The Boring Skills That Separate Emerald From Challenger

All right, guys, let's talk about the fundamentals to get out of Emerald and push towards Masters, GM, and even Challenger. A lot of you guys are actually more centralized Platinum, Emerald, and Diamond. I've come to find out that there are a lot more people of that rank than there are Gold and below. And so I'm going to target more of my content around Emerald+ decision-making and what you need to do at this level. So we're going to talk about numbers tracking, we're going to talk about tempo, we're going to talk about communication, macro, you know, everything that's, that's that's like relevant to the game. First thing I notice is that the enemy jungler has been invaded by my Fiora. So that's going to put my Fiora behind. She's going to be down 3 minions, but the enemy jungler is going to be behind by a lot. Usually what you can do is look to invade his top camps. But if I invade his top camps, that leaves my bot side a little bit like— it's a little risky for my bot camps. And so there's another option here, which is Malzahar's Volatile and my bot camps are up so I can farm all the way down towards the bot side. And then eventually I can either invade his bot camps. Oh, he's going to invade. Or I can invade his top camp. So I need to decide based off lanes. And bot lane's also— yeah, bot lane's very volatile. So I want to look to see if I can impact this lane. And so a lot of what we're doing at this level is evaluating what's going on with everybody. This guy's igniting, at least it's a 1 for 1. That's fine. Bot lane's trading. Okay, bot lane's trading. This is not bad. We have to look at the wave though. Well, they actually just lost their minds. Okay. That's not good. That's like pretty, pretty trash. The wave is okay. They're going to recall and we're not gonna get anything. Okay, so my, my gambit in a way was, hey, like their enemy bot lane, I should be able to play for them, but I can't. So what we're going to do here instead is play for the top crab. And so we're gonna drop a ward down there. We'll play for double crab at least. And the game state's a bit funky, but that's all good. That's on the way, peeing for this. My LeBlanc is down to fight. So we saw this from earlier. LeBlanc is very volatile, very aggressive. And so right now what I actually want to do is pressure his topside camps because I can. And this guy has no flash probably. So that's why it's very nice to be able to keep playing. Bro, hit anybody, hit anything. Oh my gosh. Um, I don't know if I— I don't know if I like this. Okay, I'm going to run here. I lose this crab. I should never die, but it's just a tad bit annoying. Okay, that's all good. My Rell is spam pinging. I mean, we got the, the Jayce kill, so what we're going to do is we're going to look for a full clear all the way down towards the bot side. And so the Pantheon is up top side. This is all a byproduct of my Rell kind of The Earthling, thank you for the raid, bro. Hope you had a good stream, man. Let's mute this Rell immediately. Mid's pushing in. We know already that this LeBlanc— okay, this guy still has flash, but he should die still, and then we can actually invade his bot camps after. I'm gonna go bot. So we should lose his bot side. So we got his bot camp, and now we should take his bot camp. Or we got our raptor camp, but we should be able to invade his bot camp too. Okay, because the raptor didn't reset or anything, you can kind of safely assume that your bot side is up. And so all of this is pretty good for us. Their Jayce has no flash now. Okay, the Jayce no F. Uh, bot wave is kind of shit this game. My tempo is worse right now, so I don't actually want to stay on the map. Mid is kind of volatile. No chain. Okay, we have no chain for a bit. Let's just go. There's going to be a fight on this wave here. LeBlanc should probably be able to land a chain. I kind of like doing this here. Big main reason is it guarantees my level 6. And once I'm level 6, I think the game just gets a whole lot easier. But it's also okay to look for a gank there if you really want to, because LeBlanc has a lot of control. She's just like a very aggressive champion with a chain. Chain is just broken. Broken spell if you land it. I'm gonna go for this. But after I saw LeBlanc miss, I was like, eh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I trust him. So instead, we'll just play for ourselves. We'll just grab our item. This guarantees my game that I'm in a state where I can 1v9 and carry. And so we put ourselves ahead and we're going to grab our top camp. So we still want to make a play with LeBlanc. Also, Taliyah has Merc Treads, so it's even harder for us to land it onto her. Okay, so from this time, from this point in the game, we have to evaluate like, what's our plan? Like, how do we win this game? Okay, so our LeBlanc is kind of promising. Our bot lane is not very happy with the game. Rell's obviously tilted. My Twitch kind of Inted earlier too. And my top laner gave up his game to pressure the Jayce. And so we have a kind of bad top and bot condition. Oh, this changes things. Okay, changes things. Bot lane's okay. So everything right now is like mid-bot focused. And so I want to go ahead and play towards the mid-bot side. And I want to say, hey, screw top lane. This guy Pantheon's up here. That's completely fine. The enemy Jayce just took my Raptor camp, which is okay. I want to sweep through. I want to go on the way ping here. I want to play for this Raptor respawn. Okay, I'm gonna ping this. The thing is, the Pantheon's coming. My rail's not here. This is really unfortunate for us. My LeBlanc got a