Last week "On the Road to Hannover" launched, a new series aimed at showcasing the different teams attending IEM: Hannover during the beginning of March. Tonight I'll be interviewing CLG NA, discussing how they formed as a team, their past experiences at IEM, and more. To find out when it'll be on in your timezone, hit the countdown link below and be sure to watch via the stream link at the top of the site.

Countdown!

SK Gaming has gone through lots and lots of turmoil over the last few months. First, longtime top laner Wickd left to join what's now become CLG.EU. After SK missed qualifying for IEM Kiev, jungler Snoopeh followed in Wickd's footsteps. At the time, both were poised to attend and compete at Kiev.

In a curious twist, CLG.EU was forced to withdraw from the tournament. As the fourth-place finisher in the qualifiers, SK Gaming was next in line to attend. Despite having sizeable holes in its roster, SK assured its fans that the team would manage to complete its roster and compete at Kiev. In the middle of January, SK announced that SR kev1n and SleazyWeazy would join Ocelote, Nyph and CandyPanda, filling out the roster that had so long been a question mark.

However, the phrasing of the announcement was curious. It didn't read as if both players were joining the team outright; rather, it suggested that SR kev1n would be on the team for the foreseeable future, but SleazyWeazy was a stand in for the tournament. At the time this announcement was made, I thought I might've been some kind of crazy person who was reading too much into little things.

Well, I was right about this one.

SK Gaming's aBhorsen announced today that the team has added Dedrayon as the permanent jungler. Per the announcement, Dedrayon has been competing with SK all month, including the CDiscount and BenQ cups. SK Gaming.LoL's captain Ocelote also confirmed kev1n's spot on the roster:

"I believe Kevin's and Dedrayon's addition will bring us the motivation this team lacked for a while. They got potential to be the best at their roles in the future, and they got potential to bring SK victories. I hope we can maintain the same lineup for so long, and I guess it'll be like that"

The $25,000 Curse Invitational announced only yesterday will begin shortly, with Choppa in Da Car (Chu8's team) vs CLG starting at 12 PM PST. Stick around for V8 vs Epik Gamer, Dignitas vs RFLX, and Goose vs TSM shortly after.

The whole event will be shoutcasted by Elementz and Colbycheeze. Today is just the first round of matches, with the second set occurring on the 18th. 

Teams will be fighting for $5,000 and the chance to fly to San Francisco (Curse Headquarters) where they will face Team Curse and have a chance at another $20k. 

Be sure to tune in to the Curse Twitch channel for all the action.

There are a lot of League of Legends sites out there, and most of them have a lot of bloggers. It's a tall order to keep up with all of it, but don't you worry; we'll do it for you. We like you that much.

Each week, we'll sort out the best blogs, vlogs, podcasts, sites and articles from the rest and compile them into one handy (and also dandy) post for you to use as a guide to the week's League of Legends happenings.

• In an excellent read, Stonewall talked about the importance of understanding where champions fit into the game regardless of general perception. He later updated his jungle tier list for the Ziggs era. Finally, he explained why he believes Jarvan IV is the best champion to use when learning the jungle role.
• The team at ggChronicle outlined its worldwide power rankings.
• FYA Umashi discussed the difference between a losing streak and Elo hell.
• TheOddOne "talked mostly about the previous two patches in terms of jungling."
• Renekton Bot talked about F2P games and why the League of Legends model is more successful than others. It followed this up with blogs on Renekton and his (not) dominance, and a blog about disdain for Sion.
• SSJSuntastic wrote about the triple Doran's+Wriggle's build. Later, he discussed the idea of purchasing Boots of Mobility on a mid-lane champ, and also touched on the bot-lane Summoner Spells.
• Dyrus vlogged.
• Steamanchor picked out five recent EU games and wrote about why they're great examples of the EU competitive scene.
• Winrar broke down the value of Viktor's Augment items.
• Ranhert compared League of Legends to (American) football, wondering if League has room for play calling along the lines of football's approach.
• Sotere took a deeper look at the details of the last patch, discussing some changes that flew under the radar of other analysts.
• Team Dignitas' Skuax interviewed Dyrus. As is the case for most things by Dyrus, this was equal parts honest and entertaining.
• DiffTheEnder compared Abyssal Scepter to Rabadon's Deathcap, drawing some interesting conclusions. He later interviewed Team Curse's theorycrafter, SYDTKO.
• In A DIFFerent View, TheBirdOfPrey put a gold value on the passive abilities that convert statistics.
• The LoL Mac Team, a third-party group aiming to bring League of Legends back to Macs, released a new version of its client (still in beta).
• Average Gatsby, meanwhile, updated his NA circuit power rankings.
• Despite the excitement going on at the TSM house, Chaox still managed to record another vlog.
• Moobeat caught several posts from the Riot devs, including info about Leona, Soraka and Warwick.
• And here are the week's vlogs and podcasts: All MIA ep. 60, Beyond the Rift ep. 31, ColbyCheeze Show Commentary 8, ColbyCheeze Show Commentary 9, IPL L2P ep 2., LoLPod ep. 33, Trinity Force Podcast ep. 15, Ult in 10 ep. 9.

