As I may or may not have mentioned, Mienco and Sebaku are lov… childhood friends and Mienco and I are housemates, therefore Sebaku and I are childhood friends… I think. Anyways, Mienco and Sebaku were playing League of Legends long before I was, and I joined them soon afterwards. After my double grind to level 30 we finally managed to queue together in normal games. We met many people along the way, like iMegumii and Desdooms, and we all had a lot of fun times together, kicking asses and getting our asses kicked. Sebaku always being the better player among us was a milestone for us to reach. His older Frag vids are testament to the skill difference between him and his opponents, even if he didn’t know much of the game back then.

These fun times ended when I had to cram for my studies for three consecutive months. I stopped playing LoL and my LoL friends moved on without me. They improved their skills while mine deteriorated in lame books about high velocity aerodynamics. From time to time we’d have Skype conversations and Sebaku would tell me about these new guys he’s been playing with (Gootmen, Aximer and Wippedy) and how skilled they are and how fun they are to play with. These stories re-ignited my interests in League of Legends and I started playing the game again.

Getting back into it wasn’t easy at all. I had quite some catching up to do with the 6 new champions I had missed and with the Meta shifts. My micro and multitasking capacities were extremely rusty and I was pretty much a level 10 summoner again. In order to catch up with the others, I had some rigorous 1v1 training sessions with Sebaku, which were all very infuriating for me, because I kept losing them all the time! Many rage sessions were had, but I slowly improved to the point where I was good enough to hold my own in mid. I guess around this time, TLM was officially started.

Me being in mid didn’t always go well, though. If there was a champion I hadn’t faced before, then I would automatically lose. It pretty much came down to experience and I was severely lacking in that department (still am). So for most of that time, I wasn’t a consistent asset to the team and I was therefore dumped in bottom lane, playing as either Ashe or some support champion. Pretty sadface, I know. This isn’t very different now, except for the fact that I’m extending my repertoire of champions and roles. While I’m still in that process, I find myself increasing in knowledge, skill and tactics. I guess practice has its rewards.

The real trick is using these skills in a tournament match. Unfortunately, there haven’t been many opportunities where I’ve been able to perform to the best of my abilities yet *cough* feeder *cough*. Though I’d like to blame it on the fact that the teams we face have ridiculously high Elo compared to us, I have to admit that there is still a lot for me to learn. During these ROFLstomps, the team acknowledges the fact that we were outplayed and we take the experience as a new source of knowledge. We’re not doing many things at the moment, due to very busy schedules, but we will be back soon™.

This is currently where I am within Team Low Morale and even though I wrote this in a hurry, I thank you all for reading this.

Regards,

B3ER

So this will be the first ESL ladder report. We played 3 matches in the past where we won 2 and lost 1, though it was quite some time ago so I won’t be able to write anything about those matches, but it’s not like anyone cares about that. ;p

So this game we were facing off against Tt eSPORTS.it LoL Team. An Italian team, who had around the same elo as us. We weren’t sure if we would win this match, because they had a platinum player, and we underestimated our last opponents as well, so we approached this match carefully.

Bans Tt:
Irelia
Morgana
Lee Sin

Bans TLM:
Rumble
Udyr
Amumu

Irelia and Lee Sin targeted on me and Gootman as always. I really thought after the elo reset, I would be able to play Irelia again, but since me and Gootman are the only gold elo players on our team, it was kinda obvious they targeted us. We targeted the Platinum elo player with all our bans hehe.

Picks Tt:
Orianna
Gangplank
Kog’Maw
Alistar
Cho’Gath

Picks TLM:
Caitlyn
Nocturne
Taric
Katarina
Garen

So I guess our picks are getting a bit predictable. Always first pick Caitlyn, since that is Desdooms his glory, Katarina on Aximer for mid domination, and Taric on Wippedy for the lane domination in bot and great synergy with Caitlyn’s traps. If Lee Sin and Irelia weren’t banned, we would have had the total standard TLM setup hehe. (We really should try and make it less obvious what our mains are) They first picked Orianna, what really surprised me, since I think Orianna isn’t that good anymore. I think Annie, Cassiopeia and Morgana are better choices at the moment. Next to that their team didn’t really look scary at all, except for Kog’Maw. So we focussed on shutting down Kog’Maw, which should result in us winning.

