Everything you need to know about OMG for All-Star 2014 [UPDATED]

With All-Star 2014 coming right up, League of Legends fans around the globe are starting to pay attention to OMG, the LPL’s representative for next week’s All-Star competition in France. But just who are these “men in black”, and why kind of threat do they pose to the other teams in the All-Star competition?

Oh My God

OMG (which really does stand for Oh My God) is pretty undisputed the best League of Legends team in China right now. They are known as the “men in black” and the “forces of darkness” in China, and they certainly bring darkness to their opponents. Of the 28 games the team played during the spring, OMG lost only three of them, and never lost a full match (LPL matches are best-of-two, with a 1-1 result earning both teams a draw). Over the spring, the team’s collective kills-to-deaths ratio was 1.7, the highest in the LPL, and it racked up more total kills (541) and assists (1144) than any other team.

Although it remains to be seen how much research OMG has done on its All-Star 2014 competitors, one of the team’s strengths in the LPL has been its ability to effectively deny its opponents’ favorite picks. But opponents have had difficulty returning the favor, as most of OMG’s players have deep champion pools and the habit of making even unconventional picks work out.

OMG is also adept at countering opponents’ common in-game strategies with tailor-made tactics designed to shut down and frustrate. In an LPL split where many teams focused heavily on the early game, OMG countered by drawing games out. Of course, it also helps that every member of the team is technically skilled enough to make incredible plays, and the team is adept at adapting tactically to almost any situation and forcing opponents into disadvantageous positions through warding and map control.

It’s also worth nothing that OMG will likely not fall prey to the trap that seemed to be the undoing of Chinese teams iG and Team WE at IEM Worlds. China’s servers are perpetually a patch behind the rest of the world, but OMG’s players regularly practice on Korean servers, so they aren’t likely to be surprised by the global meta in the same way that WE and iG were at Worlds, where it seemed they had no idea how to deal with support Morgana.

A more thorough and very worthwhile read on OMG’s tactics this spring can be found here.

Meet the players

Top Lane

Name: GoGoing

Real name: Gao Diping (高地平)