More mid laners should adopt Bjergsen's Scrying Orb start.

Evelynn has been a high value pick in the LCS for much of this season. She’s valued for her early power and the stealth that makes it so hard to keep track of her movements in the jungle. That stealth early game can often create strong advantages for teams forcing enemies to play safe in lane or potentially die to an invisible Evelynn popping up behind them.

It’s very difficult to counter Eve’s early pressure. Pink wards are too expensive to reasonably expect someone to purchase one at the start of the game, not to mention difficult to defend against Evelynn. You can invade and get a ward down on her camps but this is inherently dangerous. If the enemy team reacts to your invade or just walks the right way to stumble on you trying to get deep vision you can end up giving up first blood, the very thing that ward is trying to avoid. The result is most players simply play more passive against Evelynn junglers, if you don’t push up Eve has to come at you head on and it’s easier to get away.

Enter Bjergsen this super week. Twice he faced off against an Evelynn and twice he made a strong case for the blue trinket (Scrying Orb) start. The Scrying Orb reveals an area up to 2500 units away for 2 seconds on a 2 minute cool down. While the Scrying Orb does not reveal stealth it can still be invaluable in the search for information on Evelynn’s movements by revealing an enemy jungle camp.

Regardless of the state the camp is in when revealed by Scrying Orb, up, not up, actively being cleared, it is valuable info for a team. Professional junglers often study each other’s movements and can do a reasonable job of predicting each other’s movements. This means junglers can take the knowledge that Evelynn has or has not cleared the camp and use it to better estimate and predict the enemy jungler’s movements.

Taking the first item Scrying Orb comes at no cost to mid laners too. Most mid laners, even in Korea, use their ward trinkets inefficiently against Evelynns primarily because of how unsafe they have to be to drop the trinket ward somewhere it can reveal Eve. Instead we see mid laners with ward trinkets simply warding as if against a normal jungler and getting nothing from the use of it. This is likely a hold over from previous patches where the double jungle and multiple people roaming mid early was common. On the 4.10 patch such swaps have become rather uncommon as teams are favoring the standard 2v2 lanes where Evelynn thrives and the warding trinkets become superfluous.

By starting Scrying Orb instead mid laners can scout Eve’s wraith camp from just over half way up the lane, much safer than placing a trinket ward. Once a mid laner with a Scrying Orb hits the point where they want to roam they simply exchange the trinket for a sweeping lens like they normally would if they started warding trinket and go about the mid game normally.

A Scrying Orb start comes at no cost to a mid laner but grants important information against an Evelynn jungler. Looking across the premier leagues that feed directly into the World Championships, Bjergsen is the only mid laner to have made this adaptation so far. However the value for professional teams is plain to see. More mid laners should adopt the Scrying Orb start when facing Evelynn in the jungle.