I Can Play Tank Too, You Know
“Oh, this actually works.”
Dodging Malphite’s ultimate was, if I was being honest, pure habit.
Of course I’d been watching for it. Anyone who plays League of Champions and knows what kind of champion Malphite is starts tracking his ultimate the second he hits level six. Being aware of it doesn’t mean you can always get out of the way, though. Malphite’s ultimate, Unstoppable Force, closes the gap pretty damn fast—a full-on charge into the enemy ranks that launches everyone it hits into the air. It’s a brutal ability. Unless you’ve already predicted it and started moving, most mobility skills can’t react in time. Even the dashes people use as escape tools have cast animations and fixed travel speeds, so half the time you end up sailing through the air mid-dash after Malphite has already scooped you up. If he fires it from max range, sure, a clean dodge is possible—but Malphite players know that, which is why they often blink in first to cut the distance before slamming the ultimate.
I knew all that, so I’d been wound tight and watching for it. And when it came, I reacted the way I always do.
In my head, I understood perfectly well. Malphite had no kill angle on me—if anything, he was the one about to get eaten. Charging in with his ultimate first meant someone was coming to back him up. But maybe I’d played too many aggressive champions for too long. I looked at Malphite’s remaining health bar and thought, Yeah, I can take this fight. I threw my ultimate just to land the slow—and then I went and hit the forward blink on top of it.
It wasn’t until I heard that deep vrooom that I realized what I’d done.
Ah. Right. I’m on Ornn right now.
So I figured, well, we’re already here—might as well fight. And I won.
“……See? I told you I can play tank too.”
I decided to brazen it out. The viewers had no way of knowing whether I’d planned that or botched into it by accident.
There were a few jokes in there that made me snort, but overall the chat was giving my play its due. Right. Just because you’re a tank doesn’t mean you have to lie down and take it. With tanks that actually put out damage—like K'Sante or Ornn—you can play the laning phase aggressively. Sure, against a truly awful matchup it doesn’t hurt to play it safe… but just sitting there getting hit was never going to suit me.
Of course, snagging two kills in the top lane doesn’t swing the whole game by itself. Their comp could still focus a damage dealer and slip out clean if they played it right. Depending on how the teamfights went, our carries could get wiped and leave me flailing alone. That was half the reason I’d avoided tanks for so long. When the win or loss ultimately rests on your teammates, that helplessness gets under your skin—getting hit and being able to do nothing about it.
If things hadn’t gone the way they did—if Mother hadn’t finally drawn a knife—would I still be living like that, just taking the hits? No. I probably wouldn’t have lasted. I’d be dead.
……I’d let a nasty thought slip in. Bad enough that every good feeling from a moment ago evaporated on the spot.
Had it shown that clearly? The camera was only on my hands, and the viewers had picked up on my unease. Without thinking, I slid my hands back out of frame.
“Ah, yeah. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to turn out this well either. It’s kind of a rush.”
Thankfully, none of them seemed to realize my hands had been shaking because of old memories. I kept the talk casually on the game, and they filled in the blanks themselves and had a good time with it. That was enough. I didn’t want my personal baggage dragging anyone else’s mood down. When you all laugh, I get to laugh with you. They say laughter is contagious, right?
That helped me pull myself together, and I kept the game going. Maybe because I’d locked in a late-game-oriented tank, our team showed no real urge to force anything—just quietly farming minions and scaling. Once Ornn hits level thirteen, he can upgrade his allies’ items, so the mindset seemed to be that even on equal gold, we’d come out ahead in raw combat power. On the flip side, the enemy team was the one under pressure, so their jungler and mid laner kept prowling for a play. My side of the map never drew them in—I simply wouldn’t die—and our bot duo held wide vision control and slipped every cross-map roam with ease. Our jungler, deciding Malphite was playing far too scared, kept swinging bot-side support, so we barely dropped anything.
Ah. So this is one of the downsides of playing tank. Once a lane tips hard enough, laning stops being fun. How bad was it? Bad enough that I was spectating the other lanes.
Malphite had given up on last-hitting for gold entirely—just soaking experience from way back while he watched. Whenever I thought his spirit might have broken and edged forward a little, he’d roll out a single wheel that didn’t even scratch my health bar, then melt back into the brush. No intention of fighting whatsoever.
“Hey, I still have to farm CS. I can’t just stare at bot the whole time.”
