DreXxiN
2018-03-04 07:30:21
To start a small introduction: my name is Daisyx and I have been coaching competitive League of Legends for the last 3 years for various teams in the European Challenger scene as well as in Wildcard regions like Brazil, Turkey and Russia.
In this post, I will give a general overview into the many variables that are on a coach’s (and player’s) mind during the draft as well as on how to optimally prepare for a draft. Please keep in mind that this guide is supposed to be ‘’timeless’’ in the sense that I won’t specifically go into what champs are currently meta but instead I will make more general guide, which I will of course illustrate with examples. This guide is aimed towards coaches who are somewhere between freshly started and the top-level of the European national leagues. If you are not a coach yourself but just want to understand top level drafts better, then this is also a good place for you, though I would suggest skipping the ‘’preparation’’ section of this guide.
The first step to having a successful draft starts far before the game itself, before you can do a draft you need to assess how strong various picks are. There are a lot of different resources for this which I strongly encourage anyone to make use of. This includes solo queue winrates of champions — which you can find on champion.gg and what champions are being played at top-level competitive — and their respective winrates/pick & ban rates, which you can find on gamesoflegends.com. However, all of this information is just a starting point for your own team, because quite often your team has some sort of peculiarity which makes it different from the ‘’average’’ team.
Examples of this can be that certain players in your team can be better than others, making it more valuable to draft around those. Some players having limited champion pools, which obviously makes some champions useless since your players don’t play them well, but on the flipside of this, it also makes some other champions more valuable.
For example, the 8.2 meta on topside is Gnar/GP/Ornn/Cho/Vlad. Say your toplaner doesn’t play Gnar and Ornn, this obviously means that those 2 champs drop very much in priority but it also means that Cho’Gath becomes a lot more valuable, because if you don’t get Cho, you can’t play any tanks on toplane and if the enemy team picks Cho, you don’t have access to one of its counters (Gnar). Overall, you should never blindly draft the same picks that are being picked in competitive for a variety of reasons.
The biggest reasons why are that at the top level games often last longer, since games are often won based on the enemies mistakes which are obviously a lot more infrequent the better the players are, hence it taking longer before (enough) mistakes are made. Because of that, you should always adjust your draft towards the average gametime of your competitive games. Besides that, top-level teams are far better at jungle-tracking: predicting where the enemy jungler is at all moments in the game.
For example a jungler like peanut can, with a pretty small margin of error, predict where the enemy jungler will be at 7-8 minutes based on spotting the enemy jungler on a ward at raptors 3 minutes and counting his cs number (yes, this is still relevant, though obviously harder to do).
The reason he can do this is that top-level junglers all know how to optimally path in order to maximize their farming and minimize uptime of camps. While this is absolutely the best way to play the game, it also makes their path far more predictable than a random dia 1 jungler who might just go bot at 7.30 mins even though his top quadrant buff is about to spawn. The point I am making here is that the lower level your team is, the more valuable early game ganking junglers (and thus lanes that can support them) are.
Because of this and a lot of other reasons that I won’t go into to avoid writing a whole book, the further you are from the top-level competitive, the better early game champs, skirmishing champs, splitpushing champs, assassins and teamfighting champs are relatively. On the flipside, scaling champs, low-cc champs, poke/siege champs and farming junglers are less good.
If anything, if you want to measure a champion’s strength, you are better off looking at the wildcard regions since they are closer to the level of a starting team.
The reason I don’t mention LPL is that they play a very different style of League which also makes their pick priorities completely different than those of the rest of the world, hence why very few analysts and coaches follow the Chinese scene.
90-95% of all the games that your team will play are scrims, so if you used the competitive picks as a basis to decide which picks to test out in scrims, you will be able to identify what picks work for you and which ones don’t. However scrims and competitive play are very different, hence the frequent ‘’we are having issues translating scrim results onto stage’’ that so many players and coaches utter when they have lost a game (and that I am certainly guilty of saying/thinking myself).
