League-of-legends – Who sings ‘Embrace the Heresy’

The metagame is established generally through the thousands of games played. Usually, teams will get together and decide to try a team composition and success will lead them to keep trying it. Obviously, over just a few games everyone's performance will vary widely and no meta will save you on your bad days...

...But over thousands of games with hundreds of thousands of players, individual skill becomes averaged out and what you're left with is what strategies tend to work. Now, we need to distinguish a strategy from a meta to make a lot of sense here. I'll do it very briefly: The metagame is a framework in which you insert individual pieces (champions and builds, where builds are item/mastery/rune combos) that fit the framework. In our current state, the "meta" is usually a high-survivability (but not usually tank) in top who can solo and scales well with items and experience; mid is a character that scales best with experience; bot is a character who scales best with items and needs either baby-sitter or someone to setup kills; the jungler is highly variable, but often is prized for their ganking abilities. So, take any "pieces" that fit inside that framework, and you have a particular strategy within the meta. For instance, an AoE heavy composition is a strategy within the current meta.

Strategies are handed down from pro players (usually, but not always), but the meta is determined by all of us. It's less a "choice" that people get to make and more a mathematical optimization realized over a ridiculous number of games (millions). Metas will usually stabilize without some dramatic changes in terms of patches and champions, which is what has happened in LoL. More casual players will tend to emulate what they see the pro players do, which makes sense in terms of the number of games played per person.

Nunu and Kog'maw were a popular combination from the IEM tournaments (Kiev/Hanover) for American teams. The combination works well because Kog'maw and Nunu can maximize the slow effects of their abilities as well as the movement speed, attack speed buffs and increased range.

Nunu can sit by and land an ice ball so Kog'maw can attack the enemy from afar without being threatened. The combo also allows for strong ganks/escapes from allied or enemy junglers, respectively.

In this above link, we can see American Team Curse vs American Team TeamSolomid in IEM Hanover. Curse is sporting the Kog'maw/Nunu combination and this is one example of the pair working successfully.