A few weeks ago, Team Liquid started a new YouTube channel dedicated to high production-value, in-depth video essays exploring some of the burning questions in gaming and esports. You might have seen our second video (and if you haven’t, go watch now!), which took aim at one of the most contentious questions in League of Legends: who’s the second-best player of all time?

While it’s Broxah’s dulcet tones that you heard during the video, I wrote the script; and I’m now following up on your most burning comments and questions. We knew when we were making this video that it was gonna spark some contentious conversation; that’s all the fun in taking on a question that doesn’t have one clear answer. Some of these comments or questions bring up points that I want to expand upon, or didn’t have room to address in the original video; some of them I’ve chosen because I think they give an opportunity to illuminate how the sausage was made; and some are here because yeah, we all make mistakes, and I want to acknowledge that. 

Sincerely, thanks for the comments — it’s always a bit stressful reading the feedback to something you’ve written but for the most part, I just saw spirited debate… which is exactly what we’d hoped to inspire. Alright, let’s get to it.

FAKER UNDERRATED

I saw a few comments that Faker’s “skill ratings” weren’t fair, given that we ranked him as a 4 in certain aspects where other players got a 5 (or even higher, when we were amping up the drama). To that, I say: yeah, I agree with you! 

First of all, I want to acknowledge that the stat pentagons were never meant to be exacting representations of each player. One of the goals in making this video was to showcase how many different avenues you could walk to arrive at the criteria for deciding on the SGOAT, and it’s obviously not possible to distill entire players into one pentagon like they’re Pokemon in a Generation 3 contest (which was my reference for these, if that wasn’t clear). But hey — it’s really fun to try, right? These types of set dressing get to the juicy archetyping that we all love so much in esports — designating one player as the genius with no hands, another as the mechanical phenom who can eclipse anyone else. They shouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially when we’re using a scale with only 5 points, which is not nearly enough granularity to really distinguish between players. 

Second: yeah, Faker definitely should have been all 5s. I just didn’t make that explicit when writing the visual script; and because these videos are built by a village, that original intention got lost in the telephone game from script to graphics to video. This isn’t to throw anyone under the bus; if you want to blame someone, let it be me. Mea culpa: Faker obviously should have had a perfect score. We hope the 10 minutes we spent singing his praises make it clear we’re not trying to denigrate him.

WHERE’S CANYON?

Don’t worry, we’ve seen the scores of comments wondering where Canyon is. Let me peel back the curtain again: Canyon was originally in the draft of this video, but his section got cut for time, production schedule, and the sanity of the video editor. I’ll summarize some of what would have been in the video.

I think Canyon does have a really good argument to be in contention here. When we started writing this video, months before worlds, I was completely prepared for a late-in-the-game pivot to Canyon as the definitive answer if the tournament went a different way. Anyone who watched the near-Damwon dynasty knows that he’s proven to be one of the best players on an international stage multiple times over. In the world where Damwon wins that second worlds, I honestly think Canyon might just have the title, full stop; his skill level is just too hard to argue with, especially when you consider just how versatile this guy can be.

I do still think that Canyon gets slightly edged out by Deft and Ruler for two different reasons. The first might sound a little silly, but it’s longevity. We’ve been used to seeing Canyon jungle gap opponents for years now, but with a 2018 debut, he’s still got a shorter career than our other contenders. The second has to do with Canyon’s teammates. I don’t think it’s fair to say “Canyon has only had success on superteams” — let’s not forget all the flak that Ghost and Beryl caught back in the day — but it is true that he’s been on good (if not great) teams for most of his career. And when the rest of his team was faltering around him, Canyon didn’t see much success. That’s a pretty stringent ask on any player, but this is the SGOAT title we’re talking about here.

Still, Canyon looks like the best jungler in the world more often than he looks mediocre. An assessment that more highly values peak skill as a metric would have a real case for him as #2. Hell, I’m kind of convincing myself just writing this — an experience I had multiple times when writing the script, whether for Canyon, Beryl, Ruler, or Xiaohu. This is what makes this question so fun to debate: there are multiple viable answers depending on what you prioritize. Canyon’s a definite contender—and for my money, given how young he is, he’s most likely to eventually usurp the SGOAT title. 