So yeah, we won. Hurray, more points for us on the ladder! I think we really played well this game, we had a good organization, we focused Kog’Maw down in almost every teamfight and we pretty much won all lanes thanks to good ganking and teamwork. We started off a bit behind, they got the first dragon and were 2 kills up at a certain point. But we fought ourselfs back and once the teamfights started we totally dominated them. All in all it was a good game.

I’m a simple guy, 21 years old and in love with gaming. I’ve played a wide variety of games in my past starting with one of the most epic game series to date… the Duke Nukem series. You might think that I’m referring to the semi-3D FPS released by 3D Realms, but that one is the wrong one. The one I’m talking about, is a 2D side-scroller released for MS-DOS which utilizes system hardware to provide SFX sounds (you old guys know what I‘m talking about).

Yeah, pretty badass, huh? I’ve played a lot of these MS-DOS of games, the most notable ones being Commander Keen and Prince of Persia. Afterwards, I tried my hand at possibly the best console to ever reach the market: The Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve slaved away many hours of my prepubescent life playing The Super Mario Bros., Ninja Gaiden, Teenage Mutent Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Megaman, etc series. If there was ever a golden age in gaming, this was it guys. For those who have missed out on this experience, I offer my deepest condolences.

Moving on from this, I’ve actually never owned another console system. What the hell, right? I was so depraved of games that I switched back to PC gaming, now boasting some awesome 16 bit graphics and colors! I immediately fell in love with… well, games from Blizzard. I didn’t have any internet back in the day, and it was really tough to find good games. But the ones I always kept playing were Warcraft II, StarCraft and Diablo II.

My experience in gaming didn’t evolve for a quite a while until I moved away to college. Armed with a dual-core processer, my laptop could take a whole new level of awesome. Around this time, I extended my reach to many different genres in gaming. I played FPS a lot, RTS quite a bit, Racing games, RPGs and to very small degree, fighter games.

Till this date, I was never really all that good at any of these genres. Finally in October 2010, I met League of Legends through a housemate of mine (Mienco to be precise) and I thought: “Meh. Looks like a Warcraft III ripoff”. It seems that I was partially correct. Every time I saw Mienco playing the game, I got more and more interested in it. So I started playing it. For reasons beyond me, Mienco and his close friend, Sebaku, were playing on the NA servers. So to join them, I did the same.

I grinded my way to level 22, until they decided to restart on the EU servers. Like a shadow, I followed suit and the party started all over again. Grinding like a baws. The long and arduous journey to finding a good team and fighting off trolls… will be a story for another time. Right now, I have got to eat my turkey leg, cuz I don’t like to have cold turkey.

Singing out,
B3ER.

Our 3th match in the EMS tournament, this time against a sub team of Double Dutch: DD CareBears. We were convinced that we could win this one, and were actually already preparing ourselves for the round after this. Though, this match still had to be played. Bans and picks:

Bans DD CB:
Orianna
Brand
Irelia

Bans TLM:
Warwick
Amumu
Morgana

IRELIA BANNED AGAIN WTH IS THIS? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. Nah, kinda expected that I wouldn’t be playing too much Irelia this tournament, and the Orianna and Brand bans were kinda useless, since B3ER wasn’t playing, so nobody wanted Brand anyway. We just banned their most played champions.