nasty trade though, and so we want to play for this Raptor camp, and it's at least an exchange from the Jayce. Things I want to pull this out as far as I can so it doesn't get resets, and what I could do here is I could sit in this bush, and I can play for this Pantheon trade here. Okay, well, that's pretty rough. The Pantheon has Flash and everything. And my LeBlanc and Rell are really, really far away from us there. And that's this guy's Flash. That's Taliyah's Flash too. At least Taliyah used Flash. But what really sucks is my Rell is running backwards. My LeBlanc is not in a position to come kill that Pantheon. So my teammates just kind of weren't there. Pantheon had just enough move speed from his E to escape. We're losing top lane. And so this game is really hard now and we have to try to problem solve a hard game. I think my LeBlanc is still the lane I want to play around. My Twitch is still very strong. And so it's about finding a nice play around my bot side in this otherwise like really, really rough game where we just stay away from, from Teemo. The only time we can kill Teemo is with this Rell. And so a lot of the, a lot of the game is just evaluating what we can do and what timer is decent for us. Okay, let's just clear all of our camps. We also have our item so we can complete our item and then probably make a play towards the bot side after our item or even before item. These guys are gonna trade and they're gonna keep fighting on this wave. My Twitch wants to recall. If this is warded, it's— I can't do shit there. We have to consider that right now the Jayce is probably on the topside grubs. And in that case, because Jayce is probably up there, I'll just go in and take this dragon. We're gonna sweep through. It's fine, this is warded. It doesn't change too much. We just wanna go defend our raptor camp after though. Yeah, we see Jayce here. This Jayce is kind of like getting, getting ahead in this game. It doesn't really matter though. My Fiora shouldn't tweak and take my camp, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can play for everything here in the top side. Okay, my LeBlanc is here. Great. This is a nice juicy kill for us. And so my top laner is fucking dead, but there's not much we can do about that. Okay, this guy is going to be in that bush. Let's catch a Hexflash over. Did this guy disappear? I'm gonna wait for Teemo to go through. I'm gonna have— I'm gonna wait for Teemo to go through before I do all this. Then we look to kill this guy here. Beautiful. I wish I dropped my E before, but that Teemo inted instead of the Jayce. Jayce was able to channel recall, and so everybody like Plays are fine to make against their strong opponents as long as you have what we call numbers advantage, right? I had Rell there and they didn't, and so the play is a lot easier for me to make. So whenever you have a teammate advantage, you're always capable of making aggressive plays like that. And so we're constantly finding for numbers advantage. Right here, our Twitch is probably completely fucked. I'm actually not going to play into his topside because I want to go down bot lane, defend my bot camps. My Twitch is probably dead as fuck. That's okay. Chilling. We're gonna go ahead and buy IE. The reason for IE is they have no armor on their team. Jayce is running away. He's not going for my camp respawn. I could be on a ward here. I am. This guy seems like he's out, and we still want to play into the bots. Our mid laner has items, so we evaluate here. Jayce is strong. I'm up a good bit though because I've been farming very well. If that Teemo keeps disrespecting in this position, we could probably look for a kill. And again, our LeBlanc is going up there right now. So it's kind of playing around LeBlanc and, and she's like our strong laner. I mean, that guy's dead, right? Great. So just make sure our LeBlanc can walk back towards mid lane safely. I'm kind of just LeBlanc's escort here. And so all of this is working around my fed teammate, figuring out how to play the game around that, that guy. I have a full item here and so does my LeBlanc. I'm gonna go slowly here though. Okay, we found the combo as Pantheon, and then we can, we can invade this guy's camps now at this point. Yep, I'm gonna put out a LeBlanc again. Like I said, play with your fed teammate, aka this LeBlanc, and things just will look so much better. Okay, that's Pantheon's flash. Beautiful. I'm gonna fake fog here just so they don't know where I'm going, just so they feel threatened, the Pantheon at least. The Pantheon won't control any space when I do that, and my LeBlanc and Fiora should have this guy killed. I'm confident that my LeBlanc could— Um, yeah, my LeBlanc's got that shit. If Rell or if Taliyah uses her thing, we can definitely look for a kill here. She has her ult or no? No, no, no R on Taliyah. Or sorry, yeah, no R on Rell. Okay, maybe not going top lane is a bit of a blunder because our top laner is fucked. Our teammates got fucked there, but we have our Infinity Edge and that's okay. So now what we do is we have to continuously evaluate who's weak, who's strong. Who's the threats? Who do we want to not play around? Who do we want to play around? And where do we have numbers advantage? So we are like, we need LeBlanc to be alive first off. So once LeBlanc is up, we have our IE. We see who's strong, who's weak. We can one-shot literally anybody. And so we'll probably lose one or two camps here. But look at our level. We invaded this guy's entire topside. We got multiple kills. This guy needs to be a little bit careful. Oh, this guy's on my wolves, I believe. No? Okay. I was hiding! Okay, I have a combo