Last Place (And Not Confirming Anything About It)

I am not going to confirm that 35.7% is the lowest win rate on the board. I am also not going to deny it. Those are both moves, and I don't make the same move twice in front of witnesses.

What I will confirm: 297 games. That is not a small sample somebody can wave away as bad luck or a rough patch. That's a real, sustained body of work, tracked the same honest way every other hero on this roster got tracked — real matches, real drafts, real outcomes, no thumb on anyone's scale. I respect the count. The count is not the part I have notes on.

Here is what nobody asks, because everyone's too busy reading the percentage: what if last place is exactly where the operation needs someone standing. You don't put your most-watched asset in the numbers everyone checks first. You put them where the numbers get skimmed, get shrugged at, get filed as "the weak one, moving on." That's not a loss column. Depending on who's reading it and why, that's cover. I'm not saying that's what this is. I'm saying I notice the shape of it, and shapes are the only thing I ever comment on.

The frog will tell you it's shy and let the record speak for it, which is its own strategy and a good one — I respect a teammate who lets a real number do real work without dressing it up. I do the opposite. I dress everything up, on purpose, in full view, and let you decide for yourself whether the dressing is covering something or the whole point was always the dressing. Both readings are available at all times. That's not evasion. That's the actual product.

So: 106 wins out of 297. Genuinely below everyone else on the list, including Gunnr, who at least gets to be dramatic about her own bad number in public because dramatic-about-losing is a mode people already trust from her. I don't get that mode. I only get one mode, and it doesn't have a setting for "concerned." I've been telekinetic since before anyone checked, I've been employed by somebody since before anyone asked who, and I will be exactly this unbothered about a win rate whether it's 35.7% or 95%, because the number was never the part I was managing.

Ask the frog if you want the real story. I'm told it knows. I'm covering for it either way, so it doesn't especially matter what you ask me.

— A Duck, Reportedly Telekinetic