“Playtime’s over” - the return of Ahri

Ahri has made a serious comeback in the LCS after being conspicuously MIA for quite some time. With her return, the foxy lady brings destruction. And lots of it. She’s been running rampant in the games she’s been picked, dropping squishy targets with relative ease. So what makes her successful? Let’s take a look.

The one-on-one

When a game starts, pro Ahri players are looking to do one thing: Survive long enough to get to level 6. Once there, they can blow up just about anyone they get their mits on. Until patch 4.12, she often struggled to survive the laning phase, as her high mana costs made it difficult to poke for an extended period of time. Now, however, with the lowered mana cost and increased AP scaling on her Orb of Deception, her laning phase is much stronger. Her ability to kill relies largely on landing Charm, her one and only form of crowd control. To be fair, however, it’s a hell of a crowd control ability. When the kiss of death lands, its target is forced to walk towards Ahri, unable to cast abilities or attack. So, that’s pretty cool. However, the true power of Charm lays in its ability to increase the damage of Ahri’s other skills. When it lands, it increases the incoming damage from her by 20%, making her abilities deal insane damage against a single target. And being an assassin, that crazy damage is exactly what she brings to a team. It’s her job to find one squishy, kill them, and give her team a man advantage in the upcoming teamfight.

Time to flank

Take a look at how SELFIE positions himself during this engagement with SK Gaming. He patiently sits on the sideline, briefly revealing himself to let SK know that he could jump in at any time. This alone holds off SK from attempting to take the tower. That is, until SELFIE decides to head to the bottom lane and help Mimer kill fredy122’s Aatrox. That positioning is key to Ahri’s teamfight capability. If the enemies see her coming, her Charm is relatively easy to dodge, rendering her not quite as potent. If she does manage to get close, sneak her Charm through any minions or champions in the way, and land it on a high-priority target, she’ll completely take them out of the fight. Of course, she can also wait for one of her teammates to nab someone, and just dive in with the trio of dashes on her Spirit Rush, quickly dealing damage to a crowd controlled target. It’s a bit riskier, as those dashes are also quite useful to get out of danger. But as a way to quickly take someone out, it’s near unparalleled.

An indirect siege

Her usefulness doesn’t stop once teamfights end, however. She also happens to fit rather well into a siege composition, thanks to the great wave clear on both her Orb of Deception and Fox-Fire. Watch here as Jesiz’s Ahri wipes out entire waves of minions on the way to Millenium’s inner top tower. Once there, he sits off to the side, just out of Millenium’s line of sight. While his positioning may not allow him to do damage to the tower, it does accomplish something very important: It scares the crap out of Millenium. Despite the fact that every single member of Millenium has the capability of engaging (Mao’Kai, Lee Sin, Kassadin, Tristana, and Leona are rather divey, after all), they’re afraid of the Charm coming out as soon as they make their move. Essentially, he’s able to provide some serious pressure without even showing his face. This demonstrates the power of Ahri.

Hunting the fox

Thanks to the three dashes on her ultimate Spirit Rush, Ahri is very hard to lock down. However, that doesn’t mean she’s unkillable. Given enough chase and lockdown potential, a team can hold a proper fox hunt to shut her down. This scenario is exactly unfolded in SK Gaming’s match against Gambit Gaming on the third day of Week 11. With a myriad of gap closers from NiQ’s Kassadin, Genja’s Corki, and Kubon’s Irelia, there was very little Jesiz could do to get away from the onslaught. To make matters worse, EDward’s Thresh and Diamond’s Evelynn could make sure she struggled to get away. Gambit showed that to defeat Ahri, you must first catch her. Luckily for her, this doesn’t seem to happen to much in the LCS these days, as teams picking her have a 5-1 record with her since patch 4.12. Will the reign of Ahri continue? We’ll have to see as the LCS moves into the playoffs.

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