In competitive games, especially when you get to the point where your players are playing offline or even in front of a crowd, players will play a lot more smart and focused but also far more passive. Because of this, competitive games will often drag out longer. In the last 2-3 weeks, I have played ~5 scrims per day for 6 days a week, yet I can count the amount of times that a scrim has gone over 45 minutes on one hand. At the same time, almost half of the competitive games on my level seem to be going over 45 minutes.
Because of this, all the things that apply to comparing your picks to LCS/LCK apply in reverse when it comes to comparing the value of picks between your scrims and competitive games: scaling champs/low cc champs/farming junglers are better, etc.
At this point, based on your scrims and the things that are being played in competitive, you should have a decent idea about what champions you want and what champions you would draft if you knew nothing about your opponent; however this is not the case.
Often, you have access to previous drafts from the opposing team and the opposing teams’ solo queue accounts and you will often notice tendencies in those, ranging from certain champs they don’t play, off-meta champs they play a lot, how often the enemy team counterpicks for a certain lane, how much they prioritize a certain champion and how often they pick a certain role in the first/second pick phase.
Obviously, the higher your opponent rates a certain champion, the more valuable it becomes to you as well. Say you rate Shen top as a 6/10 because your support doesn’t play it and the coordination on TP’s between your botlane and toplane sucks. However, you notice that your opponent actually prioritizes it very highly (say 8/10) and he simultaneously doesn’t seem to have a lot of soloq games on GP and Gnar (the 2 most common shen counters).
Obviously, the champion becomes a lot more valuable for you to pick since you often don’t have enough bans (especially when you are on red side) to ban away all your opponents preferred picks. Similarly, a lot of lower tier teams have a certain playstyle or often pick the same kind of champions on the various roles. This makes banning or picking away certain picks more valuable.
A lot of players, especially on lower tier teams where not everyone plays every champion, have certain picks that they feel very comfortable playing. This is something that should absolutely be included in deciding what picks to play. Most notably because you will quite frequently draw bans on that specific champion if you have a lot of games played on it in soloq and are known to pick it up in competitive, even if that champion itself is not something that is meta.
The reason for this is that, unless you are at the very top level of play, most players won’t have a lot of experience playing certain matchups and won’t know the best item buys, when to recall, when they can win 1v1, etc etc — so as a coach, it is often a safe bet to just ban away champions that the enemy team specializes in. Besides that, the lower level the player is, the more important comfort becomes relative to meta and therefore the smaller the impact of the draft is on the outcome of the game. The better your team gets, the more important it is to follow the meta (and the more impactful a good draft becomes).
Having said that, everyone has picks that they feel more confident on than others and if that pick is decent, go for it. To give an example: in the last patch the 2 counters to Ryze were Cassiopeia and Malzahar with people generally thinking Malzahar was the better pick. If you have a really confident Cassiopeia player, feel free to ignore the general meta and just go with Cassio.
Once you are done assessing your opponent, it is time to make a tier list for what you want to play in your match. You should base this on conversations with your players, scrim results, your analysis of your opponent and the champions that are being played at the highest levels.
There are 3 different tiers of champions:
S-Tier: These are the must pick/ban champions and will often be banned away by red side or traded away early. These champions often include champions that are playable in various styles of play and that have little to no counters in lane. Often these picks include flex picks as well. While they might have counters, they can be swapped between two different roles, thus avoiding counter matchups. Examples of this currently are Shen, Camille and Ornn. The more of these kinds of must-ban champions there are the less balanced the meta is. Currently, there are none (some of the most banned champions are also some of the most picked champions, meaning that they get through the ban phase really often).
A-Tier: These are champions that you don’t mind picking blind but aren’t that strong or have some minor counters. They allow for a variety of playstyles so picking these doesn’t lock you into a certain playstyle early. These are the so-called ‘’generalist’’ picks.
