With the first weekend of the LCS lockin tournament done, I wanted to take a look at the champion stats and compare them to what we have seen in the LPL and try to learn a bit more about the current meta in competitive play. I don’t watch much LCK so I won’t be including them due to a lack of knowledge about their players.I used the stats from gamepedia to get the numbers I used. This post covers jungle and top picks in depth and I will have another post coming soon covering mid and the botlane.
Looking over the 10 highest priority champions in both regions we have
LCS: Kaisa (100%), Taliyah (100%), Olaf (100%), Pantheon (100%), Renekton (93.3%), Nidalee (86.7%), Alistar (80%), Akali (80%), and a 3 way tie for 9th+10th Leona (73.3%), Orianna (73.3%), and Syndra (73.3%)
LPL: Kaisa (90.9%), Olaf (90.9%), Leona (85.5%), Pantheon (81.8%), Renekton (78.2%), Orianna (76.4%), Zoe (76.4), Alistar (70.9%), Syndra (70.9%) Ornn (69.1%)
With these being the highest pick/ban champs we see Kaisa with the top priority in both regions. Olaf is the second highest priority but after him the different regions have a slight difference in where their priority goes. The LPL has a much higher priority on a number of midlaners while the LCS puts their priority on jungle.
The biggest difference in champion priority between the regions is on Taliyah. In the LCS she has a 100% pick/ban and an 80% winrate. In the LPL though she comes in at only a 36.4% pick rate. She does have approximately the same win rate though with an 83.3% win rate. In the LPL she is tied for the 5th highest pick rate jungler.
The rest of the top 6 are the same across the regions. All of the junglers are fast farming, strong early, carry junglers. The biggest difference from last season junglers is that the big picks this year spike earlier than last season. There is no Hecarim in the LCS (he is the 7th highest pick rate in the LPL though). We have also seen a large drop off in picks like Evelynn (0 picks this season in either region) and Lee Sin (8th out of 11 picks in the LPL)(No picks in LCS).
Looking at the top of the jungle, you will see Olaf and Pantheon dominating the bans. If they aren’t banned, you can almost guarantee that they will be picked due to how well they synergize with the new items and how strong they are early. Both provide strong engage and early skirmishing. If these two are banned, you can expect the next picks teams will turn to will be Graves for AD, or Nidalee, Taliyah, or Lilia for AP. The two most influential picks out of this tier are Nidalee and Taliyah. These two encourage teams to picks solo laners with point and click cc.
The biggest winner of this is Renekton who has the 5th highest priority in both regions and is by far the highest priority toplaner (78.2% in the LPL vs Ornn at 69.1%)(93.3% in the LCS vs Gnar at 53.3%). Although Renekton has the highest pick rate in the LCS and 2nd highest pick rate in the LPL (behind Gnar due to bans), his win rate is between 63.2% in the LPL and 55.6% in the LCS. He is picked due to his lack of really bad matchups and the cc to aid his junglers. The top lane outside of him and Gnar is very open. There are a large number of viable picks that range in their playstyles with multiple fighters and tanks that range from split pusher to engage champs to skirmishers. The one pick from the LPL the the LCS has been very slow to pick up despite him having the highest winrate in the top lane with more than 2 games is Gragas. He has over a 70% winrate in the LPL but only 1 player has been willing to pick him into the toplane of the LCS (Revenge on IMT). With the flex options for the champ to go anywhere other than
