In February, Riot dropped a dev update announcing Akali and Senna as 2XKO’s next champions. I made two calls in my reaction video that day: one about why Riot picked those two specifically, and one much spicier take about what was actually breaking the game.
Both champions are live now. Evo 2026 has been and gone. So rather than pretend this is still news, let’s do the thing almost nobody does with their own hot takes — go back and grade them honestly, including the one I got wrong.
The theory: it was never really about the fighting game
When the reveal art showed Akali and Senna posed side by side, my first thought wasn’t about frame data. It was about True Damage.
Look at who was already in the game at that point: Yasuo. Ekko. Add Ahri for the KDA side of things. Now add Akali and Senna, and Riot is one champion — Qiyana — away from having assembled an entire music-project roster inside a fighting game.
That is not a coincidence, and it’s not a criticism either. Riot’s skin ecosystem is the business. If you can ship a character who is both a genuinely good addition to the roster and slots into a cosmetic line you already own, that character gets fast-tracked. Understanding that gives you a legitimately useful lens for guessing who’s next, which is worth more than any individual reveal.
It also explained the stages. Akali showed up on an Ionian stage, which fits her cleanly. Senna’s was murkier — lots of Shadow Isles green, but with something large and mechanical in the background that made me second-guess whether it was Shadow Isles at all.
The scorecard
Here’s every call I made that day, against what actually happened.
| What I said in February | What happened | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Riot is filling in the True Damage / KDA roster | Akali and Senna both shipped, joining Yasuo, Ekko and Ahri. Qiyana still absent. | Held up |
| Freestyle is the real problem, not Yasuo and Ekko | By Evo 2026, most of the bracket was running Freestyle teams | Held up |
| Akali will be a reset / vortex character | She shipped as the purest assassin in the game — shroud, three-way rekka, blender pressure | Mostly right |
| Senna’s souls will be a real mechanic, not just flavour | Soul Harvest is her defining system — souls permanently extend her range | Held up |
| Senna is “not a zoner, more of a shapeshifter or an install” | She shipped as a hybrid Support-Zoner who scales into controlling the screen | Wrong |
The call I’m proudest of: Freestyle, not the characters
In that dev update, Riot gave Yasuo and Ekko their own section. Their words were that both are among the sauciest characters in the roster, but their weaknesses “aren’t apparent enough at the highest level of play.” Everyone read that as a nerf incoming, and everyone cheered.
My take at the time was that this was aiming at the wrong target. The characters were strong, sure — but the thing making them oppressive was the Freestyle fuse.
Why Freestyle, specifically
Freestyle lets you tag in and back out inside one sequence. That sounds modest until you notice what it actually buys you:
- More control than 2X Assist, because you decide the timing rather than committing to a call
- You still get to chain super into super, then tag, then close in Limit Strike
- Which means one touch can go the whole distance
At the time I pointed at community-collected data on fuse usage among Challenger players in Season 0, and Freestyle was running away with it. Not “slightly ahead” — dominating. My argument was that when one fuse is that overrepresented at the top, the fuse is the variable, not the five characters wearing it.
How it aged
Fast forward to Evo 2026. When I broke down what winning teams were actually running in 2XKO duo synergy, the pattern was the same one from February: most of the bracket leaned on Freestyle teams. Four months later, on the biggest stage of the year, with a console launch and a new season in between.
That’s the version of “I called it” I actually care about — not because I guessed a character, but because the reasoning was checkable and it survived contact with reality. If one option is that overrepresented among the best players in the world, that’s a signal about the option.
Fuse balance has kept moving since — Season 2’s Teamfight fuse changed the conversation again, and I covered what that did to the ecosystem in the Teamfight breakdown. But the underlying lesson stands: in this game, look at the fuse before you blame the character. If you’re not sure what yours is really doing for you, the fuses guide lays them all out.
The call I got wrong: Senna
Watching the reveal, I said this out loud: “She didn’t look like a zoner to me. She looks more like a shapeshifter, or like that was an install.”
She’s a zoner. Specifically, a hybrid Support-Zoner who scales over the course of the match, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a fighting game and much more interesting than what I predicted.
What threw me was the wraith form. Two visual states plus a big transformation read as “install character” to me — build meter, flip into a stronger mode, cash out. That’s a normal fighting-game pattern and I pattern-matched to it.
