Nick “LS” DeCesare may be a contentious figure to some fans of LoL esports, but there’s no denying that the Liandry’s Visage salesman is one of the most influential figures in LoL Esports.
LS was in the LTA North studio this week, appearing on the main broadcast and doing his own co-streams during both series. HotSpawn managed to snag 10 minutes to chat with LS about his role in establishing what has become the brand-new format for League of Legends esports, how we communicate about games, why LoL’s drafting lexicon is too limited, and how the game can learn from Magic: The Gathering.
Nick: Hey LS, nice to meet you, man.
Nick “LS” DeCesare: “Hello, how are you?”
Nick: I’m good! Thanks for taking this interview, even though you weren’t actually on the interview list for this week. I just realized you’d be in the studio and tried to see if we could chat. I’ll jump right into it because I’ve got a lot I’d like to talk about with you. We’ll start with Fearless. When I throw my mind back to when I first heard of Fearless Draft, I believe it was you, on your Twitch stream, talking about it with several players who were participating in a Solary event that was doing Fearless.
Before the streams, where you sat down with a draft simulator and tried Fearless, as well as talking about how League’s draft system could be changed, Fearless just wasn’t something that was in the popular consciousness of LoL players. Now, obviously, Fearless Draft has become the standard format for LoL Esports play, and I think I can pretty confidently say that it was your exposure that turned it into the more popularized concept in the years between then and now. In a lot of ways, unless I’m missing something, you’re the father of Fearless being in the player consciousness.
LS: Sure, yeah.
Nick: I’m a bit of a downer on Fearless myself, in some ways, I’m not sure it goes far enough.
LS: “We’ve actually had a lot of conversations about this this week. Some of them are private, and other stuff that is true about Fearless and Iron Man [format], which I think is the superior version, and there are YouTube videos of that. But we started talking about it around 2020, 2021, and then there’s the video that I did with Nemesis in 2021. [There are] plenty of other clips, because obviously I was very against pro play just repeating the same team comps every single time.
Salty runbacks, all this other type of stuff… it’s very boring for viewers.
On top of that, I think fans and viewers are the most important thing. Pro play, coaches, etc… it doesn’t matter what their opinion is. Absolutely at all. I think that it’s good that Fearless is here. However, when they announced what the exact Fearless was going to be last, I had made some, not negative tweets, but I said what it has ultimately become, where what we’re seeing is that Fearless doesn’t really show its head until games four and five. It’s still an upgrade compared to what we had in the past.
Don’t get me wrong. I am positive on it in that regard. But in best-of-threes, we’re seeing a lot of mirroring between teams [with] very similar team comps. We’re still seeing the same four to five mid laners, even though we get a new one every game, for the most part, right? So you’re not just seeing Azir three games in a row, you’re not seeing Ahri three games in a row, you’re not seeing Corki three games in a row, but what you are seeing is you’re just seeing a rotation of Azir, Ahri, whatever mid laners you want to enter in next, depending on like how it’s done in the last few months.”
Fearless is good, but its impact is overhyped. I don’t think that its impact and positivity reflect its current status. And I think the best thing that Riot could do is not settle on just Fearless, and you make [the standard format] Ironman, where bans carry over. The reason for that is because we already see what happens when, like pseudo-Ironman type stuff happens, like Los Ratones had that game with Baus, where the enemy team did something that I had actually talked about in a coach room the day before, where they picked five of the champions. And then in the following game, they can ban three. So now eight of TheBaus’ champions are gone, what’s he gonna pick? Well, while game 1 is going on, first off, word of mouth is traveling all over social media. And they’re like, ‘oh my god, like, look what they just did versus Baus in game one.’ By game 2, everyone’s curious what Baus is going to pick, so they tune in, right? So it’s very good fan engagement, it’s very good for social media, engagement, just everything.
I think that there is a very big video with me and Caedrel, we got blocked from where we drafted Ironman all five games, we talked to each other on Discord, thought processes, what champs are we gonna pick here, what kind of a draft are we thinking about doing 4-5. And I think that’s way better. Because if bans stick, things get really crazy.
Some people might argue, well, there aren’t enough AD carries in the game, and right now there’s like 20 or something. Riot obviously reworks a couple of champions each year; they come out with about three a year, so by this time next year, we might have 180 champions, which means even with full Ironman, you have 100 champions out of the 170 currently that are available. [It’s] more than enough. We know that enchanters can go in the marksman role. We know that you can play double bruiser bot lane historically at points. We know that you can play mages in the marksman role.
You can do creative things, and I think that’s exciting for viewers. I think that’s where it should go. Fearless isn’t good enough.
Even though you’re calling me the father of Fearless, I would rather be the bringer of Ironman if I could. Sorry, that was long.”
Nick: No, don’t apologize, that was a fantastic answer! I really appreciate it. That was awesome.
LS: “Ironman for fans is more interesting because then the mirroring suddenly doesn’t even become possible. When you give people the ability to snipe champions away or even entire comps because of certain champions’ dependency on other champions, when you give that kind of power to the ban phase, you start getting really creative things to the point where I don’t think mirroring is even possible. And this just has to do with pro players’ champion pools. Right now, they’re getting away with murder because they can rotate five to six champions in a series, right? So evas a player, modern day, you can’t just be good at two or three champions anymore. Now you kind of have to have five to six, sometimes seven.