Picks DD CB:
Nocturne – tw1nblade
Annie – DeBeer
Vayne – Extinctie
Taric – Walkingx
Cho’Gath – DarkMustic

Picks TLM:
Caitlyn – Desdooms
Alistar – Aximer
Cassiopeia – Wippedy
Lee Sin – Gootmen
Garen – Sebaku

BLUARHAHAGH, OK. So they first picked Nocturne, so we didn’t have to pick Lee Sin anytime soon, so we started with the Caitlyn pick as usual and took Alistar for Aximer, because Wippedy was sure he would dominate mid with Orianna and Brand banned. (So they switched roles) This was btw the first time, we played as the main team, so all the odds were in favor for us. They took Annie and Vayne afterwards, which both ended up being a pain in the A@% for us and we finished up with Cass and Lee Sin, for Wip and Goot and I took Garen to counter Cho.

Wai- what? Sebaku I think you uploaded the wrong screenshot! You guys lost on this one!
-No it’s the correct screenshot.

B-but you said that you could get in the top 4 of this tourney?
-Yes I did.

And weren’t they lower Elo, and weren’t you playing with the main team?!
-Sigh, yes.

So since we lost this match, I’d might as well do a small recap. We started ok-ish. Went even, we had first blood by a gank from Gootmen in mid, though not much later they settled the score with a Nocturne gank top. Mid went quite even, trading of blows and killing eachother off once, but eventually Wippedy got a minion and kill advantage and therefore a gold advantage over Annie. I prety much dominated top after my first death. Garen is so disgustingly OP, I got 2 kills on Cho’Gath and almost even got a double while Noc ganked me. Bot lane went fine as well, though, Desdooms ended up dying at the wrong time. I didn’t run teleport and Cho Gath did, so they could do an early Dragon, which we couldn’t stop. When the next dragon spawned, we weren’t with 5 again, so they could easily take it again, though by that time, we pushed both top and bottom turret, so it was still quite even. After some team fights (which we were losing) Taric disconnected, but we managed to get Baron before he reconnected. (YES WE ARE ALL $#&HOLES)  We managed to push mid pretty nicely. Even the first team fight after that we totally dominated them with 1 death and 5 kills in our favor. Though for some reason after this fight it went downhill. We lost every fight from then on, mainly because Vayne just did sick amounts of damage. I don’t know if it was our positioning or if we didn’t have enough damage or whatever, but we just weren’t able to win the team fights. They also stole almost all our blue buffs, so really props to DD CB for outplaying us. (But I really think we could have won this match!!)

Anyway, our adventure in the EMS stops here. I really enjoyed it, but it’s a shame we’re already out.

So our second match, round 3 of the lower bracket. This time EDiT was the opponent. These guys were close to our average Elo, so it was bound to become a close match. Let’s go directly into the bans and picks:

Bans EDiT:
Irelia
Lee Sin
Gangplank

Bans TLM:
Warwick
Brand
Orianna

So they definitely targeted me and Gootmen with the Irelia and Lee Sin bans. And we banned Warwick since one of their guys had a lot of matches with him, and Wippedy wanted Orianna and Brand banned so he could Roflpwn with Cassiopeia.

Picks EDiT:
Morgana – Overd0ze
Taric – Muskita
Nocturne – sickonE
Corki – Sunone
Garen – Lunaa164

Picks TLM:
Caitlyn – Desdooms
Udyr – Gootmen
Sona – Mienco
Cassiopeia – Wippedy
Nasus – Sebaku

So first of all we had 2 position changes, because Aximer and Yorick had to go, they were replaced by Wippedy and Mienco, who weren’t able to play the first match, so it all fell together really nicely. They firstpicked Morgana and we picked Udyr and Caitlyn afterwards since we really wanted them. I wanted last pick, so I could counter pick their solo top. (since irelia was taken) But then they chose Garen, which pissed me off, because I didn’t have a real counter to him. (And I ended up having a lot of trouble with Garen in this game)

Since we weren’t there the first match, and we won the first round by default, our first real match was in the second round of the Lower Bracket. We were facing off against Inside Massive x-rays, who had a lower average elo than us, so we had a chance of winning. So I’ll go straight into the bans and picks.

