It takes something special for a team to go five weeks without dropping a single game. Usually, that something "special" comes in the form of criticism: When the Taipei Assassins pulled off their streak back in 2012, spearheading their legendary warpath to the World Championship grand finals that year, it was obvious at first glance that a large chunk of their stats were basically padding, courtesy of much weaker Southeast Asian teams.
While it certainly didn't take away from TPA's October miracle, beating down the likes of Moscow 5 and Azubu Frost at their respective heights, the closeness of each set demonstrated the many weaknesses that their local dominance belied. Similarly, when Cloud9 pulled off their stunning rookie season in North America, it was accepted that it was equal parts their own skill plus major strategic weaknesses of the North American LCS as a whole.
Sometimes, though, a team is simply really good at this game -- such as South Korea's SKT T1 K back in 2013-2014, coming off a World Championship victory to sweep clean the Korean scene then split afterward. The fact that they crashed and burned immediately in the wake of that achievement, even missing Worlds 2014, is beside the point: The Korean scene was the most competitive of any of the regions back then and now, and what they accomplished was unthinkable. Is ahq E-Sports Club the next SKT T1?
Probably not (unless League of Legends Master Series fans get really lucky), but the underlying conditions of their Spring 2016 success thus far has more in common with 2013 SKT than 2012 TPA. The LoL Master Series has proven extremely competitive thus far: Worlds quarterfinalists like the Flash Wolves are just barely able to stay ahead of contenders like Hong Kong Esports, a resurgent Machi 17, and even surprise rookie force XGamers, though the last of these still have a lot to improve upon. Flash Wolves even arguably did better than ahq last October, but the scrappy team of Taiwanese teens that beat down Worlds finalists ROX Tigers twice in the 2015 group stages find themselves stuck under ahq's enormous shadow.
Strangely, like with the Wolves, ahq hardly changed between October and now. The team decided to stay together despite publicized offers from Chinese organizations, and only mid laner Liu "Westdoor" Shu-Wei had suggested retirement, only to change his mind before the split started. It seems hard to believe that ahq's power spike comes with giving Westdoor 50 percent fewer games, but the results speak for themselves: By buying out Wong "Chawy" Xing Lei, last year's Taipei Assassins mid laner, an already strong Taiwanese team has turned into regional kings. And a lot of it is specifically because of which of those 50 percent they took away from Westdoor to give to Chawy.
The Assassin
The team's senior mid laner plays exclusively blue-side games now, and it's not hard to see why. True, he was able to stand toe-to-toe versus Faker last October on Fizz, famously his best champion. True, he occasionally brings in innovative picks from the upper echelons of Korean solo queue, like last year's anti-LeBlanc Cho'gath -- very, very occasionally.
Fact is, however, he has played mainly six champions in three years and countless dozens of patches: Diana, Ahri, Twisted Fate, Zed, LeBlanc and Fizz. Five out of six of those are clear-cut assassins. Twisted Fate, the sole exception, is his Original Flavor classic, the solo queue pub stomper he used to terrorize North America with before Garena was established as Taiwan's League of Legends publisher and server. Furthermore, the play style for Twisted Fate is analogous with the rest of his pool: Show up where he's least expected and annihilate a single target, letting his team sweep through with an advantageous five versus four.
But that hyper-focused specialization had some serious weaknesses exposed this time last year, when ahq was struggling to stay in fourth place. When assassins are out of meta, Westdoor suffers heavily from the inherent difficulty to scale up with farm; he usually finds himself pushed under the turret and far behind the rival mid laner, though eventually finds a way to make it up by split pushing empty lanes and the simple matter of killing people for extra gold. But based on the patch, he's also the easiest top-tier player to ban out, just keep him off of Fizz, and the enemy mid laner basically has their choice of whatever non-assassin meta option is left over, usually acting as a direct counter to what Westdoor has left.
As a result, ahq traditionally has been strongest on blue side. Having first-pick priority means they can draft around Westdoor's weaknesses, either banning out the champions that gives his remaining options the hardest time, or at least setting up either Chen "Ziv" Yi or Chou "AN" Chun-An with power picks of their own to offset a weaker mid lane (and it helps that both Ziv and AN became much better after former support player Tsai "GreenTea' Shang-Ching stepped down to take over as team analyst). Unfortunately, a team can't dominate the LMS with only blue-side mastery. So they called in fire support.
The Magician
Thing about Wong "Chawy" Xing-Lei is, he's really used to solo-carrying. His career has been a litany of missed opportunities. Back on the Singapore Sentinels, he barely missed back-to-back world championships thanks to half-hearted teammates. He gets recruited by the Taipei Assassins in 2014, and gets to watch from the sidelines as then-mid laner Chen "Morning" Kuan-Ting completely failed to capitalize on early leads and throw away game after game.
