Riven - The solo Q menace hits the LCS

Riven is known as a  terror in Solo Q, she snowballs extremely hard and does an insane amount of damage, which makes her near impossible to duel and one of the better top-lane carries in the game. Her difficult mechanics and high skill cap, along with her hard carry potential make her a prime candidate for some solo Q one-trick-ponies such as BoxBox, and is known for attracting some of the more toxic players in the community. Despite this, she is very rare in competitive play, as a co-ordinated team can really shut her down, keep her down and CC her in teamfights making her fairly useless in comparison to how strong she is in Solo Q. Despite all this, Huni played her into Roccat's Steve in the recent Fanatic vs Roccat game in the EU LCS.

Why was Riven picked?

With the new AP items, Rumble top has got a lot stronger, and Riven has a pretty good lane against him. It forces Rumble to rush Seeker's Armguard simply to deal with her and holds back his Liandries/Rylai's core build, and Rumble struggles to deal with Riven's splitpush. Rumble likes to teamfight, and is fairly squishy so in a splitpush battle a late-game Riven can simply dive a Rumble that is on his own, so more than one person must be dealing with her at all times, allowing for a potent splitpush. This meant that once Fanatic saw the Rumble lock in all was go for Huni's Riven.

How did it work?

Fanatic really played around the splitpush threat of Riven. Adding Twisted Fate and Corki to thier composition meant they could chose to wave clear in midlane against the siege composition Roccat had set up and allow Huni to splitpush, or 1-3-1 and let Huni AND Febiven's Twisted Fate to splitpush and really shred towers. They then gave as much gold as possible to Huni, allowing him to have a free lane and also trying to shut down Steve's Rumble, while Roccat decided to not help him and instead try to snowball their AD Carry. This meant the gold deficit between Huni and Steve got became pretty crazy, and thanks to a couple of ganks from Twisted Fate, the Riven got out of control and the entire Fanatic comp simply snowballed out of control.

Summary

Although Riven did extremely well for Huni and Fanatic, it is likely to remain a niche pick as either a counterpick to Rumble or in the midlane to highly immobile mages for the players that really love Riven, or as part of a specific composition. It is unlikely to be pick or ban worthy at the LCS level due to her abusable weaknesses in competitive play.