Pro Player Pick: TheOddOne Picks Maokai

I’ve probably played about 400 games with Maokai. He’s just that fun. “Do you want to see twisted?” Maokai is a really strong ganker; you usually want to gank often whenever you see a lane that’s really open. You always want to toss your sapling where you think they’re going to run to as soon as they see you because everyone’s afraid of you. I mean, you’re a tree that just came out of the jungle. Maokai basically tosses his children into battle, and then they blow up on whoever is running away – probably a yordle. His children are badass though. I mean, he just takes people out with them. When I play with Maokai, I actually like to play with Rumble, even though he’s a stupid yordle. Interviewer: “Why do you hate yordles so much?” They’re just filthy, filthy creatures. Yordles suck. Maokai is really good at snaring people down, slowing them down. Rumble would just call his air-strike in and does hella damage. Rumble can’t tank that well, but Maokai can, so it’s a good combo. In teamfights, you have Vengeful Maelstrom; you can cast it on your buddies that are stupid enough to get hit by damage. It will cover them for a little bit, but then you can just turn it off, and it blows up and does a lot of damage to your enemies, so it’s really key to put Vengeful Maelstrom down on a place where you think a lot of damage is going to occur. Often, you can anticipate where the enemy is going to attack with Maokai, if you either engage or get engaged on. Usually you place it where the enemy melee you figure is going to run at, and you know the fight is going to be on you because they’re attacking you. You don’t want to die first because that’d be pretty noob. “Nature can be a real mother.” I’m Brian “TheOddOne” Wyllie and I play for Team SoloMid, and my favorite champion is Maokai.