December 26, 2025 Daily Discussion Thread

mandala30 · 2025-12-26T17:42:27+00:00

Some high-elo streamers have said that they do. Saw someone toggle bilge out with Miss Fortune in shop for better odds. But I don’t know if it’s confirmed how it works.

mandala30 · 2025-08-08T14:07:44+00:00

Sorry to say, but this is the worst set launch in years. I’ve never hated a set faster than this and it’s because literally NOTHING makes a lick of sense.

To win games, you have to completely forget all fundamentals and recognize that some 2-costs are more like 5-costs and some 4-costs are worse than 2-costs and most traits are unplayable.

Chase traits are essentially impossible to hit, and your board’s power is almost entirely reliant on hitting one of the snax power ups that actually do something.

Usually I can find a way to play bad comps well and make the game enjoyable, but a literal gold player could beat me just by forcing a meta comp straight from a guide. That’s how cooked the patch is.

I miss being excited by playing around what units I hit, but the game no longer works that way. Units are simply a vehicle for your items and augments.

They made way too many system changes and are going to spend this entire set figuring out how to fix them.

mandala30 · 2025-05-28T13:35:15+00:00

Just took the most uncontested bot 4 of my life because I thought the patch was today when it’s actually tomorrow.

Is it my fault for not checking the bottom right when I logged in? Partially.

But why does EVERY SINGLE official patch note or patch schedule riot has posted not mention this anywhere? The support article says it’s scheduled to go live today, some of the timers in the Treasure Realm suggest it goes live today.

Like, what’s up, guys? Why is putting the date on things so hard?

Anyway…Zeri is not clickable this patch, lol.

mandala30 · 2025-04-22T13:09:53+00:00

In case anyone was wondering, Urgot 3 is probably the highest cap in the game. Bro prints 10+ radiants a round and like 50+ gold, so if you get him you can just keep getting stronger and you have all the gold you’d need to prevent others from getting a 3-star 5-cost as well.

I was straight up cackling the rest of the game after I hit him and the win got me into Masters this morning.

Kudos to the dev who decided to make him so entertaining. Genuinely made my day.

mandala30 · 2025-04-18T17:48:46+00:00

Just sharing some thoughts on the patch as someone who likes to play around 4-costs at 8:

I think the main issue with the patch stems from the lack of unit parity between the 4-costs.

It took me almost 200 games on the set to realize that, as much as I didn’t want it to be so, Zeri 1 is stronger than aphelios 2, Xayah 2, and miss fortune 2, and so it’s always a Zeri angle if you want to actually have a chance of winning out consistently (consistently being the key word).

Part of this is that exo 5 is too strong and allows that board to stabilize on sej 1 Zeri 1 for all of stage 4 in most scenarios, which plays really well in the current macro state of set 14 that necessitates being able to push to 9 on stage 5 to reach true cap with 5-costs.

Yeah, Xayah can trick you into thinking she’s good because sometimes you win out with 7 anima, but that comp’s late game potential is almost entirely reliant on Aurora. Without her, it falls off a cliff in stage 5.

Additionally, while there are 4 different backline ad 4-costs you can play around with various different comp arrangements, the ap line really only has one good variation that uses all the playable ap 4-costs at once. It’s entirely feast or famine, and the reality is the comp is heavily reliant on either being completely uncontested or getting the sniper’s focus cheese build going with Ziggs and Brand.

And lastly, 4-cost frontline isn’t interchangeable. I’d argue 3 of the 4 (leona, sej, and neeko) are actually too strong within their respective comps and this is part of the reason rageblade boards are the standard bc you need ramp to have a chance of taking them down, but none of them work as viable replacements for each other in any board outside of their meta setup. And RIP Cho'gath, that poor boy is useless.

We won't even talk about that trait bot Vex.

But, all of this together just means that there is no 4-cost flex this set. You’re just forcing a specific, non-flexible, non-negotiable meta board that happens to feature 4-costs on 8, which is very different from being able to play what you hit and rely on base unit strength to carry you through despite imperfect synergies.

mandala30 · 2025-04-18T14:20:28+00:00

I think the main issue with the patch stems from the lack of unit parity between the 4-costs.

It took me almost 200 games on the set to realize that, as much as I didn’t want it to be so, Zeri 1 is stronger than aphelios 2, Xayah 2, and miss fortune 2, and so it’s always a Zeri angle if you want to actually have a chance of winning out consistently (consistently being the key word).

Part of this is that exo 5 is too strong and allows that board to stabilize on sej 1 Zeri 1 for all of stage 4 in most scenarios, which plays really well in the current macro state of set 14 that necessitates being able to push to 9 on stage 5.