What I underrated was the thing I did spot. I noticed her taking a soul off a hit — that little green orb — and correctly clocked it as her League identity carried over. I just treated it as flavour. It isn’t. Soul Harvest is the entire character: knockdowns drop souls, collecting them permanently extends her rifle range, and by round three she’s poking from angles that shouldn’t exist. She’s the longest game of compound interest in the game.
So the lesson on myself: I read the animation and guessed an archetype, when the mechanic was right there on screen telling me what she was. If you want the version I’d write now, it’s in the Senna guide — and her release breakdown is in Thresh and Senna are live.
Akali: closer than I expected
My read on Akali was “resets, teleports, true vortex character,” based on seeing her blink around and switch sides in the trailer.
She shipped as the purest assassin on the roster. Twilight Shroud erases her from the screen and makes her untargetable to projectiles. Her rekka chain branches into an overhead, a low, or a grab, so every blocked string is a three-way guess. Shroud plus tag creates double-blind situations.
“Vortex” was the right instinct even if “teleports” wasn’t literally the mechanic — the actual answer is stealth and unblockable-feeling mixups rather than blinks. And the weakness I didn’t call: she’s fragile, with low health and stubby mid-range. She steals rounds faster than anyone off one opening, and she dies just as fast. Full breakdown in the Akali guide.
What Riot promised that day, and where it stands
The champion reveal got the attention, but the rest of that update mattered more. The two lines Riot chose to bold tell you most of it: that they’re doubling down on building for the FGC that loves this genre, and that the skill ceiling is high and staying there.
Read together, that was Riot answering a question the community kept asking — who is this game for? The answer was fighting game players, not casual League fans who’d wandered in. Some people took that badly. I thought it was the single most clarifying thing they’d said all year, because a game that knows its audience can actually be balanced for someone.
The rest of what they committed to:
- Local duo mode. A couch co-op experience so you and a friend can play together against the world — described as a top priority and in prototyping.
- Clearer strengths and weaknesses across the cast, with balance aimed at outliers rather than flattening characters.
- A locals program giving smaller tournament organizers access to exclusive in-game prizes that can’t be earned anywhere else.
- Acknowledged, no fix dated: ranked matchmaking edge cases, and console screen tearing.
Two notes I’d stand by. First, the local duo mode was the right call and the obvious gap — though what I actually want is a random duo queue, so solo players can find a partner without organising it themselves. Still waiting on that one.
Second, the screen tearing wording bothered me then and it bothers me now. They said they were working on an update to address it “in the future” — not the near future. For console players dealing with it every match, that’s a meaningful difference in urgency.
How to read the next reveal
Riot has since announced Lux and Samira, so this exercise isn’t academic. Three things I’d take from grading myself:
- Look at the cosmetic lines, not just the roster gaps. The True Damage read worked. Ask which skin family a new champion completes.
- Read the mechanic, not the animation. This is where Senna got me. The flashy transformation was a distraction; the little green orb was the actual character.
- When something is overrepresented at the top, look at the system. Freestyle was the lesson. It’s rarely one character — it’s usually the option every strong character is choosing.
The short version
- Akali and Senna were announced February 2026 and are both live now — this is a retrospective, not a reveal.
- The True Damage theory held up: they joined Yasuo, Ekko and Ahri; only Qiyana is missing.
- Freestyle was the real problem, not Yasuo and Ekko — and by Evo 2026 most of the bracket was on Freestyle teams.
- Akali landed close to my read — an assassin built on shroud and a three-way rekka guess, though fragile in a way I didn’t predict.
- I was wrong about Senna. She’s a scaling Support-Zoner, not an install character. The souls I dismissed as flavour are her whole design.
- Riot committed to the FGC audience and to a high skill ceiling — the clearest statement of intent they’d made.
- Still open: a random duo queue, and a firm date on the console screen tearing fix.
Want to actually beat the fuse you’re complaining about?
Most people who lose to Freestyle teams are losing to one specific interaction and blaming the whole fuse. If you want that diagnosed properly, I go through your replays in one-on-one sessions and we find the actual gap — book one here.
Otherwise: come make your own predictions in the 2XKO Jungle Discord, build your own rankings on the tier list maker, or read up on where Akali and Senna ended up now that the theory-crafting is over.
