This split ends with a whimper for me, I was on vacation for 2 weeks then came back and played 10 games and am now done for the split. That was the plan because I have other stuff to do, but also I don't feel super interested in league right now - chess feels more like the game I want to play when I can (1300 chess.com blitz! suck it nerds). I'm sure league will be fun again later though.

My most fun this split was definitely crown soraka. When Latence started playing it I was like "wtf is that", but it turns out to actually work sometimes. And I really enjoy doing things that seem completely troll when people look at them, but then work surprisingly well. And I feel like that doesn't happen often in league because it requires understanding something sort of subtle about a champion, and by this point most subtleties are generally understood, if not by everyone then at least by most good players. Crown soraka was the first thing in a while that really surprised people. Substantive details here

By the end of the split I was playing pretty much exclusively shurelya's sona. Other sona players were doing this, see schuhbart's post, maybe one reason it feels better now is fights are more random chaotic picks rather than front to back teamfights. But this feels like one of the well-known solutions to every "why is x good now" question, which is neat, plausible, and wrong, when the real answer is well that has high numbers now.

Unrelated but since scorch/stopwatch is stronger early and has more playmaking potential (especially stopwatch for dives), you look a lot better with this build vs when you just sit there scaling pressing w and gathering a storm (you look better even if shurelya's/stopwatch isn't actually better, but it probably is idk).

These were my thoughts while trying it

I feel like the problem with interesting league builds is champs/items go from "who knows they just released this I haven't tried it" to "obviously this item is the one correct choice" too quickly, as in either of those there's nothing interesting to write. The sweet spot is when there's something interesting but not yet generally understood, but except in rare cases like crown soraka it seems pretty small. Like once you start playing something it's clear pretty quickly if it's good or not.

I will say I thought maybe with shurelya's/stopwatch sona I felt like if I played better I could conceive of 1500 lp, my next thing to fix would be not dying to ganks early. Which is kind of aids if you're playing sona vs naut samira or whatever especially because I feel like my jungler is usually gapped, like merely going even in lane vs naut samira when their jg is bot and yours does nothing means you're 1v9 carrying but whatever.

Anyways, I'll definitely come back to league later this year and have a few features on the todo list for this site I want to do (some match history filering and win stats during games) but for now I need to learn how the knight moves.