It just mindblowing to think about this player.

• 19 years old;
• Asian Games gold medal;
• Worlds and MSI runner-up’
• Worlds Winner with Finals MVP title

Completely gapped everyone (except Doran he he he) entire tournament while playing his own meta and his own picks. He said once he doesn’t want to adopt to meta, he wants to lead it, and did just like this.

Insane combination of strong laning phase, splitpushing and teamfight power. I know that especially without Faker, Zeus was shaky earlier this year, but at Worlds-2023 he felt as by far the strongest player individually across all roles. The biggest damage contributor to T1 (in more than half of T1 games he was a main carry), carrying so many teamfights and making so many critical moves (solo killing shopping Ruler, for example), while still bullying everyone at lane and playing splitpush Yone in 2023 teamfight meta.

It just feels surreal that everyone (including TheShy) was “eh top is boring, play safe bruiser or tank, absorb damage, provide CC for key teamfights, the game is decided at bot” and then Zeus came and say “lol, no”. Playing his Jayce, picking Yone, picking Gwen with whom he lost game 5 to DRX, and still winning it all.

There are 3 layers of toplaners:

• Meta-toplaners. The most of them. Play a mix of tanks and bruisers, teamplayer;
• Pocket-picks toplaners from behind. Usually they can’t learn good enough meta champions and instead stick to some weird pocket-picks to balance their lack of fundamentals, sometimes even succeeding high in this mission (BB, Adam as an example);
• “I play what I want” toplaners from lead. If previous play weird picks to compensate weak points, this type of players feel they’re so good, that they just play whatever they want. TheShy in 2018 was a great example of such player, and now we have Zeus;