“Malphite won’t fight me, so what am I supposed to do? If he keeps turtling like that I might actually fall asleep.”
Well—having the bandwidth to answer chat was probably a perk, at least.
Anyway, the game had been dragging in that stagnant way long enough that someone finally decided to force a change. The enemy bot duo was shoving the wave, and their mid laner was nowhere on the map. Junglers are invisible by default unless they’re mid-gank—only showing on warded ground—but this level of disappearance made the play obvious. A tower dive you can see coming and still can’t stop. Both bot duos were sitting on shaky health bars, too.
Sure enough, the enemy mid laner and jungler appeared cutting into our jungle. Our ADC and support had their escape route cut off and were bracing for a last stand under tower. And there, swirling in the brush on our side of the river—that telltale channeling effect. Malphite was clearly winding up a Teleport from the brush.
It was so obvious that answering it was easy. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where in the brush he was sitting, so landing my Q on him would’ve been a long shot—but Ornn’s ultimate covers a pretty generous stretch of the map.
Vroooooom.
I called the ram.
Clang!
I slammed into the summoned ram and bent its path straight into the brush where Malphite was hiding. When I checked bot again, that swirling magical effect was gone. Whatever Malphite had been channeling had been interrupted the moment Ornn’s ultimate launched him into the air.
Now it was my turn. While the enemy team steeled themselves for an all-or-nothing dive on the bot tower, I safely channeled Teleport from under my own turret.
Four seconds of focus.
Only then did Malphite stumble out of the brush, clearly torn over whether to break my Teleport. If he used his ultimate to cancel it, my crowd control would pin him inside tower range and he’d die. If he didn’t, his team’s one shot at a swing play died with it—and they’d end up even further behind. In situations like that, most people choose the option that dodges personal blame. Just so they don’t have to die. Leaving me free to crash into their fight.
A real case of Top-sin-byeong-ja would do what needed doing even if it killed them. You don’t have that kind of heart. You’re not even the Tin Woodman—you’re just a rock.
You think finishing 0/1/0 means none of this is on you?
I swallowed the words I couldn’t say out loud on stream and landed in bot lane.
No ultimate left—but stopping the enemies already diving our ADC Ashe and support Lulu under tower didn’t take one. I cracked open a fissure to stall their ADC’s chase for a beat, then body-checked into the tower and launched the enemy Lee Sin into the air. And in that same instant—maybe a misclick meant for the nearly dead Ashe—Lulu’s ultimate, Wild Growth, landed on me instead.
An already massive tank, suddenly even bigger. Their mid laner, Sylas, had already dumped his kit into Ashe, so the real threats were the enemy ADC’s autoattacks and Lee Sin’s splash damage. Ordinarily Lee Sin would have pulled a little tower aggro, unloaded, and dashed out on his mobility—but Ashe and I poured everything into melting him down, and I used my bloated frame to body-block for her. Every auto that should have finished the dying Ashe slammed into Ornn’s armor instead and went no further. Ashe, down to a sliver of health with nowhere left to run, kept fighting.
Even Sylas, with Ashe screened behind Ornn, ended up dumping his refreshed cooldowns into me. The chain grab at least wasn’t a targeted skill, so he tried to aim it at Ashe’s position—only for Lulu to blink into the path and snuff it out. In the end Sylas only managed to kill Lulu before going down himself.
Ashe was still one hit from death, but with a healthy Ornn parked next to the tower, the enemy ADC must have decided she wasn’t worth the risk. He peeled off with his support and retreated in silence. A support, a mid laner, and a jungler traded. The only real extra cost on our side was Malphite diligently whaling on the top tower—and even that barely counted, since our mid laner had already demolished theirs. Net result: the enemy team had taken a pure loss.
And whether that sparked the internal collapse or not, the entire enemy team vanished off the map at once. We took the hint, scooped the objectives, and started methodically shoving the mid towers.
Just like my teammates said—we shoved the towers straight in and went for the nexus, and there was the enemy team, dancing in the fountain. After we finished the nexus, sure enough, they were still fighting among themselves.
And through all of that, Malphite stayed quiet—like none of it was his fault—and that rubbed me the wrong way. But so what if it did? What was I going to do about it?
I closed the post-game screen and queued straight into the next one.
“Tank’s actually fun. Depending on the draft, I’d pull it out again.”