LCS 2021: Ranking Every Single Starting LCS Mid Laner

1. Luka “Perkz” Perković (Cloud9)

Easily the biggest acquisition of the offseason, Perkz only played one half of the LEC season in the mid lane for G2. However, his performance as G2’s mid laner was absolutely exceptional, to the point where it was a legitimate debate whether he or teammate Caps would be the mid laner for G2 this year. And personally, I think G2 might have gotten this one wrong.

For starters, as a mid laner, Perkz posted a 127.8 estimated damage differential. This is a higher EDD than Caps himself posted in Summer 2020 and at Worlds as a mid laner (56.9).

Perkz also had incredibly strong lane performances, recording an MAGXD @ 15 of 368.5 as a mid laner. That means that Perkz is the best-performing laner of those top three mids, on matchups that he had not played for over a year! Plus, he was able to translate those lane leads to high gold throughout the game (431 GPM) and high damage outputs.

The only two real “knocks” on Perkz are his “limited” champion pool (17 unique picks with Akali and Azir being elite) and his “low” adjusted KDA. His 3.88 aKDA was third out of the top three mids, and third out of all the LCS mid laners. So, basically, the two knocks on Perkz is that he can’t play a lot of different champions after one year off playing the role and his KDA isn’t exceptional.

This pickup will prove to be one of the most impactful of the entire LCS offseason and Perkz will end up being the best mid laner in the entire league. Yeah, Cloud9 won the offseason.