Caedrel had heard enough about Faker’s farm count.
While co-streaming a recent T1 game, the analyst-turned-streamer pushed back on viewers spamming his chat to slam Faker for falling behind on Orianna into Cassiopeia. His answer was simple: this is what the matchup does.
“It’s funny because people are saying criticize Faker, but this exact same matchup happened yesterday,” Caedrel said. “I just feel like some people in chat just don’t watch League. They just watch like the games that they want to watch and then they expect things to just be different outcome.”
The moment he was reacting to was about as clean as lane analysis gets. Roughly seven minutes in, both mid laners were sitting on 0/0/0. No ganks, no assists, no outside help skewing the numbers. Just Orianna versus Cassiopeia doing what Orianna versus Cassiopeia does.
Caedrel’s evidence was a near-identical mid lane from a game one day earlier, involving one of the LCK’s most respected laners. Same champions, same story. His point: if an elite laner eats the same deficit from the Orianna side, it’s the matchup talking, not a Faker collapse.
Why Cassiopeia bullies Orianna
Orianna is a control mage built around ball placement, safe waveclear, and a game-winning ultimate. She wants to poke, farm, and stay alive until teamfights matter.
Cassiopeia doesn’t care about any of that. She stacks poison, spams Twin Fang, and wins any extended trade she can force. Miasma cuts off escape routes, so every step Orianna takes toward the wave becomes a risk. Falling behind in CS is basically the tax for picking her into Cass.
Fearless Draft makes this more common than it used to be. With champions locked out after being used earlier in a series, teams regularly accept a rough lane to secure the composition they want elsewhere.
Worth being clear on what Caedrel was actually defending. He was talking about one early lane, not the whole game or the whole series. Faker’s positioning, side-lane deaths, and Ryze decisions in other games are separate conversations, and plenty of viewers are still having them.
The wider context isn’t kind either. T1’s group is stacked with Chovy, Bdd, Zeka, and ShowMaker, meaning Faker has been running into world-class mid laners game after game with no soft matchups to pad the numbers.
