Mustering up the best Wukong impersonation he could, Fnatic mid laner Rasmus “Caps” Winther yelled out “I will be the best” before locking in the monkey king in his game against Splyce today.
Okay, maybe that isn’t exactly what happened (or at all what happened), but we like to think it did. Picturing Caps quoting Wukong while smashing Splyce’s faces in with the mid lane monkey makes it all the more entertaining.
The last time Caps ran with Wukong in the mid lane was against Misfits, when he used the weird pick to break their 9-0 win streak in the EU LCS. It looked clean then, and it was just as impressive today. It might seem like a really strange pick, but Wukong has been performing well in solo queue for months, and he has very strong matchups in the current professional meta.
Wukong really only has one job in any game, professional or not, and that’s to delete a carry. With items like the Stormrazor, Duskblade, and Shiv, he can effectively two-shot any squishy champion with just his E and Q. If his ultimate is up, that’s even more firepower. In solo queue, he can get away with this with almost no risk, due to the extreme lack of warding and vision when compared to the pro scene. In high-stakes games like this one, though, he still works in the right circumstances.
Caps was able to pull off Wukong today thanks to two things. His teammates had very strong pressure throughout the jungle, which allowed them to create perfect, vision-controlled paths for Caps to run through to get to the back line. The second reason it worked was because Splyce had two extremely squishy, immobile carries in Varus and Zoe.
Any champion that can get in Zoe’s face and deal a ton of damage wins that lane, and Varus has no means of escaping, either. He can use his ultimate, but there were several times in today’s game where Caps baited him into ulting his clone instead.
In solo queue, as long as the enemy team has some sort of squishy carry, you can get away with playing Wukong in the mid lane. In pro play, you need an aggressive comp that can storm through the enemy jungle and lay down wards for it to work to its fullest extent.
As long as Fnatic keep doing just that for Caps, he doesn’t really have a reason to stop monkeying around.