[Editor’s Note: As to why Canyon got cut, the way we structured the video was to avoid a traditional top 10. Zane felt, and I agreed, that it would be more interesting to make a video around the metrics and skills that define greatness. Canyon slotted into the “Peak Skill” category, which was already crowded, and had a similar narrative/downside as ZOGK. So you had some players in the video who had worse arguments for SGOAT but still made it in (Bengi, Bang, Wolf) because they fit the form of the video better — and told more interesting stories. Anyways, here’s a chunk of his part and his stats table so you know we’re on the level.]

AMBITION AND THE ROLESWAP

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Here’s another Gen.G jungler to talk about. Once again, this is a player we cut for time. Along with his Samsung compatriot CoreJJ, Ambition’s got a case for greatest roleswap of all time. But while Core’s got the whole “leading our region and our team” thing going for him, Ambition has something arguably better: his status before the swap.

Chances are, the clip you’ve seen of Ambition playing mid-lane involves him deciding to evolve Kha’zix W in the middle of lane and gifting the first career kill to some unknown rookie playing his debut game… who happened to go on to become the greatest of all time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Ambition, there’s no Faker. But I’m not just talking about that clip — though it is charming how much Ambition himself seems to cherish the experience. 

Ambition set the mold that Faker eventually inhabited — and totally broke — as the first Korean superstar midlaner. His peak might have been the IEM Season 7 championships, where he ran the gamut of contenders for “best mid in the world,” including Alex Ich, Froggen, xPeke, and Rapidstar, all while playing the most champions of any mid in the tournament. It’s easy to remember Ambition now as a relic of an earlier era, the guy whose skill Faker seemingly absorbed with that solokill, but at his best, he was elite.

It’s how he handled the loss of that cutting edge that makes him so admirable. Ambition saw with clear-eyed insight that he couldn’t stack up to the young midlane phenoms of Faker, Pawn, Rookie. So he set aside his ego and stepped into the jungle where he could leverage his experience. How can you not respect Ambition—a guy who saw the coming wave and, instead of drowning in it, rode the crest?

Look back at 2016, when Samsung came just one game short of upsetting SKT in the world finals; there’s Ambition, comforting his young teammates. Without him, do they have the grit to come back the next year and snatch their dream? I’m not so sure. Ambition didn’t end his career on the same uplifting terms; but he’s one of the biggest Dogs we’ve ever seen on the rift. I think his absence from the later years of League history disqualify him, but he presents an argument all his own for the ability to set aside ego and be what the team needs.

KNIGHT AND THE MINIMIZATION OF CHINA

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A few of you have pointed out that it felt weird to include Chovy but not Knight, given that their careers are so alike; at this point Knight has edged Chovy out in regional titles (though that wasn’t true when we were writing this video). This time, I don’t have my magic bullet “he was there but got cut!” answer — I never wrote about Knight, and he probably deserved a section.

That said, it probably would have been a brief section. Knight’s similarity to Chovy is the very reason he wasn’t included. If we were doing an enumerated list, there would be no excuse for excluding Knight, because he’s gotta be pretty high up there — arguably even higher than Chovy, given the recent edge in the title race and his better international results. But this video was explicitly conceived to NOT be a ranking. I didn’t choose players just based on how close to SGOAT; I chose them to investigate different arguments for what constitutes an SGOAT —  Knight and Chovy just so happen to investigate the same argument.

That said, I do still want to own up to my mistake in not including Knight for a different reason: I think it plays into a long-lived pattern of minimizing the narratives of players in China. Knight should rightly be discussed in the same breath as Chovy or Canyon, whether you’re talking about SGOAT or the current best in the world. That he isn’t is a sign of greater flaws with how the League scene tells stories… one that I became a part of by not including him. I don’t really think Knight has a case for SGOAT, just like I don’t think Chovy does; but not including him furthered a skewed regional focus that we really should have accounted for. In a similar vein, I don’t really think Meiko or Clearlove have a real case for #2, but they probably should have gotten a shout. 

