It's the time of year again that League of Legends players love and sometimes fear. In the next few days, the gates will open and fans of the game will flood into ranked for Season 10.
Every year leading up to the start of the season, Riot Games releases teasers and previews about the upcoming ranked season. Prior to the flood of announcements in Fall, the studio took things a step further than its usual promotions in January 2019 by distributing art of several champions emblazoned with reasons to climb in ranked: Revenge, Glory, Pursuit, Thrill, and Mastery. The momentum kept ramping up with a login screen featuring the previous champions and finished off with a new cinematic and song, "Awaken" by Valerie Broussard. In 2020, Riot Games looks to continue this tradition, having already unleashed teaser images of five more champions to hype up players.
From this year's five images, the champions displayed are Kai'Sa, Azir, Rengar, Nami, and Urgot. Furthermore, the captions imprinted on each teaser are Eliminate, Control, Hunt, Protect, and Dominate, words that even the most unlikely of players know well. Looking inside the outlines, each image shows the champion using their in-game abilities. To note, Kai'Sa is blasting monsters with her void-powered auto attacks, Azir is summoning his sand soldiers to form a wall, Rengar is stalking his prey while camouflaged, Nami is sweeping back several enemies with her tidal wave, and Urgot is preparing to drag a chained victim into his meat-grinder stomach. Urgot has also received a second variation of his teaser, with the message "IN 5 DAYS WE BREAK THEM."
While impressive already, the details of each teaser image come together to really satisfy League of Legends players. Each champion fits in a different role, forming a perfectly viable team when put together: Urgot is a juggernaut, Rengar is a jungler, Azir is a mage, Kai'Sa is a marksman, and Nami is a support. Furthermore, each image caption also describes their role very well: top laners fight alone and can dominate each other, junglers hunt the enemy team, mid laners control fights and pacing with their spells, bot laners can eliminate everyone after scaling, and supports provide utility to protect the team. Finally, some of the teased champions are actually using their abilities on other champions in fights that could normally be seen in solo-queue or the eSports scene. Rengar is preparing to jump on Ashe, Nami is crowd-controlling Sion, Draven, and Katarina from getting to Miss Fortune, and Urgot is about to execute Viktor.
But even though some of these champions aren't in the meta right now, Riot's choice to include them in the images is due to their past influence. At one time or another, these few have been the go-to pick for their role in the competitive scene, with four-out-of-five getting skins as part of previous championship-winning teams. And as Urgot's modified image shows, the other champion teasers will receive similar changes to count down the days until Season 10 starts on January 10th.
In the end, most players can't wait for the new ranked season and these teasers have continued to excite them, especially people who main those champions. However, there may also be some that want to wait before diving in or are uninterested in ranked play during Season 10. For those players, there are still normal draft games and Teamfight Tactics to play, with additional releases such as the Legends of Runeterra card game later in 2020.
League of Legends is available on PC.
Source: League of Legends Subreddit, League of Legends Instagram