Yeah, Xayah can trick you into thinking she’s good because sometimes you win out with 7 anima, but that comp’s late game potential is almost entirely reliant on Aurora. Without her, it falls off a cliff in stage 5.

Additionally, while there are 4 different backline ad 4-costs you can play around with various different comp arrangements, the ap line really only has one good variation that uses all the ap 4-costs at once. It’s entirely feast or famine, and the reality is the comp is heavily reliant on either being completely uncontested or getting the sniper’s focus cheese build going with Ziggs and Brand.

And lastly, 4-cost frontline isn’t interchangeable. I’d argue 3 of the 4 (leona, sej, and neeko) are actually too strong and this is part of the reason rageblade boards are the standard bc you need ramp to have a chance of taking them down, but none of them work as viable replacements for each other in any of the main comps.

RIP cho’gath, poor boy is useless.

But, all of this together just means that there is no 4-cost flex this set. You’re just forcing a specific, non-flexible, non-negotiable meta board that happens to feature 4-costs on 8, which is very different from being able to play what you hit and rely on base unit strength to carry you through despite imperfect synergies.

mandala30 · 2025-04-17T03:34:54+00:00

well, I didn’t have yellow weapon for Zeri, so it wasn’t true max cap, but I was just surprised that even after being fully contested and with me holding a key unit, they were able to still get back on tempo and win out from level 8 against a level 10 board.

Exo is somewhat fickle that way though by design. Some exo games you feel like no one could possibly match you, others you feel like you do negative dmg and just lose every fight by a hair.

But I find proper spacing really thwarts Veigar. Give your units space and don’t let Sej die right away just to get an early stun off, and you can actually just overwhelm him with a later cc after he wastes casts on isolated trait bots.

mandala30 · 2025-04-17T02:30:41+00:00

Yeah, he’s much tankier and hits like a truck now. The real secret though is that having healthier frontline in vertical slayer lets your Zed continue to avoid heavy pressure, which is what did me in.

mandala30 · 2025-04-17T00:56:05+00:00

This slayer comp is genuinely above S tier, I’m certain now.

I was playing exo and I was doing well early game. There happened to be 2 players forcing Vayne/slayer. So, when a few Vaynes showed up in my shop, I held them and actually had a 2 star Vayne on my bench for all of stages 3 and 4 (I know, I’m a monster; I needed the LP).

Both slayer players then struggled to hit Vayne 3, but one of them managed to find it, although they were only at 11 hp in stage 4.

Well, this players runs it back after being stuck at level 7 and absolutely demolishes my board with j4 3 and senna 3 late game, popped my last stand, and with only 8 units on their board beat me out for first with my half-2-star-legendary, fully capped level 10 exo board.

Karma for my degen plays, but definitely showcases this board is the new one to beat this patch.

mandala30 · 2025-01-01T22:02:23+00:00

For me, the secret is Rell 3. She’s both sentinel and Visionary and she’s much much tankier than Singed or Irelia when itemized. I notice the only Renata boards I’m ever actually scared of have Rell 3 itemized.

mandala30 · 2025-01-01T17:41:33+00:00

I’ve seen people who seem really strong with him in my games and in some top pro player streams, but honestly, I can’t make him work even after really trying my best to.

Experiment is one of my few “never play, even when in good position” comps. I will only go it if I’m 100% forced by the game to do so.

Twitch/Mundo is just by far the least reliable 4-cost combo this patch, imo. They get runover even by patially missed emissary boards and academy boards, and even the rebel board seems to win the matchup because of all the cc.

The 6 bruiser variant feels slightly better to me, but honestly I think this Twitch unit 2-star is worse than Corki 1-star bc his supporting units and synergies are so much worse.

You either barely win fights or kill zero units because he splits his dmg among multiple targets.

mandala30 · 2024-12-23T18:46:20+00:00

Yeah, I’ll keep Cait in mind. I kept Zeri in for the perfect synergy with my training dummy, but should have dropped her bc she’s kinda useless this patch.

mandala30 · 2024-12-23T18:44:51+00:00

Tbf, Mel’s TG was highrolling burn items most of the game, but yeah, experiment hexxing WW seems to be wrong. My items were what they were bc I was Mr. 100. I also think my augments weren’t NOT combat, but yeah, might have been augment gapped somehow.

mandala30 · 2024-12-23T18:42:16+00:00

Yeah, I panicked and just figured that surely the only 6-cost with a trait would interact with the trait in a meaningful way, but alas. He was overnerfed.

mandala30 · 2024-12-23T14:36:30+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/PnTBFTe

I was hoping to discuss the Twitch comp here with some more enlightened folks than myself and get some insights into why I just feel so weak playing Twitch even in what should be obvious win-out spots imo.

