considering not many people would have this attitude playing off role. In the one series he was our 4, he ended up pulling off some baller Rubick plays as well, which only goes to show we should’ve swapped him over earlier. I think the most lacking aspect of Sockar’s support play — at least in terms of things that wouldn’t naturally be expected, like warding and general support mechanics — was his itemization, and he’d regularly go for pretty silly items, sometimes even when told otherwise. An important note here is also that Sockar doesn’t use mic himself, which made it pretty hard at some points to communicate, especially for myself as he was my lane partner for most of the season, and the communication in that lane ended up being very one-way, with me trying to micro him a bit, but I’m not the best at that, and I mostly ended up trying to direct him to do things which are very dependent on general game sense and just having a well-developed feel for hero mechanics and laning. Overall, I could definitely see Sockar becoming very value, and I think he wasn’t far off it in this season, and I think using mic and being able to contribute to team comms would be a huge step in the right direction for him. He’s a very friendly guy who’s very open to learn, but I can’t help but feel he was a tiny bit overwhelmed here — but that’s only natural.
Madsen — I genuinely think I performed better in my SUN team than my WED team individually, but between the average MMR being lower and playing my main role that’s not too surprising. The issue with my play in SUN was consistency moreso than anything — I think I definitely had some standout performances, but I’d end up being mediocre the next game, then back to popping off a bit, then back to being unimpactful again. I made some pretty significant mistakes, including ditching an important Rosh fight without communicating it, eating a Cheese because I was low and thought the enemy team was coming in to fight and generally just being in the wrong place at the wrong time quite often throughout the season (and these are mostly the moments where Dota got frustrated with me as I mentioned previously). I did miss a playoffs series, and while Chris stood in and managed to help the team out to a in, I think I needed to step up much more in games for us to get further than the top 8 finish we got, as SUN is, in my opinion, more focused on the performances of the 2 farming cores in each team, and while Dota did his usual thing, I was still…well, I was still just Madsen. And that’s not a world-beating core duo, despite Dota’s skill. This is a pretty long review already, so I’m running out of thoughts, but I’m sure there’s many things I missed, including in this segment about myself — I welcome any and all of my teammates to write a review from their own perspective if they feel so inclined, but for right now, that’s all from me.
Thanks to our standins during the season — SightierOwl, Crispy Bacon and Peterswo (and cheers to Spicy for connecting us to Peter!)
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Dota, Karma, Maus and Sockar for a fun season!
