C9 Fudge: “We actually have plans to play different champions next week which are probably going to be a bit off-meta”
Following a great weekend of matches, we spoke to Cloud9 top laner Fudge about his future matchups, the current meta and Gwen.
Thanks for sitting down to talk with me, Fudge, and congratulations on the 3-0 week! Starting off with the draft, Cloud9 thus far is the team with the most games of Gwen. Of course she’s an incredibly strong champion but can you elaborate why Cloud9 has prioritized her so much?
Fudge: I think right now a lot of people are playing the bruiser, melee champions on the topside of the map. Sometimes also in the support role but I think Lulu and Karma are starting to become more popular. I think Gwen works really well when versusing a lot of melee champions and she out damages them for the most part. She basically does what they do but just better. So I think with how everyone is drafting, picking the same melee champions on topside, Gwen is really strong.
Snip snip. @Fudgecakey cuts off the competition to close out #LCS week 2 with a clean 3-0 for @Cloud9! pic.twitter.com/VtVYiCaCwr
— LoLEsports Stats (@LoLEsportsStats) June 14, 2021
You ended up laning against Akali instead of Viego in most of your games. Akali has of course seen some strong games across multiple solo laners, do you think this champion is inherently strong at the moment?
Fudge: Akali is a champion that can be strong when you can get through your laning phase. First of all, I think her early laning is generally really weak and loses to most champions in the toplane especially. Toplane is a really long lane which makes it really easy to punish champions with a weak early game, which is what I did as Gwen versus Akali. But I think once you can get out of the laning phase and into the mid-game, her first and second item spike can be pretty strong and she can out-skirmish a lot of champions.
I also think that if you’re just better than your opponent, then Akali will let you smurf on people. I think for example Jenkins played really well on Akali today and out-laned Revenge and played really well in the team fights. So I think Akali can be good, but it’s not a good early pick in drafts.
With Seraphine on the enemy team today, did you guys feel any pressure to end the game early before she could reach her late game healing/shields to potentially ‘unlock’ Akali?
Fudge: I wouldn’t say there was a lot of pressure. Generally, in the back of your mind there is the thought that ‘if we get to six items, Seraphine could carry.’ Also Dignitas didn’t have any hyper carries on their teams. No one was really going to get a lot of items and really be difficult to play against. I think it maybe could have been Viego or Xin Zhao but generally only Akali if she somehow got a couple kills in mid-game.
Seraphine, or rather enchanters in general, aren’t as good if they aren’t paired with a hyper carry, like Tristana in mid for example. So we weren’t as pressured as we would have been if they had a hyper carry but obviously Seraphine can be strong when she gets into the mid-game with her first item spike. We were fine with it though because we also had an Ezreal which I think works well against a Seraphine because he similarly gets his first item power spike easily. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of pressure though considering we’re playing against a team that I think we’re much better than.
Cloud9 got a significant lead early in the game, but there were relatively few team fights. Would you attribute this head start to the overall macro play?
Fudge: We generally played around fighting for dragons and we didn’t want to waste a lot of our cooldowns before the dragons came up. Fighting randomly in the top jungle when I just want to farm for my second item power spike is generally bad. My past games on Gwen that I’ve played, I feel like I was running to more mid-game fights and I was losing a lot of farm, so today I tried to focus on doing what I believed was the best play and not trying to run to random skirmishes and instead farming the most efficiently I could.
I would say that we were going for objectives and Dignitas were giving over all of them and were always trying to trade, but were too far behind. We got a really good Dragon Soul obviously, Infernal Soul, so they were forced to fight us at the fourth dragon.
Though you guys had a strong 5v5, Dignitas were able to get some isolated picks. Do you think these were preventable?
Fudge: There was an isolated pick in botside when I was holding the wave topside and Viego ran into the bot lane and killed Galio. I think that could have been avoided if I had communicated not to fight raptor and let them have it, especially since I was denying top. That was one pick we could’ve avoided, but they also dove Lee Sin in toplane.
I think we had to make the choice of either sending more people to help toplane faster or to just defend the tower plate. I think we didn’t make the choice instantly, so we kinda baited Perkz. We teleported in lane, we weren’t on the tower, and then he obviously died so I could only collect the farm. I think the picks could have definitely been prevented, but I don’t think they were very impactful deaths.
Reflecting back on the fight for the Infernal Soul, you were an absolute menace to Dignitas’ backline. Did you just see the potential 1v3 play and go for it?
Fudge: Yeah I think at that point, I was so far ahead in items. I think a champion like Gwen against those melee champions, no one actually does damage to me and I sort of just kill them all. It felt like they literally had no damage to kill me and I get to do whatever I want in the game. There just wasn’t a lot of ways they could have killed me unless I was 1v5, so I was confident in that team fight. It felt really, really easy.
Does Gwen do better in these ‘split fight’ moments than other champions?
Fudge: She actually finds it harder to get on top of people because she doesn’t have a lot of CC or instant dashes, but she’s really good at fighting melee champions whilst also zoning backline champions using her W. I think her W is really effective when you use it correctly. Actually yesterday when I was playing Gwen I wasn’t using her W very effectively and I was dying a lot in the fights because I was mistiming it and not using Zhonyas correctly as well.
I think when you play Gwen well you can zone the backline and kill the frontline since you deal so much more damage. Against the right composition, Gwen can be really strong.
It feels like Cloud9 is among the teams with the best read on the meta currently. Did you guys just latch on to these champions and compositions particularly early?
Fudge: I would say that we’re a team that changes our mind really quickly, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. For example, we caught onto the Karma and Lulu trades and picks in the draft phase quite fast and a lot of the teams are banning that against us now since I think we’re a good team when it comes to those champions.
I was obviously playing a lot of Karma and Lulu in Spring Split. Perkz is really good at a lot of different types of champions, so he catches onto champions really quickly. We actually have plans to play different champions next week which are probably going to be a bit off-meta. We’ll see how they go in scrims obviously.
Overall this was an incredibly dominant game. Does getting a win like this to wrap up the week instill a lot of confidence in the team?
Fudge: I think it definitely builds more confidence, but it doesn’t mean that we played well in the games where we obviously didn’t. For example yesterday, I think we played really poorly and I think a lot of it can be attributed to the fact we were playing a composition that was slower. When we play compositions that are slower, we generally play worse.
We tend to get impatient or we don’t really know what to do in the mid-game. So, I think we need to work on playing the enchanters where we don’t have Vulcan just headbutting the enemy team for vision in the river. We’re going to have to work on a lot of those weaknesses and I don’t think that just because we won today means that we played well in the other games.
Finally, going into next week. Cloud9 and TSM are currently battling for first place. Do you have any thoughts going into next week where you’ll be meeting them on Sunday?
Fudge: Well I thought TSM played a lot better in the first week. Going into the second week I thought they showed some really bad games. I think a lot of their games were similar to one we had yesterday, where they made a ton of mistakes. Today in their toplane matchup, I thought that Huni played really, really poorly in his lane.
I’m pretty confident playing against TSM, I don’t think any of their players will really stand out. I feel like our team is slowly starting to ramp up and get more comfortable with the champions that we’re playing so I’m pretty sure that by the match against TSM we’ll probably just smash them.
Also read:
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