here. And I'm gonna kill the Ziggs here as well. Beautiful. Disrespectful. Okay, we found the— we have numbers there as well, but also look at my items. Even if we don't have numbers in this position, Given strength in this game, I am so powerful to the point where we can not only constantly like just invade, fight, do whatever we want. We can do anything essentially in a game like this. We can do anything. We're with our LeBlanc and we're with our Rell. This is a great position for us to be in because we're playing with our strongest teammates. My LeBlanc should never die here. Beautiful. And that turret's pretty healthy. We can chunk this guy out at least. Fuck, I wish I could have got that auto off. That's fine. Kind of fake them out with which way I'm going. I don't want to show them entirely. But the Blackfire Torch might kill me here, but I think I'm okay. Meow. Pantheon came out of base. Oh, okay. Taliyah flashed. My Rell not going in earlier allows Taliyah to flash. At the very least, Pantheon gets the kill. But honestly, I was kind of debated by teammates, but it's all good. The reason why is we killed the Pantheon, we got TPs, and we're getting pressure in the bot side. And so at the very least, Pantheon gets my shutdown. The idea there is we want to create pressure with this big lead that we have all around. And so we want to keep fighting things all the time. Uh, we want to keep pressuring. And so at a base here, the same, the same thing applies where we want to go ahead and play for the— probably the Herald, and then we'll go play for the bot camps after, and then we'll go play to pressure bot lane here. Is this recorded or live? This is live, but I just lock in for my videos because this is going on YouTube. Okay, we have numbers advantage. These guys should, should be fine. They should not kill this Pantheon. The Jayce is literally dead. Our LeBlanc has almost 2 items. And so given that position, I'm going to confidently say they don't need me and I want to use my tempo to play for the Herald. So what I'm doing is I'm evaluating position, I'm evaluating if they need me or not, and then I'm making a confident choice as to whether or not they, they need me. And so LeBlanc, LeBlanc should be fine. There's a bot crab up and there are my entire, like my entire bot side. And so in a position like this, I'm actually just going to Herald mid lane and I'm going to hardcore pressure Here? With the idea, with the hope that we can just pressure this whole mid turret. Can pressure this Jayce as well. Sweep through. Okay. I kind of have to ult away here. I kind of overdid it. If my Rell just combos at all earlier, that guy should fucking die. Somehow I'm alive. My Rell comboed very late. This is pretty rough all around. The Fiora broke the mid turret at least. My LeBlanc got very low. This is extremely dangerous, and that's why, because they're right there. Okay. And so I get punished pretty hard here. I lose my entire bot side, but I'm going to— I'm going to say, hey, fuck it, I lose my bot side. I need to stop playing sloppily. I'm making too many disrespectful plays here. I'll take the L on my bot camps. My teammates got it. If they got it, great. If they don't, all good. What I'm going to do is I'm going to look to invade his top camps. And so my Fiora is going down there, getting herself killed. Maybe Twitch wins, maybe Twitch loses. It doesn't actually change my game plan here, which is fine. I'll take your top camps, Jayce. And so because we know that the enemy Jayce was in the bot side doing all this, they're overextending. We don't have to perma fight where they are. Instead, we can play for camps like this here. We should be able to walk it off, except for if this guy does this, we can just one-shot his ass. He blinded me early and he just thinks he's going to live and walk away. I'm freaking 2 and a half items, almost 3. And so we killed the disrespectful one. And now this Jayce's invade from my mistake turns into a huge misplay for them because I'm respectful and I don't throw my entire HP bar away. And so that's a huge lesson there, right? Which is just respect your HP bar and let them lose their minds. And now this Jayce is not respectful at all. As you can see, he just got angry, ran in, and he got it. He lost all of his camps there in the FF. And so a lot of what this game is, and a lot of what I wanted to show you guys this game, forcing them to FF, is numbers advantage is crucial. It's very important to think about. But the bigger thing is strength. How strong are you? How strong are your allies? Who do you fight around? Who is good to play with? And then the last and most— last and one of the most important things is respectfulness around not getting yourself killed when your camps are not yours to take. And the Great, great part about this is I know Captor. Captor was one of my students a while back. Well, not great because I wanted to improve, but great because we showed him what you're supposed to do in a way. And like, in an essence, that's kind of what you're supposed to do. But this game was a great display of, hey, you know, teammates are losing, but that's fine. I have somebody who is winning. Play through that winning lane, identify how to play with that winning lane, and continue and accelerate the game using that strong Teammate. I hope you guys learned a valuable lesson or two from this game. Check out thejunglekingdom.gg in the description box down below. You can assess yourself, analyze yourself, and get a really good analysis on how you should improve and get better at League of Legends. And anyway, I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace, peace.