League of Legends LCS: 2019 Scouting Grounds guide

The LCS is looking for the next generation of homegrown League of Legends talent and here is what to look for.

Scouting Grounds is an annual event to showcase some of the best upcoming League of Legends talent from North American solo queue. It will be held from November 11-16th 2019 and features four teams coached and ran by the LCS teams and represented by the four Elemental Dragons.

There are certain requirements you must meet to be able to be invited to the event including being one of the 10 highest-rated players from solo queue in your role, without having more than 30% of the total games on one champion, and having a minimum of 30 games or more games on four or more champions in their desired role. Players on the top two teams from the scouting grounds circuit also made it to the event, is determined by a best-of-three double round-robin.

So, with those criteria in mind, here is the breakdown of players featured at the 2019 LCS Scouting Grounds by role:

Top lane

Derek “zig” Shao
Ian “MistyStumpey” Alexander
Kostyantyn “PieCakeLord” Dudarchuk
Sameer “BMD” Ishaq

This is an interesting mix of players. Zig and PieCakeLord have played at the professional level, or at least in the Academy scene and PieCakeLord participated in the 2017 Scouting Grounds but went undrafted.  BMD is a college player from DePaul University, while MistyStumpey the number three prospect at last year’s Scouting Grounds.

BMD seems to be the most like a true prospect since the other three have prior professional experience and feel like holdovers since they can’t find other top lane talent. I don’t think players with many years of professional experience, or that have played in an Academy team in the past year or two should be invited to this event. It just promotes recycling the same talent, which I don’t think is the purpose of the event.

Jungle

Rami “Inori” Charagh
Gabriel “Fanatiik” Saucier
Winston “Winston” Herold
Ryan “Frostynomad” Keel.

Inori and Fanatiik have professional experience and Academy experience within the past couple of years, but Winston and Frostynomad are more of the traditional prospects with Winston being a college player at the University of Western Ontario and Frostynomad only in the amateur ranks with Emissary Esports. Winston also holds the number nine rank in North American solo queue under the name Julius, so he feels like the prospect to watch in this group.