League of Legends! (Dominion/fave champs/whatever)

[Final-Fan]

Story Time.  Please skip to the last paragraph if you hate story time, or get tired of it at any point. 

So I've been playing a lot of Ranked games in Season 3. I would estimate that over 90% and probably around 95% of those games have been as Poppy. I started out in Bronze I (trolled in placement matches) and am now in Gold I and hoping to make Platinum by the end of the season, at the end of this month. I have played almost a thousand ranked games as Poppy. I tell you all this as context for my next sentence.

This last game I played is the greatest game I can remember carrying as Poppy.

By "greatest game", I refer to the fact that despite doing very bad at the beginning of the game, no one flipped out at other players or raged. If anyone lost hope, it didn't stop them from continuing to try. There was team spirit.

By "carrying", I mean that I personally and almost singlehandedly shut down the enemy fed carry, continued to kill him after that, and caused panic and disorder in the enemy team that allowed our team to win. Oh, and when the game ended I was 16/2/6. But let me turn back the clock.

The game did not begin on a good note. I screwed up my initial buy. (I meant to buy a Crystalline Flask and then buy 3 red potions, and instead I somehow wound up with 4 red potions and no Flask. I did not notice this until my top lane was starting.) Meanwhile, our mid, Orianna announced that she was rusty. She was going against Fizz.

In top lane, our jungler Rammus ganked the enemy Jax, but I failed to adequately commit (Ghosted too late) and he didn't die. I don't recall who got first blood, but Orianna died to Fizz before too long, and then at around level 5 I made some foolish moves that allowed Jax to kill me. I was not having trouble farming, but lacking the Crystalline Flask was a real pain because I had to buy more red pots to compensate and didn't get the mana the Flask potions give. Later on, he was able to kill me again, and took the turret from 100% to 0 because he's Jax. Fortunately, he stayed in lane pushing, because he thought I couldn't kill him in revenge; I proved him wrong, but only barely—that was when I knew I wasn't going to win that lane.

Meanwhile, Orianna hadn't been feeding like a retard, but she had died one or two more times to Fizz, and probably been intimidated out of a bunch of farm, and Fizz had also begun to gank bot lane very successfully. (Our bot lane was Caitlyn and Soraka; theirs was Sona and Ashe.) There was talk in chat about how Fizz was going to get out of control. Orianna was apologizing but fortunately no one was getting abusive. Rammus and I tried to keep people's spirits up. I decided to try to put a stop to this instead of fighting a losing battle in top lane. Before doing this, I took the liberty of grabbing our team's blue buff, since Orianna had already been wisely letting Rammus keep it because she would just lose it to Fizz. (Poppy with blue buff is a sexy beast. Her mana issues are the stuff of legend and her one weakness (along with CC lock), and the CDR helps a lot as well.)

So I went bot, and Fizz was there. I showed up, and Fizz tried to kill me, but I ulted the enemy support Sona so Fizz couldn't touch me; then I blew EVERYTHING on Fizz (I had my spells back up after blowing them on Jax by then), killed him, and the enemy tried to kill me but I killed someone else and then got away at low health while my team cleaned up. Shut Down.

Sadly, Jax had taken the opportunity to push down another top tower, and their jungler Jarvan IV was at the inner mid tower which was at 50%. It was still worth it to shut Fizz down and it was probably even more worth it for team morale. Nevertheless, people worried that Jax would split-push his way to victory, a valid concern.

The next teamfight, which happened in mid lane, was similar to the last one. After they initiated I came roaring in, avoiding Fizz's damage either because he had already blown his cooldowns on killing someone or because I ulted someone else, and killed Fizz, while my team took advantage of the fact that he was "occupied" to 4v4 the rest of the team, with me piling on after killing Fizz. We aced them (I once again stayed in the fight long enough to kill someone else and then kited the rest while my team cleaned up) so we were able to not only finish off their outer mid tower, but bully them away from their inner mid tower long enough to get it below 50% before Fizz arrived, AND THEN get Dragon. I had actually been at very low health after the battle, and almost recalled before I realized that they were aced and our team had a Soraka. I also burned the last red pots I would buy that game.

At this point I began taking our red buff as well because it was becoming obvious that I was the team's carry, and the slow red buff gives to Poppy is extremely useful for sticking to targets since Trinity now gives a bit more speed instead of a slow. The true damage doesn't hurt either.

By this time I was legendary. After going 1/2 in laning phase (and lucky to get the one) and losing a turret and probably losing in farm as well, I had something like 9 or 11 kills and no additional deaths. I felt on top of the world because although Fizz was very fed, I was having great success at stopping him from doing massive damage to our team, while they were not killing me in return. I was lucky to have a team that, even if they hadn't done good in lane, was good at cooperating as a team and were able to capitalize on my disruption of the enemy team, while the enemy was less good at reacting coherently to me running at one of them with my ult up trying to kill someone. I think there were a lot of spells being blown on me uselessly even after I was ulting.

It's standard procedure on Poppy to save your ult and use it at a critical time that you need it to negate crippling damage or disables that are about to happen, but I was able to use it particularly effectively against Fizz. For instance, he would ult me, and Fizz's ult only slows you for a bit before doing its huge AOE nuke and knockup. So I would have time to ult some poor slob near me and then I would avoid all that damage and CC. It would also work if I did it while he was in the air on his pole before coming down on me. I could also ult when Jarvan ulted and trapped me in his circle, so then I wouldn't take focus fire from the whole enemy team.

A good example of team cooperation is this: Rammus was powerballing at the enemy team, and I was there, so I used my Shurelya's speed boost to make him get there even faster, then he taunted a target and I took the opportunity to wall stun them and we did massive damage to that victim while our team was coming up. The enemy team wasn't able to respond fast enough to do much damage to us in the same amount of time. It wasn't quite a 5v4 already, but that enemy was definitely in terrible shape compared to everyone else.

In an example of how dangerous I was by then, after the teamfight we won after my last example, everyone else recalled while I decided to "stand guard :)" at Baron, because I had full mana thanks to blue buff and full health thanks to Hextech Gunblade and the enemy's red buff monster. Fizz came by, alone , and since I had a perfect wall stun opportunity I decided to go for it. My spells and ult were down but so were his. Gunblade kept him from getting too far away with his Playful/Trickster, and when some of his teammates tried to peel me off him with slows, Shurelya's speed boost kept me on target, and I killed him and got away with over 1/3 health left because of my speed boost W that was on a short cooldown. Blue and red buff definitely helped there.

Anyway, I'll end this huge rambling narrative before it turns completely into bragging, because the whole point is that even though I carried that game really hard (16 of 35 total team kills and shutting the enemy fed carry out of teamfights), I am only here telling you about it because of the TEAM. This game is not as memorable as it is because I went 16/2. It's the most amazing carry that I can remember doing because of the POSITIVITY in the face of seeming defeat, the COOPERATION to work together, and the TEAM SPIRIT that helped us rally to push harder than we possibly could have if we were all mad at each other for whatever mistakes, even if we were winning.  I am the one who "carried" the team, but it was my team who made it a joy instead of a burden.