Bans IMx:
Mordekaiser
Morgana
Orianna

Bans TLM:
Rumble
Annie
Udyr

So they just based of their bans on nothing I guess, since no one of us really plays any of the champions they banned, while we just banned their most played champions who we were afraid of.

Picks IMx:
Brand – IMxDifferent
Gangplank – IMxKing
Alistar – IMxHot
Warwick – IMxSky
Vayne – IMxPudding

Picks TLM:
Irelia – Sebaku
Caitlyn – Desdooms
Lee Sin – Gootmen
Taric – iMegumii
Katarina – Aximer

So they picked Brand first, we first picked Irelia and Caitlyn, since those are the only champs me and Desdooms can play haha. And afterwards Lee Sin for Gootmen, Taric for iMegummii, and Katarina for Aximer.

So we, TLM, the main team of this website, are competing in the ESL Major Series IX Dutch Qualifier. ESL Major Series IX is a tournament held by ESL, with a total price money of 5000 euro’s. The 2 best Dutch teams will be able to go trough the actual tournament and actually compete for the money.

However, we are just joining for fun, since we won’t be able to compete with teams like TTT and LLL. But our goal is trying to get a #3 or #4 spot in this qualifier, what would make me really proud. This tournament is a great opportunity to show ourselves how good we are, and where we are actually standing between other Dutch teams.

So even though we were really exited and motivated to play in this tournament, we totally forgot we had to play Sunday haha. So we lost our first match by forfeit, trowing us immediately in the losers bracket. Luckily our next opponents tried everything to contact us which I really want to thank them for and reminded us to play.

The brackets are viewable here:
http://www.esl.eu/benelux/lol/5on5/ems8qualifiernl/#/benelux/lol/5on5/ems9qualifiernl/rankings/

So I’ll try to upload as much content as possible about our matches played and if I won’t lag too much, I will actually live record some matches. Can’t promise anything yet though!

So I myself, Sebaku will probably mainly be playing solo top, since I’m an #&@hole and can only play 1 spot. I’m asuming Irelia will be banned quite often so I prepared enough other solo top champs for this tournament. So you might see some Nasus, Garen, Mordekaiser, Singed, Jarvan, Jax or Akali play from me. And since I’ve set so much attention on myself, I’d might as well introduce the current team of Team Low Morale.

Team Captain:
Sebastiaan “Sebaku” van Vliet – Solo Top/Ad Carry

Members:
Arn “Aximer” Baartmans – Ap Carry/Solo Top/Jungle/Support (dude plays everything yo!)
Felix “Wippedy” Künzer – Support/Ap Carry
Tom “Gootmen” Gootjes – Jungle/Ad Carry
Sammy “Desdooms” Lannoy – Ad Carry/Support

Reserve:
Gijs “Mienco” van Suylichem - Support/Ad Carry
Amol “B3ER” Mahabir – Ap Carry/Solo Top
Yorick “iMegumii” Rommers – Ap Carry/Ad Carry/Support

The role’s that are bold, are probably the roles that will be played by each player, though if the opposing team picks a certain champ who needs to be countered or if some one has to be replaced, then we might switch things around.

So that’s about it and make sure to keep an eye out on the website for content of the matches we played.

Second of all, if you guys could post on my topic in the LoL forums, that would really help me! Thanks in advance.
EU: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=4268642#post4268642
NA:http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=14147572#post14147572

So this is a Mordekaiser Montage thingy. I wanted to do it for quite some time now, after hearing this song for the first time, though I didn’t have time back than. I did have time this week, and rushed into finishing it. ;p Might be a bit overrushed, but I’m happy with the result. Also I’m already working on my 5th Frag Movie, which should be out in 1-3 weeks.

Anyway, thanks for watching, I’ll be working on more vids in the future.