The Special Ones
The teams attending MSI are clear in their rankings and collective levels, but the X factor that draws in attention is the potential for the best players to hit their peak form. The special ones.
League of Legends is a team game in a manner even the likes of Counter-Strike resist. While the latter is known for tactical execution and deep team-play concepts, the former relies upon five distinct roles in every game and each game is a single unit undivided and so culminating in a single result. Within such an environment and conceptual framing it is obvious that the best team beats the best players so long as that team has enough baseline mechanical skill to pull off their plays and make good on their decisions.
Then there are the special ones. The players so skilled they reverse that dynamic and win by sheer force of ability regardless of their decision-making or their opposition's choices and advantages. The minds that intuitively tap into the League akashic record and appear to download the exact outplay for a given situation and without warning. Those unruly mega talents that upon being unleashed cannot be restrained, redirected or resisted.
The contrasting beauty of the team and role-based nature of League of Legends is that such demi-gods manifest their plays from thin air. This leads to an addiction to seeing if they can do it again and when it matters most. Turn the flow of the game towards their team no matter the gold lead. Overcome a lost dragon by locating a play you didn't even know existed let alone conceive of as possible to execute. Defy the health bars and item mismatches of a team-fight to parry every Justin Wong on their screen and then slay him.
You know the kind of player I'm talking about.
The lord's favourites
Gen.G are the odds on favourite not just to win MSI 2025 but with ease. Double elimination coupled with only Bo5 play in the main event will make this team as hard to beat as last year's incarnation proved, yielding a fifth game in a single series and never losing a match. So it's easy to point to Chovy as the ultimate avatar of the special player, but the truth is he can win the tournament without even necessarily being that player as often as some of his fellow future hall of famers will need to be. He just might do it anyway because he's Chovy!
Even on his unbeaten team, though, sit two other names to make the field quake. Canyon is frequently referred to as the jungle G.O.A.T and his time on Gen.G has only enhanced that reputation and added silverware to his already stupendous haul. This is a tournament for Junglers so who better to have on your team than the best to ever play the role and still within his prime?
The same cannot be said of Ruler, a G.O.A.T contender at ADC in his own right, as the man who has won every trophy was for the first time in his career arguably carried to a crown with the least role in the success. He will be written off and overlooked and forgotten about, but somewhere in there remains the faint but pure essence of the perfect ADC. The smooth kiting, the relentless damage, the frugal summonor economy gambles and the man who when peeled for can make juice of any five bulging full health bars on his screen!
Chinese excellence
The first non-Gen.G usernames leaping to the top of the conscious mind are, of course, the men who all but won a world championship on their backs late last year: Bin and Knight. Bin is having his worst individual year and split since he was being loaned out to RNG, but give him a Jax or Camille pick against anyone and there is an unsettling feeling in your stomach if you're pulling for or betting on the other team. You know what lurks deep in his psyche.
That will to not just win, but dominate and humilitate his opposition. That peak flow state he hits where he becomes the brutal nightmare fuel fed Jax from a solo queue game who long since passed the point of being dealt with. Except this guy does it to champions and soon-to-be legends.
Similarly, The Golden Left hand in the Mid lane for BLG enters the event with one of the worst Junglers in a stacked field and yet even in this recent split Knight could produce individual games where it looked as if nobody in the world could have matched him in the server. If Chovy has the best right hand in League of Legends history then his counterpart is fittingly speaking Manderin and over in the other major winning region in the game's history.
He outplayed Faker over a Worlds final, even if the title didn't end up coming home with him. He also has an MSI title of his own and is going for a third straight finals appearance. Odds and analysis be damned, this phenom holds within that left appendage the power to put a mark in the Bo5 score indictator for his team at any moment of his choosing or the League gods' - who knows at this point whence these epic League moments are summoned from and by whom.
Korean crypto carries
Tarzan would be a name thrown around in fiesty "best Jungler in history" discussions had he not choked a number of international appearances and never secured a domestic crown until this split. His combination of elite mechanical ability, elite pathing, powerful decision-making and deep champion pool depth look like someone creating the perfect Jungler in the My Player feature of an imaginary single player League of Legends career campaign.
What ability cannot account for, though, is heart and nerve and grit. Just as few get all the talent so even fewer seem to get the intangibles that can elevate a player to victory against most under pressure. Tarzan has thusfar not proven himself to be that player. Even his domestic title comes with key victories over a Beichuan who must still be feeling a part of a surreal dream even being placed between Bin and Knight. That was hardly a meeting with peak Kanavi or Tian on the finals stage.
Yet those who have observed Tarzan's play enough can easily be seduced by the romance of a redemption arc. A time to mirror his domestic run and show the world that he is capable of being the best player in the world at his position and unduly impacting a game and series.
The other Korean who must also be brought up, even without reason to believe he will be the game changer of an MSI with a 2 as the third digit, is the mighty Faker. The greatest player in the history of the game and perhaps esports itself attests to a timeless rule: never bury a great player until he leaves the game entirely or the game entirely leaves him. That Faker is at the tournament is reason enough it's possible he can produce timeless moments, like in the fourth and fifth games of the last Worlds final.
Laning and champion pool depth aren't the areas he is going to top the field or outpace his opponents. No, what he seeks and his teams play for is that moment of uncertainty in a skirmish without full vision or a close-to-even strength late game team-fight where he can channel the player who dominated the 2010s to the extent a game which has always been about a pantheon of supernatural stars became a monotheistic cult order dedicated to a single terrible and magnificent diety.
Lovecraft never conjured up a more fearsome thought than facing that Faker and the glimpses of yesteryear's greatness hover around him like ghosts ready to possess him for a moment or more!
Never count out Faker. As an analyst and on talk shows I must, because that's what analysis tells us is most likely to be the outcome, but as an aficionado of esports history and excellence I was fist pumping along with everyone else at his Galio plays at Worlds - I contend his most important plays despite being far from his fiercest form.
The good, the bad and the ugly of the Western scene
Three obvious names stand out for our hemisphere. Inspired is perhaps the best Western player and has the smarts and poise to challenge anyone at the Jungle position and give his team the outside chance to upset even the contender teams.
The West's Faker: Caps. LEC fans and stars alike will tell you that Caps can never be entirely written off or buried. Even the most subdued and boring periods of his career can be transformed faster that an Akali dashing back in to again become the most powerful carry the West has seen. The Chosen One has blessed the LEC with a power that can never be entirely drained of its force. Look past him and get clapped!
Elyoya sits atop the European hierachy, with a few names not present, and will show us the limits a single world class player in a team of otherwise average international performers can accomplish against Asia's best. To look at the flaws of his team-mates is to miss how he draws them into his plans and his aura boosts their performance like he was a Top lane orn handing out supercharged item blessings.
Put up or shut up
Among the teams there are names which would dare to creep into this conversation. Hans Sama has long been put up as one of the great Western carries and now, facing a diminished ADC power level field, has an opportunity to make his supporters look shrewd.
MKOI's Alvaro has repeatedly teased a kind of genius that makes many hope he can join the lineage of Hylissang and Mikyx as outlier Supports from EU who can outthink and outplay the best of the LPL and LCK. In a week or so he could go from a top LEC player to an international star. It's on his back now. Just how special is he really? We'll soon have a sense.
