The 2020 LPL Summer Season is underway, and once again we’ve seen the amazing teams of this region pull up their signature picks while giving way for new champions due to being buffed.

One such champion is highly regarded to be the greatest solo queue pick for mid laners. Now, even professional mid laners are taking this champion to their best-of-three games in a bid to become an LPL champion.

This champion is one who did not appear in the Summer games out of luck. Twisted Fate is the pocket ace of some mid laners, and we’ll analyze why he is now picked up by many.

Season 10 Twisted Fate changes

If you’ve been out of the loop for patch notes, Twisted Fate has been the subject of some quality of life buffs for three different patches now (since 9.19), and one of them was extremely powerful.

On 9.19, Twisted Fate’s E ability (Stacked Deck) gained better attack speed scaling from 10-30% to 20-40% and +10 bonus damage on all ranks. This optimizes his attack pattern and makes weaving movement and auto attacks feel cleaner.

On 10.6, his W ability (Pick a Card) gained additional AP ratios for Blue card (50% AP to 90% AP) and Red card (50% AP to 60%) AP. This change gave his champion an identity other than being a Gold card stunbot, and that picking Blue or Red by accident is not much of an issue because of their damage potential.

On 10.10, his base AD (49.954 to 52) and armor values (20.542 to 21) got rounded up, which may look like a tiny buff but it makes his values consistent. In addition, his ultimate ability, Destiny, got its mana reduced to 100 mana on all ranks, making his level 6 roams easier to pull off.

What’s Twisted Fate good for, anyway? He’s not Akali or Zed or (insert solo queue favorite)!

Twisted Fate is a champion heavily recommended to players who want to climb to Challenger.

Out of all the mid champions in the roster, even if Akali and Syndra are S-tier, and even if it’s fun to play Yasuo, Twisted Fate does things that they cannot: the mid lane fundamental of roaming.

Here’s a clip of RNG Xiaohu’s Twisted Fate instantly turning OMG Aliez’ engage on RNG New into a 1v2 and a kill.

The ability to instantly turn around fights towards your favor and heavily punish the enemy’s reckless engaging is so harmful. If you were that enemy and you had a bounty on your head, if you’re unaware of TF’s ultimate cooldowns you’re going to be intentionally feeding.

While Twisted Fate is not a fancy champion with modern-day mechanics, max health percent true damage, and a billion dashes, he is still a staple of competitive play because his kit complements what mid laners are capable of achieving. He can act proactively thanks to his global reveal ultimate (the only one in the game), semi-global teleport and his Gold card to help his team, and during his own time in mid lane, his passive helps him stay slightly ahead of the enemy in gold. In addition, he has good tower pushing capability to boot with his E passive and Blue card (which works on turrets!)

Kills are not the end goal of League of Legends; your goal as a team is to destroy the enemy Nexus. With a champion that has damage, crowd control, and roaming ability, you have your fundamental mid lane champion that gets results when he’s ready to play with his team.

How come we have yet to see Twisted Fate from other mid laners like Doinb (and other top level mids?)

Simple: Syndra and Zoe are also powerful picks for the LPL mid laners.

Taking the current statistics as of June 11, Syndra and Zoe have been placed 12 and 11 times respectively out of 31 games. They have about 38% and 35% champion presence solely for mid laners.

Twisted Fate is the top 3 most played with 6 games out of 31 games, making up about 20% champion presence rounded up.

Outside of that top three, Galio has appeared in 5 games and Kassadin has 4 games. The rest of the mid picks appeared at less than 4 games.

It is way early in the season to have a good amount of sample size, but the fact that Week 2 has already featured this much Twisted Fate as well as Syndra and Zoe speaks in what pro mid laners in the LPL prefer.

However, if you try to look up VODs of Doinb, Knight, and Rookie, you’re guaranteed to see them at least play Twisted Fate once. It shows that the top level pros understand how good Twisted Fate is for aspiring mid laners.

Concluding Thoughts

If reading this made you want to pick up Twisted Fate, it may be rough at first because it’s not like playing Akali or Zed. However, the payout for playing the game through fundamentals is priceless, and it will carry your mid lane prowess to new heights and make playing other immobile mages quite manageable.

Right now, Twisted Fate is a strong champion to learn the game and win games on. Whether he is overpowered or not is a topic for another day.

Are there any champions in other lanes that are slowly gaining popularity? Do you want to see a pro play your main in the big stage? Let us know!