Hi Everyone!

Over the next few weeks I'm going to attempt to grab interviews with every team that will be going to IEM Hannover in about a month. Depending on language barriers and availability, I'm planning to have as many members of each team on for each episode as possible.

Tonight the series will premiere with "On the Road to Hannover: Curse". It's sounding like all 7 members of Curse will be able to join me. The format for the show will look something like this:

1. Information about the players and the team as a whole.
2. Discussion about the team's past IEM's and their thoughts on the championship tournament occuring in March.
3. Questions from the community.

I'm thinking each of these episodes will be between 30-60 minutes.

You can catch the whole thing *after* their live battle with TSM tonight in IPL's Killing Spree (casted by Chauster), by heading over to the SotL Stream.

Sure Fizz just came out a short time ago, but that doesn't mean Riot needed to wait any longer before releasing another nautical champion. Or should I say... Nautilus champion. Perhaps this means we'll see a League under the sea soon? Or maybe 20,000 of them? But I know you're not reading this post for the incredible humor laced into every State of the League post, so here's the lowdown straight from Riot.

Last week we published a review of Ziggs, one that I was particularly proud of. It was the first piece by a new writer for the site. Up until then, SotL had been a two man project with Domenic and I keeping everything together. While we've recieved numerous offers to assist in keeping SotL updated, I had finally decided to let someone else write with us because I felt I could trust the individual after interacting with them for several months.

Yesterday it was brought to my attention that the article was eerily similar to a review written earlier on GGChronicle, another fantastic eSports website. We immediately removed the offending review from the website while we investigated further. Today I have the embarassing task of admitting that our one-time writer blatantly plagerized the impressive writing of Obscurica. The author of the offending piece is no longer affiliated with State of the League in any way. 

I'd like to personally apologize to Obscurica and the rest of the staff at GGChronicle and thank them for being so gracious about the ordeal. They made no request for a public apology, refrained from writing a public response, and simply asked us to remove the review from our site. They're stand up guys and didn't deserve something like that. 

-Travis

Have I mentioned recently how fantastic and attractive Surrender at 20's Moobeat is? Because he's those things. All of those things. And possibly more.

Why the love? Well, I'm a busy guy, and when I'm not a busy guy I'm a lazy guy. Moobeat, meanwhile, diligently patrols the League of Legends forums for information that the community might find useful. Like a 60-page conversation between the community and Riot's Xypherous, who happened to discuss the upcoming champion before the sneak peek. Which makes this a sneak-sneak peek, among the sneakiest of peeks you'll meet.

The champ's been referred to as "Nautilus" in the thread and as "Anchor Man" by Moobeat; regardless of his name, here's what you need to know:

• His inspiration draws heavily from the Tidehunter of Defense of the Ancients.
• He possesses a hookshot, which can be used to pull things to him and himself to things! (Think Bandage Toss meets Rocket Grab.)
• He uses mana and scales with ability power, but at the heart of it all he's a tank.
• He's reportedly not a pirate (per se), but Fizz supposedly isn't a yordle and I... I just don't buy it.

Honestly, I've already wasted your time with this article; Moobeat's has a much better recap than I'm able to offer.

[Sources: Surrender at 20; CLG Redtracker]