Worlds 2020: Ranking and Rating All the Mid Laners at Worlds

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League of Legends. Photo Courtesy of Riot Games. /

We break down the best mid laners that you will see at Worlds 2020.

We’ve broken down, rated, and ranked the best players at support, top, ADC, and jungle at Worlds 2020. Now, it’s time to look at the lane where there is the most “star power” at Worlds 2020, the mid lane. Today, we are rating and ranking every mid laner that is attending this year’s League of Legends World Championship.

We will be using the same rating system that I used throughout the LCS season, I have pulled data for every player in the four major leagues (LCS, LEC, LPL, and LCK) as well as data from all the teams and players appearing from the PCS and Wildcard regions. I’ve compared each player’s statistics against the baseline for their position and adjusted their rating for their region (that is to say, a player in the LPL will be rated higher than a player in his role with similar stats who is in the LEC, who would be higher than a similar player in LCS, etc.) to grade the worst and best players by position.

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The rankings are based on 22 different statistics that include KDA, kill participation, damage and gold outputs, vision scores, and laning stats. These stats are judged relative to other players in that role and weighted given how strongly they correlate to a team’s overall performance. Although in some cases I may disagree with how a player is ranked due to certain context not captured by the player’s statistics, the ratings will be purely based on a player’s statistical performance, with the best mid laner being the player who had the overall strongest season statistically against the strongest competition.

We will start with some of the most notable and best mids that will not be appearing at Worlds 2020. I will not be going into the same depth that I will for the mid laners at Worlds, but just giving my pure ranking so that fans know where players fit relative to others in their role.

The Best of the Rest

Lee “Scout” Ye-chan (EDward Gaming) – 87 OVR
Kim “Doinb” Tae-sang (FunPlus Pheonix) – 86 OVR
Li “Xiaohu” Yuan-Hao (Royal Never Give Up) – 86 OVR
Felix “Abbedagge” Braun (FC Schalke 04) – 86 OVR
Song “Rookie” Eui-jin (Invictus Gaming) – 84 OVR
Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok (T1) – 80 OVR

22. Kotoji “Ace” Mugita (V3 Esports) – 69 OVR

The lowest-rated mid laner attending Worlds 2020, Ace hails from Japan’s representative will be making his first international appearance in his three-year career. Although his 5.22 aKDA is quite good the fact that he’s consistently losing in lane (he averaged -388g/-13 CS/-131 XP differentials at 15 minutes in the playoffs) in one of the weaker regions isn’t comforting. Neither are his 372.8 adjusted damage per minute (“aDPM”) nor his 1.66 damage-to-gold ratio.

His champion pool includes power picks for Worlds like Zoe and Leblanc, but also includes some off-meta choices like Jayce (more common in top lane) and Nocturne. At the very least, Ace has proven that he can play a variety of styles, but he hasn’t shown that he can stand up against the quality of opponents he will face.

21. James “Tally” Shute (Legacy Esports) – 69 OVR

He split time with substitute mid laner Halo, but it should be Tally who gets the starting nod for Legacy when the play-in games kick off tomorrow. Even though Tally isn’t regarded as one of the best mid laners at Worlds, he has the right mind-set to enable his teammates with Galio and Karma as his two most-played champions.

However, despite that supportive champion pool, Tally only averaged a kill participation just above 60% and 6 assists per game during the 2020 season. Although he kept the deaths to a minimum and wasn’t actively hurting his team, that low KP and low damage output (408.8 aDPM) indicates that he isn’t helping drive his teammates to success as much as he should.

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