B-Tier: these are champions with significant counters or champions that are only playable in a single type of team composition and will generally only be picked at the end of the draft phase when your opponent has already picked the lane that they will be played in or if you don’t mind showing what the goal of your composition is. These are the so-called ‘’specialist’’ picks. For example: Tahm Kench (against pick comps) Kha’zix/Rengar (with pick or splitpush comps), Kassadin (splitpush) or Azir (front-to-back teamfighting comp). If picks like this can be blind picked without risk (like for example, Tahm Kench in 8.1, which Deficio frequently complained about, or LB/Rengar/Camille last year), it means that something in the game is imbalanced.
So now that we have done all the preparation we can, it is time to look at what you are actually looking for in a draft. The most important thing you as a coach need to ensure is that your composition is cohesive: players will often want to play picks that are good for their respective lanes and as a coach, it is your job to make sure that those four lane picks also work towards the same goal in the mid/late game.
There are four archetypical compositions, though keep in mind that often comps aren’t fully committed to a single style because of various reasons. Because of how both poke and splitpush comps are on a timer and are generally harder to execute as well as the massive creep when it comes to engage options in the champs that have been released in the last ~2 years, the 2 first ones are by far the most prevalent, with the first type of comp seeing the most play (whereas the second style is relatively better at the lower levels of competitive play).
With this kind of comp, you are looking to play teamfights where you are focusing the enemy front line (tanks/assassins) while simultaneously kiting backwards, having your frontline holding theirs in place and destroying their backline only when their front line is gone. This comp usually consists of 2-3 carries and 2-3 tanks, preferably with engage and mostly gets defined by how the carries want to teamfight. Examples of champions that play this style are Cho’Gath, Maokai, Gnar, Azir, Cassiopeia and almost every hypercarry.
With this kind of comp, you are looking to play teamfights where you are going into the enemy team, avoiding the enemy front line (tanks/assassins) while simultaneously focusing down the enemy carries, destroying their frontline only when their carries are dead. This comp usually consists of 2-3 carries, 1-2 assassins/divers and 1-2 tanks. Examples of champions that play this style are J4, Vladimir, Tristana, Twitch, Vayne, Syndra and every assassin.
With this kind of comp, you are looking to avoid teamfights unless you have a numbers advantage and play either 1-3-1, 4-1 or (more rarely) 2-2-1 (which means your jungler rotates between protecting your 3-man and murdering the enemy sidelaners) where your 1’s consist of champions that are really great duelists with good (counterpicked) matchups that can kill 1v1 or get towers. Simultaneously, you want really solid and safe waveclear (most notably on ADC) and a strong disengage on jungle or support on your 2/3/4-man. Champions that can play this style well (in the sidelanes) are Jax, Fiora, Camille, (though she can also teamfight), Kassadin and Yorick.
With this type of comp, you are looking to group up early in the game and use your superior range to slowly whittle down opponents’ health bars and take towers. Due to the aforementioned inflation of engage (and the introduction of Doran’s Shield), this type of comp is almost nearly extinct, though Giants recently played this style (and lost) in their game against S04. Champions that play this style well are (Q-max) Varus, Corki, Caitlyn, Nidalee, Zoe, Gnar and Zyra.
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Within a composition, there are often multiple ways of winning the game. What decides a good versus a bad draft is how many win conditions there are, how broad the time window to accomplish these win conditions are and how easy they are to accomplish relative to the opponents composition. The win condition can be something as simple as ‘’top lane is a carry matchup so if we gank the enemy toplaner enough times then he will fall behind and our toplaner can then get objectives by himself or force the enemy team to send multiple people to deal with him which opens up opportunities on the other side of the map’’.
An example of this is the Jayce-Gnar matchup, which is highly favourable for Jayce as long as he has an early game jungler that can protect him from the enemy and win 2v2 with him. However, if you pick Jayce into Gnar while your opponent has Jarvan and you have Sejuani, you lose the 2v2, meaning Jayce can’t reliably push and you get horribly outscaled. A more complex win condition is: ‘’the enemy team is playing 1-3-1; however, as long as our botlane is even, our Tahm Kench and Tristana can push out the mid lane in midgame and then gank their sidelaners using Tahm Kench ult, which allows us to stall out the game sufficiently to force a teamfight around Nashor, which we should win’’.
