Flippable Cards Expose a Gaping Hole in Riot's "Matchmaking"

People give me a lot of crap for having 750K mastery on Morgana. I always tell them the same thing: yeah, that's what happens when you're still using the one account which is the only account you've ever had.

Meanwhile, when the enemy Zed has 199 (not 199K, mind you, just 199) mastery on Zed and goes 16/2 and the rest of your team can't even touch him, it's pretty clear what's happening. This happens regularly. As in, every. single. game. And pretty much always whenever this happens you look up their match history and see that they've been elo-boosting one of the players on the other team.

(revised) Clearly, it can't take mastery into account when matchmaking as you don't choose your champion till after that, but still, it seems pretty likely that these smurfs are supposed to be the weak players on the other team who will need to be carried and are supposed to counterbalance the flabbier ones on your team. But then they're the ones even the best players on your team can't keep up with once they're fed.

Is Riot's official policy still that they "frown" on smurfing? They need to start doing more than that. Smurfing has totally obliterated any semblance of matchmaking there might have otherwise been.