I hopped into a game this afternoon with one of the readers here, playing a Blitz/Vayne combo on bottom lane. I really thought we were going to dominate – we were up against Lee Sin and Janna, which on second thought I should not have underestimated as heavily as I did. Janna is such a strong lane partner and, frankly, Lee Sin does a hell of a lot of sustained damage with a support to back him up.

Things didn’t go exactly as I had planned. I died early thanks to an Ignite/Exhaust combo and struggled to get my farm up for the rest of our lane phase. Around 15 minutes I checked the score; our team was up 14 to 5, but I was a whopping 4 of my team’s deaths. Ouch.

My deaths didn’t tell the whole story, though. In fact, I was 4/4/4. It was more deaths than I would have liked to endure early, but I also had a nice kill count and the cash from four assists. I had been involved in 8 of my team’s 14 kills, which is a pretty nice contribution for early in the game.

I’ve always maintained that stats don’t tell the whole picture. Sure, four deaths worth of gold was a lot to give up in the early game, but my dying usually allowed my team the opportunity to turn a couple kills, which resulted in much more gold for my own team than I was giving up. It was a frustrating early game for me but it resulted in a very solid performance for my team and a handy win. Always make sure you’re looking at the big picture in those frustrating lanes. If you’re playing smart, sometimes it’s okay to be the one soaking deaths for your team, even as a carry.

Despite the short notice, lack of an advertised time, and general disorganization on my part, last night was a lot of fun. We started with just three people and ramped up to five by the end of the night so we stayed in the regular matchmaking queues.

The first game was myself, zebano, and bojamba in threes. We played Tryndamere, Garen, and Poppy respectively and utterly dominated the game. For the next game, the three of us went into a 5v5 match as Amumu, Ryze, and Nasus. We were getting torn up early game by the heals on Taric and Janna, and our opposing Gragas was getting pretty thick. It didn’t take long, though, to turn things around. Sometime toward level 15, the Amumu/Nasus/Ryze ult combo became way too much for them to handle. We started winning every team fight and eventually just pushed straight to nexus.

For the final game we had a full five and went Galio, Blitzcrank, Twitch, Fiddlesticks, and Garen. MVP for the game went to Zirze with his Blitzcrank grabs. He was all money, all the time that game. Imbri also had his time to shine when he got caught alone as Galio against three opponents. Somehow he stayed up for what felt like a year, got his full ult off, dropping three of them below 50 percent health. By that time our whole team was right behind them for cleanup. The surrender followed shortly after.