What Ironman does, it says, ‘hey, we need actually 12, or like, 10.’ And then the other thing that it does for viewers is it creates a narrative in the pick ban phase that is not going to be mirrorable. And that’s just a given because pro players are not just going to share the same 12 champions. It’s not going to, because, at that point, it’s going to be a little bit too much diversity. We already know that score is important. ADC players are actually praised for their ability to play non-traditional ADCs. We also know that certain mid laners are praised for their ability to play physical damage mids, or even marksmen in mid. We know that certain top laners are praised for their ability to play unconventional things, or like junglers [being] able to play AP carry junglers versus tank junglers versus utility junglers, etc. It’s going to be very difficult, and I think that brings a lot of excitement.”
Nick: Awesome. Alright, my next question is connected, but a little different. I know that you are a fellow Magic: The Gathering fan, and you’ve done a lot of work to bring pieces of verbiage and concepts from Magic: The Gathering over to League of Legends. Colours, card archetypes, etc. And, certainly, if you look at a piece of foundational Magic: The Gathering strategy, like Mike Flores’ “Who’s The Beatdown?” article, concepts like inevitability apply just as much to a LoL game as they do to MTG.
I’ve been really interested in this because Magic has a much more robustly developed lexicon of terms and concepts relating to draft systems, and you’ve been very purposeful about the ones you’ve tried to bring over to LoL. As an esports journalist, I’m obviously really interested in how we communicate and tell stories, and about the games we play.
LS: “Well, games and strategy overall are a language in themselves, right? That’s why you have players from, you know, different regions that don’t speak the same language, play a game, right? Even if you don’t speak, say Russian, right? You can sit down at a chess place in Russia, or anywhere, Sweden, if you don’t speak Swedish, you could go to Japan, and if you don’t speak Japanese, etc. You can sit down at a chess place and move the pieces. You can point to the pieces and we can nod our heads because body language is universal. [It’s the] same way that numbers are right.
I come from an RTS background. My first game was StarCraft 1, I was an extremely high-level StarCraft 1 player, and then a StarCraft 2 player. RTS, you’re taught to view everything differently. You’re taught to fight for min-maxes. You’re taught to look at why something works, not just accept that it does. You know, you have to build upon that and whatnot. In trading card games, obviously, there are no mechanics. So the room for outplay is all cerebral.
I’m a very big fan of Magic. As you pointed out, I like limited formats. Mostly, I don’t like constructed as much. A lot of sealed. I play a lot of draft because that’s where you get the most cerebral thought. And you have to understand how certain cards blend together with one another. And then obviously on a more mentally straining point, if you’re doing draft in a pod with six, eight people, you have to remember all the cards getting passed and then all the cards that are being seen and how certain cards might affect other decks and how they might build certain decks, etc.
If you’re seeing, you know, in pack one, you’re seeing a lot of removal, as just coming up, maybe in two colors, black and red, [you] have a lot of removal. That is just going to mean that, if you have a lot of creatures, you need to keep in mind what number, maybe the red cards, were all doing two damage. So now three damage creatures have more value because you know that they get around.
So if you go up against a red player, it gets around the two damage. If the black removal spells say ‘destroy a creature with converted mana cost two or less’, and you go up against a black player, three mana cost plus is going to be a lot safer.
League of Legends drafting is identical and pro players don’t know how to draft. Coaches also don’t know how to draft because the skill set isn’t from League of Legends. You were forced to do it, but it doesn’t have to do with League of Legends. Most players only play their own role. We also see that even more challenging players are doing all the awful challenges lately, right? Where they’re having abysmal win rates and lower MMRs because they don’t play champions or that role at the same level that they play their main role. Pro players are identical. I had multiple Challengers on my co-stream and they just pointed out how many things they don’t know about the game. Drafting happens in League, but it’s not from League so it’s dishonest to think that just because they’re doing the exercise, they know what’s going on.
And I think a lot of people, when they hear me say this, will be like, ‘Oh, very egotistical’ and ‘if you know so much better, why don’t you go and coach and like do all this other stuff?’
I do in private for a lot of people, mostly pros.’ In fact, a lot of the stuff that I do for pros, whether it be champion picks, item builds, they appear in pro play. I was talking about today on stream with Bwipo that I’ve been able to enter a lot of stuff into the entire jungle pool in the world through Inspired. I talk to him a lot about certain things. I’m like, ‘Hey, test this, do this, tell me what you think.’
He comes back to me, gives me the feedback. I think about, you know, ponder it a bit, give it back. Then maybe he plays it on stage and then because it inspires the best Western jungler, everyone just copies him. They don’t understand everything that went into the end result, but they copy Inspired. I think that’s a way that I get to experience something like vicariously. It’s important to understand how to draft. [laughs]”
Alright last question here has absolutely nothing to do with gameplay, but I love asking this question. So, Arcane is over with Season 2, and Riot has said that there will be a new show by Fortiche with a new region, a new champ.
LS: “Okay. So, I think it’s too early for Shadow Isles or like the Viego-type stuff.”
Totally agree.
LS: “With the ending that just happened with Piltover, we also know that I think the events happening here in the past. Because it’s not modern day, you can either do a time jump backwards to Shurima with the Ascended. I think that would introduce a lot of really cool things. Or you could, before we even go to Noxus or something, you could do the first fall of the Iron Revenant, which is Mordekaiser, who I think built Noxus, right? If I have my lore correct.
You’ve got your lore bang-on.
LS: “But yeah, stuff like that.”
Awesome, thanks so much for taking the time, LS! Have a lovely one!
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