Both these win conditions can exist in the same game, however they need to be clear to the player and players need to be trained on how to execute them as well as identify during the game which win condition is the best to go for. ‘’Winning’’ the draft, means that your win conditions line up well against the opponent’s win conditions. In the example above, blue side drafted Gnar/Ryze to try and play a 1-3-1 comp in the midgame whereas red tried to counter that by picking Jayce into the Gnar, denying them the pressure on at least one lane, while simultaneously drafting the Tahm Kench in order to prevent the Ryze from winning the side lane or prevent Gnar from beating Jayce in the sidelane in midgame in case red side’s first win condition (shutting down Gnar in lane) failed.
It is completely fine to only play both of the teamfight comp styles, since they are in fact the most popular, easiest to play and the best. It is even fine to to only play 4-6 champs per role. I see a lot of amateur teams making the mistake of practicing everything they see in competitive play whereas playing comfort and then improving macro first is a far better way to improve as a team.
Besides picking together a coherent team comp, there are a variety of other factors that you have to keep in mind while drafting. They are listed in no particular order.
This is basically making sure that you have enough AD damage in your comp, especially when you have a hypercarry ADC that deals little damage in the early game like Tristana or play Kog’maw/Varus (Ezreal actually doesn’t do that much AP damage). It is very easy to have little to no early game AD damage if you go for a tank top/jungle and a mage mid. The reason why this is such a big deal is the existence of Hexdrinker. This item is horribly over-budgeted and any ad-based champion can buy it (without upgrading to maw) to be super safe from AP damage in the early game.
Getting a full AD comp is far harder because (outside of the rare Jayce) there isn’t a single viable AD midlaner and most AP carries will do enough magic damage by themselves to deter people from stacking armor. Another reason for this is that there are no attractive armor-based items for AD carries and armguard as a component isn’t even close to being as good as Hexdrinker, whereas Zhonya’s is a massive investment and fairly situational. If you are unsure what percentage of a champion’s damage is magic, both gamesoflegends and champion.gg provide this information.
While drafting, you always want to have a composition that scales slightly better than your opponent, to minimize the window where they are stronger than you while simultaneously putting a clock on the enemies composition since if nothing happens at all it is favorable for you. Knowing when champions (more importantly, carries) spike is honestly really complex and it is just something you need to memorize.
Generally for mid, the rule can be applied that the shorter a champions cd’s the better he scales (cassio/ori/corki come to mind) whereas for ADC the general rule is that if he has an (attack speed) steroid, the champion needs 3+ items to do well (for example Caitlyn, Tristana and Jinx) whereas champions that have high ability damage (and thus build lethality) do well in the earlier game (like Jhin and Miss Fortune). Champs like Varus/Kog’maw break these rules because they have other factors balancing them. While generally you want to have your team comp spike at the same time, if that point is late into the game you do need to tools to get there. So picking a few champs (mostly junglers and tops) that spike early in order to be able to not lose the game while your real carries are scaling is always advisable.
This is generally something that your players should know for you, but obviously it helps if you know them as well. Again, this is mostly about remembering things; most lane matchups are really complex and deducing whether or not A counters B requires a very good understanding of the champions. Just remembering it (or writing it down) is far easier.
Whereas previously counters were mostly focused on the overall matchup, nowadays that is harder to do and instead you attempt to counter a specific aspect of the opposing champion. For example, the Gnar-Maokai matchup: whereas 2-3 seasons ago Gnar just stomped the floor with Maokai and basically forced a laneswap around level 6, now Maokai ‘’just’’ loses the lane by 20 cs and maybe a third of the tower HP, but that is completely fine because Mao can itemize for lane and still do completely fine in teamfights. If you play the Gnar-Mao matchup in a comp where you (as Gnar) want to 1-3-1, then it is a fine matchup to play; however, if your team’s win condition is to teamfight, you are better off picking Cho’gath into Maokai, which has a (slightly) favourable lane matchup and does only slightly worse than him in teamfights. Especially players have a tendency to over-focus on lane counters. Another example of this is Xerath into Azir, which is a really common counterpick in the European challenger scene but almost sees 0 play in LCS: Xerath counters the poking aspect of Azir; however, since poke isn’t that important in the current meta and Azir can just lose lane with 10 cs and still have a far better teamfight, it doesn’t see much play at the highest level.