He's finally named starter for TPA, and it's TPA's worst roster since the Great Hangover of 2013. Despite all that, his skill and determination is self-evident, even being named LMS MVP despite TPA's shortcomings throughout last year. So what happens when Chawy is on a legitimately good team? Chawy farms better than Westdoor (50 more CS per game on average), plays longer games than Westdoor (six minutes longer on average), and, unlike Westdoor, favors area-of-effect mages that lend well to deliberative map-control strategies (thus explaining both the farm and longer games). Chawy also can't get banned out, playing 11 different champions in the spring of 2015, and 12 in the summer (he's currently on six, halfway through Spring 2016).
Normally, that would suggest a player that plays just to the patch without particular specialties or strengths of his own, except that Chawy is more likely than not to define the region's mid lane metagame. He attracts the same number of targeted bans as Westdoor (11 each), despite not having a legendary pocket specialty like Fizz, and is the main reason why Zilean mid lane is now often banned in Taiwan, despite playing it only once on stage. Granted, when you've been dominating solo queue with it, and the one pro game you played was 40 minutes of playing with your food, Chawy's rivals are well in their right to make it his most frequent ban.
But despite doing more damage, farming more kills and generating more gold per game, Chawy's damage participation ratio has actually gone down since leaving TPA. Neither ahq or Chawy has ever had it so good. Chawy gets a team where even his best effort is successfully matched by his team, and ahq gets a mid laner that greatly expands their strategic repertoire. It'd be almost tempting to say that Westdoor is obsolete.
Chawy's magic act works on multiple levels; not just in the most common attributes of his champion roster, but also in the strategic sleight of hand. Ziv and AN are just as likely to hard-carry an ahq game (AN in particular) yet don't receive anywhere near the amount of targeted bans or in-game focus. And amid the literally dozens of champions that Chawy has pulled out over the course of his career, most teams have missed out that he's not just the anti-Westdoor in terms of champion diversity, he's also the anti-Westdoor in what he can't play.
Chawy has an amazing LeBlanc. That is not at all the same thing as saying he can play assassins. His Kassadin is weak (never mind the KDA: the last time he played it, he was blowing Flashes from getting ganked near his own turret), his Diana is deplorable (played it only once last year, to be fair), and overall he's much more likely to be in the back of a fight zapping people to respawn than doing so in your face. He's a natural red side player: the second pick position lets him react to the other team's compositions, and there's a lot more mages than assassins with the crowd control to do so.
Two Thrones
Frankly, this is an unfair setup for the rest of the LMS -- or, indeed, anywhere else Traditionally, the sole mid laner on a team does a lot to set their collective personality and style. The position has easy access to the rest of the map and usually gets a lot more gold than the jungler, making them a central mainspring to whatever strategy the team is conducting. But "style and personality" is just another way to say "strengths and weaknesses," and even SKT T1 occasionally struggles when Faker hasn't yet gotten a grasp on the current metagame or the play style of the opposing mid laner (this spring, in particular, has been rough for the 2013 and 2015 world champions).
ahq has their weaknesses, but it isn't something that teams can develop and force in-game. If patch balance gets really bad, either Westdoor's assassins become a liability, or Chawy's comparably poor handle on assassins makes red-side matches unfavorable (the champion archetype's tendency to blow people up without much in the way of counterplay does, admittedly, make them a constant and moving target by Riot's balance team). On the other hand, a shift in balance either way just serves to empower one of two players who were already at the forefront of the Taiwanese scene, and without forcing ahq to go through that awkward integration period teams suffer when they have to drop a player for somebody new.
It may be that ahq has done something nobody else in the world of pro League of Legends has quite figured out: How to work a legitimately functional substitution system. Though SKT T1 tried it with Easyhoon and Faker last year, the pre-eminence of the latter legend made it an entirely unequal relationship, eventually leading to Easyhoon flying over to China for LPL's Vici Gaming in hopes of escaping Faker's shadow. No such problem exists for Westdoor or Chawy, at least not yet. For now, they stand as the deadliest duo the island has ever seen. Come the Mid-Season Invitational, scheduled in May at Shanghai, China, ahq's diarchy will likely get its first real international test.
It may be brash to predict only halfway through spring that it'll be ahq taking LMS Spring and qualifying, but at the rate they're going, who's going to stop them? The only real question is which of the two kings of mid lane will be trusted to carry the banner in a game-five scenario. And if it'll be enough to take on Korea.