DoinB, another player who’s spent his career in China, actually was in the original script, but he was used as an illustration that innovation can’t get you the title by itself; despite flipping the meta on its head to win Worlds, I don’t think anyone actually thinks DoinB is the SGOAT. The LPL is a fascinating league though, and we probably should have gotten more of its stars in here.

[Editor’s Note: I’m a huge LPL stan — I’ve written glowingly about several LPL players including Knight — but I didn’t push for Knight in part because: 1. He’s been on incredible teams for most of his career. Chovy not only makes a similar argument but he has the advantage of showing that, in a 1v9 scenario, he can basically become prime LeBron. And 2. You have to draw the line somewhere or the video would go on longer than a best of five. I love the Golden Left Hand. I love his net cafe rivalry with Yagao, but I think I still would keep him at a mention rather than a full section. Besides, if you discard your anti-MSI, anti-Spring bias and you will see the truth: The true LPL goat and nearest to SGOAT is Xiaohu.] 

AND THE REST

These aren’t the only players you all wanted to hear more about; some of you thought Keria deserved more of a fair shake for his DRX stint, or were caping for Peanut, or accurately pointed out that Duke in fact won two worlds, one of them off of SKT. Someone even shouted out Huni. Let me quickly cover my bases.

Keria. This guy’s maybe the most cracked player to ever touch support, but his DRX stint—while more impressive than we gave him credit for—still doesn’t shift the needle in a meaningful way. It’s hard for me to convincingly move any of the ZOFGK players out of the Scottie Pippen zone until they succeed on an international level without Faker… which might be why it’s just OFGK now.

Duke. He did, in fact, become the first player to ever win worlds on two different teams, one of which wasn’t T1, but Beryl was still the only player to ever do it without ANY T1 involvement. I mean, Duke’s story definitely goes untold, but he has no case for SGOAT… and even worse for our video, he doesn’t really represent a case that could be applied to any other player.

Huni. The holo holo god may have won both MSI and the LCK and perfect seasoned the EU LCS… but he never reached the true peak of competition, the top of NA! How can he be the SGOAT without that?

Showmaker. All that stuff I said about Canyon not succeeding once Damwon fell? The same applies to Showmaker, except he doesn’t have the Gen.G redemptive arc to put him back in contention. One of the greatest mids of all time; clearly not the SGOAT, unless we’re talking about as a streamer.

Peanut. Oh, how I wish Peanut had a clear case. (He’s one of my favorite players of all time ever since I attended the Madison Square Garden semis in 2016.) Still, I don’t think there’s an argument you can really make for Peanut that doesn’t get eclipsed by Canyon. Certainly, their playstyle is different, and Peanut has the longevity Canyon lacks, but the career accolades and peak skill all lean Canyon. Gotta be close to the top of the list, but that’s not what we were really doing here. I think a lot of us would love for him to win Worlds in his last year and make the case though.

OUTRO

That about wraps it up! We couldn’t get to every player or comment, but I hope this article provided some insight into the making of this video. It was a gargantuan effort, spanning months, multiple tournaments, and a whole team working together to get it out the door.

Moreover, I hope I’ve made clear what the goal was in making this. I’m so sick of numbered lists, because they don’t do justice to the real picture of what this debate looks like: Faker at the top, SKT Faker just beneath him, and then a choose-your-fighter spread of candidates all at the same level beneath him. If anything, I hope this article inspires more passionate argument on the topic; it was very fun reading and seeing how ardently you’ll go to bat for your pick. Did I, an AD Carry player, maybe write an hour long video endorsed by Team Liquid all to hold up two of my faves at the top? Maybe. Tell me you wouldn’t.

If your favorite didn’t make it in the video, it doesn’t mean I think they’re bad; they even may be one of the greatest of all time! They just probably don’t have the case for the SECOND greatest of all time, because someone has done their thing better than them. Or because they just didn’t quite fit in the form or the runtime or the video.