You always want at least 1 and preferably more lanes pushing in. This helps with contesting vision in the river, protecting your jungler from being invaded, preventing dragon/herald from being taken and allows you to set up pink wards around the lane where you have lane pressure. This in turn allows your lane with pressure to roam and potentially gank other lanes, which in turn forces those other lanes to concede pressure or risk being ganked by a roaming mid/bot/top lane in combination with the jungler or even get dove (though that is quite hard with the current tank support meta and the amount of stopwatches and teleports currently in the game). This is closely related to the lane matchup, since generally if you have a good lane matchup you will have lane pressure as well, though this isn’t always the case in some tank matchups or with champions like Kassadin or Katarina that have a good matchup into some immobile mid mages but still get pushed in 24/7 and have to rely on kill pressure and later splitpush to do well. Worth noting however, these picks (most commonly assassins) are seeing very little play at the highest level because they are really risky (you have to all-in with little vision) and at the highest level mid priority at all points in the game is incredibly important.
You want to have lanes that synergize well with the junglers you pick. For example, high-gank junglers like Lee/Reksai/Elise/J4 want laners that can win 1v1/2v2 and have initiation or follow-up. Carry junglers (Shyv, Jax, Kindred) want safe laners that want to focus on getting through lane and don’t need much ganks/attention while simultaneously having a lot of CC to initiate the gank post-6 since most carry junglers have crappy CC/engage. Scaling tank junglers (Zac, Gragas, Seju) want laners that have lane pressure so the jungler can ward for them and his jungle doesn’t get invaded, since they are weak duelists and extremely vulnerable pre-6. Not all of your laners have to completely synergize with your jungle but some synergy is needed. In fact, having more than 2 lanes that require jungle attention is risky, even with an early game jungler.
There are a lot of champions that work, for a variety of reasons, really well with other champions. Obviously if you or your opponent picks one of the 2/3 pieces that makes the remaining piece(s) more valuable. It is important that you learn these specific champ synergies and there are probably some more that I forgot or don’t know myself but here are some examples:
There are probably a lot more I could mention, but you get my point - previous picks absolutely should influence your future picks. Having said that, a rookie mistake is to draft full wombo-combo teamfighting comps and then ignore what your enemy is picking, since champions with strong teamfighting ultimates often have very weak laning phases, so your Yasuo-Jarvan-Ori-Twitch-Alistar comp might be able to completely blast your opponent off the map in an ideal situation, but you will rarely live long enough to be able to pull it off.
Every teamcomp, even team comps whose aim is to mostly avoid teamfighting, want to have some form of engage. There are 2 kinds of engage: primary and secondary engage. The first one is the engage that you use to get onto the target (like Sejuani/Camille/ornn/Kalista ult), the second one is the CC you use to make sure you stick on the target that you just engaged on. These are often the cc’s that are harder to hit, shorter range or have a longer travel time like Braum ult, Morgana Q or Galio Ult. Every teamcomp wants to have at least 1 form of primary engage as well as multiple forms of secondary engage.
Now that we are done with all the different things to keep in mind, you can actually start to prepare for the 3 bans as well as the first 3 picks. Preparing for anything after that is usually pointless, since there are too many variables surrounding the last ban phase and usually you want to counterpick in the last 2 picks.