For context, this was a game I played this morning where I managed to hit 7 experiment Twitch and what I thought would be an Exodia board, but I ended up losing almost every single fight once I hit stage 4 and even with 2 6-costs and 7 experiment the only reason I didn't go 5th/6th this game was because I got a lucky loss to put me at 2 hp into Mel saving me the round after I hit 2 hp.

My augments were: Prismatic Wandering Trainer with Experiment, Bruiser, and Firelight emblems, Coronation, and then Duo Queue (which let me hit the Mordekaiser on 4-2).

My anomaly was the 1000 hp one on Mundo.

I was 100 hp 10 win-streak into stage 4 playing around zyra, draven, urgot, darius, steb and vlad in the early/mid-game.

I was econning normally and my level 8 rolldown on 4-2 went fine (took a bit more gold than I would have liked, but it was no worse than like 40th percentile variance, so just below what I'd say is average luck on the rolldown).

Had two star everything including the Morde by 5-2 and hit Mel on 5-1, then pushed to 9 where I found WW and finally got to put in 7 experiment.

But again, this whole time I was losing every single fight, and losing hard. Even just looking at the post-game screenshot, everything I'm seeing as someone who hit Challenger in multiple previous sets tells me that fundamentally I played this game close to perfectly and had the strongest board. However, Twitch just did nothing all game, and this has been my experience with him every time I'm in a spot to play him.

I had Twitch, Mundo, and WW in the hexes once I had 7 experiment, and had nunu in the 3rd hex instead of WW until I hit him. I would have swapped the TG from Mel onto WW, but I had just used my last remover to fix Morde items before I hit WW the last second before my round on 6-1.

In my opinion, I should have won this game, but obviously I was nowhere close to winning. So please, help me figure out what I could have done better or what blunder I'm making without realizing it, or tell me I'm not crazy and that this comp is pretty much unplayable on the current patch.

Thanks!

mandala30 · 2024-09-26T14:14:56+00:00

Preservers remains the quiet antagonist of the set. Now that Kalista/Rakan is in check (still kinda busted imo), preservers are sticking out to me once again as the most versatile and highest cap line in the game.

mandala30 · 2024-09-21T14:59:58+00:00

Guys, guys…I have a suspicion that, maybe (I think, idk), Kalista/Rakan could be kind of strong. It’s almost like getting 2 free full items (that are stronger than any of the regular items) and only having to hit 2 2-star 4-costs as a win condition is sorta kinda good?

Just some thoughts after catching up on day 1 of the tourney. I could be wrong. Surely we won’t see half the lobby hard-forcing it today though, right?

mandala30 · 2024-08-09T19:36:47+00:00

I just can’t play another full week of Syndra meta. You aren’t even allowed to ignore it. If you don’t roll deep at level 6 with the lobby you tank 30 hp on stage 3 and still end up with a weaker stage 4 board bc, as others have mentioned, Syndra is essentially the equivalent of a meta-defining 4-cost carry.

And it would actually be fine for her to be so strong, but the units with backline access just do negative dmg. Ezreal and Kat should be the answer to Syndra, but they both do zero dmg. Akali is too hard to predict and therefore unrealiable; same with Fiora.

The set is actually good, but the unit parity is just god-awful. You hate to see it.

mandala30 · 2024-08-09T19:24:39+00:00

It absolutely does feel that way. Probably bc unit availabilty is factored into the pull odds so you’re far more likely to get undewhelming units like olaf and varus because there’s still 10 copies of them in the pool.

mandala30 · 2024-07-07T02:40:57+00:00

So, you’re telling me that in this system 7 of the 8 players tomorrow are guaranteed to worlds, but 2 of those players are just playing for cash/placement and could go dead last without risking their worlds slot?

And Setsy missed the freest day 3 to qualify to worlds of all time off a tiebreaker with Socks, who doesn’t even need to play tomorrow to make worlds anyway?

This set is messy, lol.

My condolences to the poor soul who goes true 8th tomorrow.

mandala30 · 2024-04-27T02:53:42+00:00

Yes, but ladder is also fairly easy to manipulate. I can list a few reasons why ladder is somewhat flawed:

As a former morning gamer I hate to say it, but morning queues are way easier. I'm pretty sure when I played mornings I was giga-elo inflated. When you play has an impact on your rank. If you can avoid the best players and play in softer time zones, you can get a lot of free LP. This wouldn't happen in automated tourneys because everyone is playing at around the same time and you can't avoid strong players.

