It’s been an active League of Legends season, rife with frequent patching and champion reworks.

Prior to the 2015 League of Legends World Championship, it was anyone’s guess as to what meta — or metas — would develop as representatives from multiple regions worldwide clashed in Europe. Now that the dust has settled and SKTelecom T1 has emerged victorious, eyes have already shifted towards 2016 with both eagerness and trepidation — depending on how ready you are to tackle the 2016 changes.

Before moving on into the uncharted waters of the Season 6 Preseason, it’s worth noting that the 2015 World Championship had the largest amount of unique champion picks of any League of Legends World Championship, at 74. With, coincidentally, 73 games played in total, that’s an oddly tidy average of just over one unique champion per game.

Meeting All My Standards

Naturally, there are caveats to this. The primary of which is the fact that two champions — Mordekaiser and Gangplank — had a 93.2% and 94.5% ban rate, respectively. Gangplank was 100% picked or banned across all games, and while Mordekaiser did drop completely through a few drafts, he had a similarly hefty 98.6% pick/ban rate. Both of these champions were chosen four times each and won every game played.

Their seemingly ubiquitous Worlds existence skews the overall idea of champion diversity, as their mere presence necessitates bans, or initial picks if an opponent dares allow them through. No other champions provided a similar amount of pressure in Champion Select. For comparison, the next most-picked champion was Lulu; however, the drop-off in banning is significant. Mordekaiser and Gangplank were both in the low 90s, where Lulu was banned 58.9% of the time and picked 35.7% of the time when one combines her time spent mid and top.

You Flex, They Flex Twice As Hard

Flexible picks in Champion Select have drawn acclaim since the start of the 2015 season. Hardly a new concept, flexing champions between lanes and positions increased exponentially this year across all major regions. Versatile players with deep champion pools became highly prized commodities, as they leant themselves to teams out-flexing opponents in the draft. It’s no surprise that flex picks continued to be fairly common at the 2015 World Championship.

Ten total champions were flexed in two lanes: Gangplank, Hecarim, Irelia, Jarvan IV, Lissandra, Lulu, Morgana, Shen, Varus, and Yasuo. Of these, mid and top shared the most common champions with Lulu, Gangplank, Lissandra, Irelia, and Yasuo played in both lanes. Hecarim and Jarvan IV were split between top lane and jungle, while Morgana was taken mid and support and Shen played top and support. Lastly, Varus was flexed between the AD carry and mid roles.

Of all positions on the Rift, mid laners are seemingly required to be the most accommodating, with the vast majority of flex picks flexed into or out of their lane.

I Can Almost Taste My Future Popularity!

Additionally, three champions were flexed across three different lanes at the 2015 World Championship: Ekko, Kennen, and Olaf.

Olaf is a bit of an outlier. Sang-hyeok “Faker” Lee took the crazed Viking against the Southeast Asian representative, Bangkok Titans, in a game where saying that SKTelecom T1 was heavily favored would be a significant understatement. Mismatches in overall team skill allowed for these experiments, and one could argue that Faker’s mid lane Irelia and Master Yi — even if they did also make sense in that context or matchup — were born from similar series back in Korea. To bring things full circle, the one mid lane Irelia pick at the World Championship was from Bangkok Titans’ Nuttapong “G4” Menkasikan against Faker’s Olaf.

Ekko had previously seen play in mid, top, and jungle, so his presence in all three roles isn’t much of a surprise; however, Fnatic’s AD carry Kennen for Martin “Rekkles” Larsson certainly was. Kennen had been used as a support and in the top lane, but Fnatic took his zone potential and self-peel to the bottom lane as another utility carry for Rekkles. This worked so well that another team who relied on their AD carry for utility more than damage — the KOO Tigers and Jong-in “PraY” Kim — picked up the champion in their second game against SKTelecom T1 in the World Championship Final.

You Can’t Improve on Perfection

While mid lane saw a myriad of champions both played and flexed elsewhere, the jungle was stalked by far fewer picks. The most picked champion at the 2015 World Championship was Elise, with a 53.4% pick rate. Jungle counterpart Rek’Sai wasn’t too far behind with 50.7%, and even following his forced absence from the Semifinals and Finals (due to a bug), Gragas was also among the top 10 most-played champions at Worlds, picked 39.7% of the time.

I’ll Never Forget That You Remembered

Lastly, with such a wide variety of champions picked, other odd statistics to throw out (to win the most obscure of bar trivia competitions or annoy one’s friends) are those of the champions who were picked only once. Vladimir, Karthus, Draven, and Graves, among others, all have 100% win ratios thanks to the fact that they were only selected once. Meanwhile, recalling the 0% win rate of Brand or Blitzcrank may bring back bad memories, especially if one remembers the games where they were played.