Last-ditch effort for Gold S4!

So here I am, a long-time casual LoL player who's maybe played a little bit more than is healthy for the last month or so. You see, the first champion I ever bought for LoL was Morgana, before I even really understood who she was and what she did. I just liked her old splash and her back story sounded cool. She's been my main ever since and while that was difficult in S2 because of bans and is so once again in S4 (I hate you Morg support), you can probably imagine I was excited by the idea of a Victorious Morgana skin.

Anyways, I've been busting my butt the last few weeks trying to improve my game as I'm generally a rather ho-hum silver 3ish player. I've slowly (I mean SLOWLY - as in maybe a division every 2 weeks) climbed up to Silver 1 and after a nice win streak I'm finally in my gold qualifiers. My lovely Morgana skin is in sight!

I thought just for kicks I'd post this here and (although I'm sure 99% of people don't care) summarize my Gold V qualifying matches tonight before the deadline just because it's exciting for me lol. I have hockey tonight in a few hours but I'm toying with the idea of ditching my team...

If you don't care, that's cool. Just don't flame me please! I guess we'll find out tonight if Morgana and I were meant to be...(yeah I might marry her).

Game highlights to come!

Game 1: (WIN!) - Was last pick champion select, which is neato, but unfortunately I'm called to fill my least comfortable role (adc). Enemy bot lane goes Ez/Janna and I go MF with Blitz. I haven't played MF in awhile but did a lot of her in normals awhile back and could usually beat Ez with it, but to my surprise her Q now has a default aiming cone. This is a hassle all game (must get better at assigning smart-casts) but the enemy bot seems pretty scared of Blitz and I freeze the lane outside of my tower and get to free-farm for like 15 minutes.

Anyways, we easily win our lane and all of our other lanes win so that's 1 out of 3 complete! Also, this is a (hopefully not lucky) 6 game win streak...Two more wins to go with only a few hours to spare!

Game 2: (LOSS!) - This time I was placed in the jungle and the game went pretty well almost from start to finish. I was playing Vi and didn't feel like I had a ton to do as the lanes were being pushed and I was struggling to find a place to make my presence felt. After hitting 6 I was able to come in for a lantern gank from lane (Ez/Thresh vs Lucian/Nami) and picked up a kill. Not long after I was able to nail an over-pushed Lissandra mid as well as a kill for Ez bot shortly after. Our mid and bot started snowballing shortly after and we were taking down towers and got our first inhib. By 27 minutes I think we were ahead by close to 10k and then....

The cockiness set in. You guys probably know what I'm talking about right? We're winning a lot of skirmishes, people are getting fed and everyone starts wandering around hunting kills. This culminates with our top and adc trying a 2-man baron (the other team is all up) while 3 of us are bot lane. It takes so long that I'm able to run all the way to Baron from bot before the enemy team shows up and I stupidly jump in to try to save the adc and we give up a triple + free Baron. We follow this shortly after with an unwarded jungle wander and get caught at red buff for a disastrous 4v5 and the loss. OOPS!

Game 3: (LOSS!)

Oh no! Things aren't going well now! 2 losses in a row. 1 more and I'm done!

I got to play Morg mid (YAY) this time and did reasonably well against an Ahri. I missed a bunch of CS and was a little spazzy with my summoners, but more or less won the lane and emerged to mid game 3/1/4. Our Warwick jungle seemed pretty good but our top was a little behind against a Riven (Is Orianna top a thing!?) but our adc (who seemed competent) was struggling because his support had fed a lot of kills to the enemy jungle (LS) and Caitlyn. Cait and Lee were very fed by mid game and Riven started to snowball soon after. Suffice it to say that Riven, Lee, Caitlyn and Ahri are not ideal targets for me to land binds against. I have to try to anticipate their hops and fail quite frequently and have trouble keeping them in my ult. Even when I do hit them their support Janna is able to disengage so I don't feel like I'm offering enough to my team at this point to help turn it around. We lose heavily (enemy Cait was 20/6 or something at the end) and I can't decide if my main squeeze Morg let me down that game (champ select fail?), if I didn't play it well enough (I had a couple questionable chases/plays) or if it was just a rotten game to be forgotten. Oh well.

Game 4: (WIN!)

I got called to jungle again. We had a Mundo top and a Blitz bottom so I thought that was enough tank/initiate for me to go dps Vi. This was a one-sided game from the start. Blitz pulled their support from Dragon and our adc followed her flash for FB. I cleared to red quickly (I run a lot of Att Spd runes on my jungle) and forced their Nasus to B. I took Golems and then ganked Mid and helped our Annie get a kill vs their mid. From there it just sort of snowballed. I had enough money on my first b to perma-sustain in the jungle so I was able to be sort of everywhere. Their jungle was camping bot so at one point Annie and I went together and she nailed a sweet Tibbers which I was able to clean up for a triple. I had Elder Lizard and Triforce at 18 minutes. Yeah. Hope the next one goes this well because it's my last of the season and for all the swag!

Game 5 (WIN - SUCCESS!)

I started this game off really worried. First, our mid was Nautilus. I barely ever see Nautilus and I sure as heck have never seen him mid so I don't know what to expect. Next, our jungle is Yi and you probably all understand the potential ups and downs of that. Lastly, I'm slotted into ADC which is likely my weakest role.

So the game starts and here I am playing my last game of the season as my weakest role with my goal of weeks/months on the line. How nerdy is it to say I was nervous? Fortunately my support was a cheap hooker named Thresh and he was pretty good at landing his Q. After 6 minutes we'd forced the enemy bot back once and also landed a kill. Meanwhile top and mid were carnage with a total of 16 kills in ~11 minutes (holy crap!) and our Yi and their Jarvan were largely ignoring bot lane. We were slightly behind by ~6 kills at this point and our Nautilus mid was getting spanked. I was worried....

and then Yi finally came bot and he picked up a double, and two minutes later he picked up a triple at mid, and then a quad two minutes after that. Surprisingly the enemy team managed to hang on for another ~15 minutes and keep things somewhat close. Their tankiness (lots of armor) made things difficult for Yi in teamfights despite him being fed so he started to back door. We forced a lot of 4v5's against them to give Yi space and their lack of damage (their bot was probably ~3-5k behind) made it possible for us to go even or better with them while Yi demolished their base. The nexus was down by ~30 minutes and I was lucky enough to FINALLY make Gold V 30 minutes before the season ended!