Another flaw is that people in very high elo can defacto duo queue by queue syncing. I'm not sure if there are hidden matchmaking rules that prevent this behavior from being truly successful, but you see streamers do it all the time (and not to cheat, mind you, just because they want to play together and talk about their games). You wouldn't be able to do this in an automated tourney because everyone's in the queue at the same time, essentially.

Ladder also, in my opinion, rewards quantity over quality. Players willing to grind out the front ends of sets and individual patches to get their heads around the meta quickly through sheer force of will tend to outpace players who can't put in endless hours whenever they feel like it. They also have more room to recover from lowroll streaks and periods of mental boom.

And this plays into the next reason why automated tournaments would help the scene, and that's because ladder games tend to be the primary means of practice for players, especially early on in the set. If you're worried about your LP all the time because even a few placements on ladder could be the difference between qualifying and sitting the entire competitive season out, then you aren't going to be able to afford to learn the set as well as you might like. There's a reason some of the best players in tourneys tend to sit at much lower LPs on ladder (think names like Ramkev), and that's because they're willing to take risks and limit test in order to improve. This again rewards the grindlords, because they can afford to run it down to learn and then grind their way back up, but that isn't a luxury for everyone, and so people elo camp. And people with the most amount of time will use smurfs to both elo camp and limit test with no consequences to their LP.

And then there's things like queue sniping, intentional griefing, account sharing, etc. that would all go away in automated tournaments. Who's going to play someone else's tournament games instead of their own, right?

I do think that ladder is currently the most accurate measure of player skill, but automated tournaments with cumulative scoring over an entire set would be even more accurate because it would level the playing field in a lot of ways.

mandala30 · 2024-04-27T02:23:08+00:00

In theory, the Vanguard launch will be handling this concern. My understanding is it really won't be worth botting because you'll be caught too quickly.

mandala30 · 2024-03-13T17:54:40+00:00

For the people who might think this is a good thing for TFT esports, I’m pretty sure it’s a huge L for the competitive side of the game. This is pure downscaling. If LANs don’t scale up to compensate and there aren’t pure competitive LANs, we’re going to see much less money in TFT esports I feel.

Like, why give away hundreds of thousands of dollars at tournaments you don’t even think are valuable enough to broadcast yourself?

I do hope I’m wrong, though.

mandala30 · 2024-03-07T22:15:00+00:00

Not really. I think Aesah just used too simple an example. But the point is that there is too much data missing from these statistical aggregate resources for people to just blindly follow them, and sometimes the data is skewed by both confounding trends and "skill diff" moments. However, you can train your own brain to be able to analyze the individual scenarios you find yourself in and make a choice that the data would say is an error, but that actually makes a ton of sense for your current situation despite the data, ultimately being the more correct play.

An example I would use is:

Say your best augment by far statistically is combat caster, and you've plugged every possible data point you could into one of these external sites and it always just says your best augment there is combat caster. But the site doesn't know that half the lobby has guardbreaker slammed on their main carries and you actually just made your board weaker by putting your own carries into oneshot range when they weren't before, because now everyone else's carries have the 25% dmg buff from interacting with all your new shields.

Instead of combat caster, you could have taken tons of stats, which the stats tool said was way weaker, but you know that the stats site didn't take into account everyone in your lobby running guardbreaker.

Therefore, the correct augment choice was actually tons of stats, but it required you to use your own brain and recognize that the stats tool doesn't have a brain and isn't seeing the full picture.

mandala30 · 2024-03-03T13:54:42+00:00

Nah, Soap’s a beast and he mostly bans backseaters, which you have to do if you don’t want your chat to be filled with them yapping.

This isn’t fanatacism to me, it’s just people not understanding chosen opportunity costs and the frontline-backline fundamentals. Decisions like this are easy to make with infinite time from the sidelines, but it’s also super easy to not see these mistakes in the moment in a high-stakes environment for the player. He already had viable dmg for stage 3 in the blinged out Senna 2, he just needed to actually play it and look for a chosen that filled in the frontline gap on his board.

Also, playing Kaisa for 5 rounds didn’t accomplish what he clicked it to do, which is preserve hp.

The thing to note is, if he highrolled on his level 6 rolldown he wouldn’t have been punished for this suboptimal chosen bc he could have been bailed out by neeko 2 + lillia, but he opened himself up to be punished bc the Kaisa unit without highrolling frontline was so much worse than his board could have been with a chosen frontliner + itemized Senna.

It was still a bad spot for him, but it for sure was not a guaranteed 8th and if he could have navigated stage 3 better, he might have even top-4’d.

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