With everything to keep in mind, this can be harder for new coaches, but because of how much gametime is spent in teamfights and groups, counters can also include champions that don’t lane against a specific champion but are good against it in teamfights. This includes general counters (Tristana is solid against all divers, Alistar is strong against all assassins), specific counters (Maokai/Ornn are great against diving champions like Khazix and J4 because after 6 they become almost unkillable under tower) and ability counters (Taric is a wise choice against Galio comps and Vladimir because the damage is delayed and really predictable, Zoe is really bad against Tahm Kench and Braum because they both completely nullify her bouble-peddle combo).
Another way to think of this is drafting junglers to cover weak sides of laners, the example I gave before about Gnar being countered by Jayce (or Camille). Say you are blue side and want to blind pick Gnar and already have Jarvan going into the second ban phase and red side is still looking to pick top/jungle with the intent of counterpicking top. You can then ban Camille (counter to Gnar and early game jungler) and Kha’zix. This will most likely force the enemy jungler on Sejuani which makes the Jayce pick far more risky for him. If he instead opts to pick the Gnar for himself, it allows you to pick Jayce since you already have an early game jungler which should allow you to smash the Gnar topside (especially because red side toplaners are far more vulnerable to getting ganked/dove/zoned from tower).
While the map is built to be mirrored, there are actually a large number of differences in draft between blue and red side, with both of them having their pros and cons. Depending on the meta at a certain moment, either side can be better: red side is better if there is a strong rock-paper-scissors meta in the solo lanes, with a lot of carries and splitpushers so they can maximally abuse their free counterpicks, whereas blue side is better if there are a lot of op champs and most solo lane matchups are 50/50 or 45/55 at worse.
On blue side, you have far more flexibility when it comes to your bans than red side, since you are not looking to ban away any OP champions, excluding the rare scenario where there are 4+ OP champions. Instead there are 4 kinds of common blue side bans:
For the order in which you ban you want to ban the things that red side is least likely to ban first before banning things red side might ban for you.
Always have 1-2 back up bans in case red side bans things for you.
Ideally on red side you want to spend as little bans as possible on op picks; however, ban what you must.
If there is only 1 must-ban champion, you usually want to start out with a targeted ban similar to blue side, giving your opponent the opportunity to ban the pick for you in his first 2 bans. On your second ban you want to ban away the OP pick if it hasn’t been done for you whereas on your third ban you want to be flexible, either doing another targeted ban or responding to blue sides bans by (for example) banning a champion that they have been banning away soft counters for.
I came up with this name myself but in some metas, most notably ones that see a lot of competitive play and are highly ‘’figured out’’ (i.e. the Worlds patch), there will sometimes be 4 must-bans. In this case, it is viable for red side to just leave everything open in his first 2 bans and then reduce the pool to 3 with his third ban. You then gamble that blue side doesn’t have as much experience playing with/against a certain OP pick so they don’t know the relative valuation of the OP picks or aren’t super comfortable playing with/against these picks, since they are frequently banned in scrims as well. This does require you to be actually able to play with and versus anything (since you don’t know which out of the 3 picks blue side will pick). This strategy becomes a lot more complicated if 2 picks of the same role are OP or if some OP picks counter others. This strategy is very rarely seen on an LCS level since with 5/6 scrims a day and teams making agreements on what to play, often pros know how to play with/against everything on a really good level, but on lower levels of play, this can be a good way to not get a massive disadvantage on red side if there are a lot of OP picks available.
While preparing for a draft, you usually think about which roles you want to pick on which rotation. Usually you want to pick the role with the smallest champion pools first while avoiding getting counterpicked. Usually this means that you want to start off with picking OP champs and then picking the A-tier champions for the roles which are least vulnerable to being counterpicked (jungle and ADC). If there are a lot of A-tier picks in a certain meta, you might want to say things like ‘’on the second rotation I want to pick Ornn and Seju/J4 if they are open, otherwise we will drop to the best available ad/support and leave jungle/top until after the ban phase’’.
