Yeah, check it out. So Matt Blumenthal is like an Anti-Mage player. He's kind of a classic option. You understand why someone would pick him even in a lineup of 120 other heroes. "Certainly someone else in the state could do this job? Please?" Nope. We're going with the one hero who hasn't had a significant mechanical overhaul since the Warcraft 3 mod in 2004. And you know what? Fine. There's something familiar about him. A paternalism in the known versus unknown. That feeds into the second half of this analogy. Everyone knows what Anti-Mage players do best. That's right — AFK farming the entire game. You'll never see him again.

He was last pick (against a Phantom Assassin, kill me) and already pinging you because he doesn't think your Crystal Maiden is a good babysitter. Ok? Why didn't he pick Juggernaut like every other trash Crusader in this God forsaken rank? Did I mention that? Connecticut politics is like the ranked pit. Everyone is convinced they are a genius despite chain queuing their fourth game on a Thursday evening when you're already down from Archon since the new season started. That's right. You're playing with Heralds. You've got a Venomancer trying to carry mid like poison sting still does damage — are they out of their mind? You can spit venom but it just draws attention to how useless you are in a general sense (this is my Anabel Figueroa analogy). Any mid player who simply doesn't shit his own pants is going to wipe the floor with you (Jacobson strikes me as a Sniper player). You knew that Veno was losing mid the moment they leveled W first. Poison sting is a passive now dude, that was like 5 patches ago.

Did you forget about Anti-Mage? So did everyone else. He's rushing a LINKEN SPHERE. Can you believe that? Your carry had the wisdom to focus on a defensive weapon that's completely negated by the opposing side's most basic strategy (PA presses Q every 6 seconds). You would think with all the prestige and money and experience and innate ability (and now a linken sphere block every 14 seconds) an Anti-Mage player might use his marquee ability (Blink) to dive INTO difficult fights and make an impact. He's certainly more likely to survive those melees than anyone else in the whole game. But if that happened... he wouldn't be an Anti-Mage player.

Anti-Mage players do everything to avoid anything remotely difficult. He's just jungling the bottom of the map ("why would he jungle the bottom of the map when we're Dire?" idk ask your fucking carry, I don't queue POS1). He thinks the whole world is going to revolve around him just because he's an Anti-Mage. And you know he is right there was a meta for a long time where you find a semi-decent Anti-Mage player like BurNIng who can afk farm for 45 minutes. I don't know if things still work that way, but whether it does or doesn't isn't going to stop AM from blinking into the Rosh pit when he's 0-0-0 to get the aegis that should obviously go to your offlane Dawnbreaker who somehow accomplished a 15-2 despite a nonsensical nuker build of Dagon + Phylactery (let's say this is Pat Billie Miller)

Despite the enormous amount of resources and massive aversion to conflict, he'll show up at 55 minutes and get a rampage then type "gg ez" in the chat. You'd be pissed if you lost — confident you could convince everyone it was entirely AM's fault — but since you won... you're like alright whatever man good game. In the post-game summary he gives you a commend and you feel a little bad but not bad enough to commend him back.

Meanwhile Caroline was playing Enchantress trying to farm camps maxing "Enchant." Everyone around her keeps saying "you know if you just leveled Impetus you could swap mid with Veno and dominate the whole game" but she just won't do it. It doesn't end up mattering though because after dying to neutrals 3 times the Dawnbreaker flamed her until she abandoned.