What I've noticed about carrying from bronze to high silver/low gold elo so far

Early on it seemed like the best way to carry reliably was to get a snowball top/jungle that could split push. But as the game awareness and teamwork of players improved, split pushing to victory was less reliable.

However, their level of game knowledge and mechanics has not improved to the point where they know how to capitalize on the early leads you give them. Almost every game will be a long game by default if there is no surrender. Plus, they don't have a lot of strategic finesse either. The most of what they know how to do is just group mid and push towers, occasionally getting baron. Since none of the champions I liked to play really translated well into late game teamfights, I wasn't getting very far.

However, it seems I have learned to use this new development against them. Since they all group mid and slam their face repeatedly into the enemy tower by default, I can really abuse that behavior by taking long range high damage mages that have great poke and wreck teamfights.

Poke seems to be far more important than teamfight wombo combo power, because teams have poor initiation skill and are relunctant to commit to a fight quickly. I tried mages like Viktor but did poorly because he lacks range and has long cooldowns. He's a good burster against an initiation, but once he blows his abilities he's out of the fight. Xerath and Ziggs have been giving me much better results, with both longer range and quicker cooldowns. Plus ziggs has more outright damage after the viktor nerfs.

Previously I had tried using carry mages to win, but in high bronze/low silver elo a mage is a death sentence because you don't have a team that is cohesive enough to even create the kind of team vs team situations you shine in.

I suspect as they gain more finesse in their map strategies, and can snowball early leads better, that this mage strategy will fade out. But in that case the snowballing tops may yield more returns by being able to decide games early with a won lane.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I missing something about the high silver/low gold elo?