Ideally you want to ban away 2 (counter)-picks for enemies in a role where you have already picked yourself. If you are red side, you want to try and make sure with your third pick that both sides have picked the same roles since you get to decide which role to blindpick after banning away a few counters and which role you want to counterpick. On blue side, you generally spend 1 ban on disabling the enemy counterpick and 1 ban on banning away the champion you expect red side to blind based on their 2 previous bans. A good example of a counterpick ban for top is Gnar. If you ban Gnar you open up Maokai, Ornn and Cho’gath who have no other hard counters, so you force enemies to counterpick for mid (assuming mid and top are open) while you trade 2 evenly matched toplane tanks.
This is generally where specialist (counter)-picks get picked and teams show their hand at what kind of composition they want to run.
This is always a hotly discussed topic and I know that this varies strongly based on the personality of the coach, the team structure, the level of the players and the region in which the team is. However, the best bet is to say that things are a co-production, but I will here say what I think the best way of doing it is (or at least, the way in which I feel most comfortable doing it).
Since bans and the first 3 picks should be more or less decided beforehand, the first part of the draft is usually just a flowchart of going through pre-discussed options, so there isn’t that much discussion about those if you prepared well — though obviously, unexpected things can happen. For my teams, I am usually the person who decides which role we pick at a certain point and then I ask that laner for options, based on what is already picked/banned.
The player will then give me 2-3 picks he thinks are good. If I think those picks are good for the comp, I will then make a decision and ask the player if he is okay with the pick I selected. If I want something different than the player suggests, I will make a case for that pick, but if the player disagrees, he is the one that has the final say, since player comfort and confidence is very important in competitive matches. Obviously if you give players this final say then you as a coach are still responsible for what they pick and can (and should) be held accountable if it ends up being the wrong pick.
Once the draft is over, you need to communicate about 6 things. This means that you need to bring up the topic and give your input; the final decision is on the players:
1. Which of our lanes have pressure?
2. Which lanes want/need ganks or protection?
3. Therefore: where does the jungler start (currently it doesn’t matter that much but in some botlane metas, it really hurts them if they leash and lose the level 2 push)
4. Do we outscale or do we need to be the ones initiating plays?
5. What are their/our powerspikes?
6. What kind of comp are we playing (see overview above), how do we want to teamfight and what are our win conditions?
Make sure that the players are talking about these topics as they go into the game.
When it comes to things like runes, summoners and item builds, you should mostly leave your players to do as they see fit, since they often have a lot of experience building on various champions. The only times you should mention these things are when a very specific situation arises which requires different runes or a different item build that players might not see by themselves (for example, Corki mid with crit-based ADC on enemy team makes Randuin’s super strong on tanks, or Vlad/Mao make Executioner’s strong, or you want to have Spellbook instead of Grasp on Ornn in ranged matchups and melee matchups where the enemy jungler is unlikely to come top).
So after reading all of this theory you might be wondering: well this is all really nice and dandy but how does this help me in practice?
The #1 recommendation I always give to aspiring coaches is to make a champion chart which includes all the above variables like lane matchups, what team comps they fit into, how much AP damage they do, when they spike etc etc. You can easily make this in the excel function of google docs and you can even collaborate with other people on making it if you want to.
I could link my own here if I wanted but part of the process is figuring these kinds of things out for yourself and having a chart like this gives you an easy reference to look things up in the start when you are drafting online but most importantly it shows you what you don’t know yet.
All of this information is publicly available but not gathered in a single place. Good places to find this kind of information is by asking other coaches/players, champion.gg, Picks of the week (and other places on this website, but this is a good starting point)
There are probably many other resources that other people use, feel free to share in the comments.
Besides that, I would suggest watching vods of NA/EU LCS (Korean/Chinese drafting is often more personalized) and trying to predict every pick (which is really hard) and trying to explain to yourself (or even better, a friend), why they picked a certain pick.
If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will try to answer them to the best of my ability.
Author's Note: This article was written based on the meta from 8.2, so some things mentioned as "current meta" may be dated.
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If you enjoyed this article, follow the author on Twitter at @PNG_Daisyx. Special thanks to Ram 'Brokenshard' Djemal for providing feedback. Cover Photo - Lolesports Flickr Banner art - Joseph 'Volamel' Franco.
