not me ranting about lol drafting

as yall may or may not know, i frequently get pissed at the level of incompetence displayed by LoL coaches at the pro level with respect to drafting. by writing this, i hope to sort out my thoughts on the topic and explore a little while im at it, and lay them out in a (hopefully) coherent manner for your reading pleasure.

(disclaimer: im just your average lol player with little knowledge of drafting, by no means am i an expert, i just find that the number of pro games which are "decided in draft" are much higher than one would expect, and thus it signals a lack of development in the area.)

this article will largely talk about theory and philosophy. it will be league focused, but i wont be talking about champions, champion archetypes, teamfights etc etc., i will however talk about the snake ladder pick order which is used in league and therefore use its terminology, for example B1 means blue side's first pick.

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for starters, lets have some definitions. let us think of draft as an ordered process in which two or more opposing teams take turns selecting champions from a pool of options, so as to achieve a superior combination (aka team comp) when matched against the opponent.

So, at every point in the draft, a team would theoretically have to consider and filter through all 170+ champions minus champions that have been banned/already picked and evaluate which champion is the best.

we know that due to "meta restrictions" and "role restrictions" that the real number of viable picks at every position in draft is going to be much less than 170, but even after that there will still be at least 10 picks, and the question remains, what makes a champion better than another at any point in the draft?

fundamental goals

every pick must strive to satisfy one or more of these four goals:

1) The pick synergizes with your existing picks.

2) The pick counters the opponent's existing picks.

3) The pick sets up/enables a future pick or otherwise improves the quality and selection of your future picks.

4) The pick limits/dissuades certain enemy champions from coming in as a counter to your comp.

these four goals, when simplified, can be better visualized as a quadrant diagram:

of course, not all 4 goals need to be achieved in equal measure, nor is it always possible to do so. for example, the first pick of the draft B1 has no existing picks to synergize with nor any enemy picks to counter.

we quickly find that it cannot be possible that the only goal of the first pick is to interact with the 9 other future picks, and it isnt. lets talk about the other side of the coin: power picking.

power pick

in the practical realm of drafting, we understand that every champion/card/hero/whatever (im just gonna use champion from now on) has a unique power level, determined by how it interacts with other champions + game mechanics in the current patch. it goes without saying that picking champions with a higher innate power level is a favourable thing to do.

the philosophy of power picking is a simple and straightforward one: we simply pick the most powerful champion in each role. (spoiler alert: this is what usually happens in pro play)

however, power picking goes against the fundamental goals outlined above. when you pick a champion that is good because of its innate power level, this means that a certain degree of the champion's synergies and counter interactions are being overlooked, and vice versa. with every pick, a compromise is made on either or both of these philosophies, and the ideal scenario is one of least compromise.

thus, coaches need to have a deep understanding of the game while acknowledging the compromise at play, so that at each point the philosophies may be accurately weighed against each other. is it more important for me to have a powerful individual pick or it is better for me to consider the other nine champions in the draft? and this isn't a binary question either, we could weigh a power 8/10 champion with 6/10 synergy vs a 5/10 champion with 10/10 synergy. the possibility space balloons very quickly as more and more details and nuances are entertained.

yet, the answer to such a daunting question is surprisingly simple: how balanced is the current patch?

consider a primitive element game of grass/ fire/ water. if fire attack deals 500 damage while the other two deals 100 (aka game is imbalanced), then it doesnt matter if your enemy is all water, you would go fire every time anyway.

the more imbalanced the game is, the better power picking is, and vice versa.

information

now consider a balanced version of the game: if every ability deals 100 damage and x2 to the type it beats, then you would always want to pick later so that you can pick the type that beats the opponent's. the core idea is to make decisions after gaining information.

pick later => more information to work with + dont give away information => good

(the converse is also true, because picking earlier is giving away information.)

this does come with the caveat that the draft is face up, so that said information can be seen and acted upon. drafting strategies in any game would look vastly different depending on whether the teams could see each other's picks.

anyhow, league drafting happens to be fully face up, so the caveat mentioned becomes a truth, and there becomes no way* to conceal your picks (there is, i'll get to that later). and because the draft sequence is a fixed order, the blue team must inevitably pick first and show their hand.

blind pick

a blind pick is when a champion is picked first in the role matchup; the pick is made without knowing what the role matchup is, and the champion accepts that it should run into a disadvantage because the enemy can now pick against it (aka counterpicking).

there's no sugarcoating it: blind picking is theoretically disadvantageous. thus, teams should want to find other boons so as to lessen the burden of blind picking a champion.

the main way to salvage a blind pick is to power pick, since power picks are agnostic to other picks anyway. one might say that having the strongest possible champion in the patch is big plus, but that argument is rather flawed in my opinion due to the ban phase which occurs before it. because red side has the last ban, they always have the final say in what the B1 - R1 trade is. so if only one OP pick is left, red would ban it last, and if there are two, then red could leave them both up and trade. so the idea of B1 OP champ = blue win is quickly met with R1 = also OP champ + red gets to respond to B1 with information.

if blind picking is bad, and counterpicking is good, it follows that the side with later picks should be favoured in draft, and that the later the pick, the more powerful it is. considering that blue side has to blind pick thrice (B1 B3 B5), and red side only twice (R2 R4), and the fact that red side has last pick, this would lead us to believe that red side is favoured in draft, and that having first pick puts blue side in zugzwang.

yet, in the current scene as well as in the 8 year history of this draft format, blue side has always been favoured by most pro teams, despite its shortcomings from a strategical perspective.

what gives?

i acknowledge that pro teams generally lean heavily towards power picking as a philosophy. but fortunately, there is another concept at play which lessens the burdens of blind picking and therefore blue side: flex picks.

flex pick

flex pick, from the word flexible, describes a champion with one or both of the following qualities:

1) the champion can be played in multiple roles, or

2) the champion can be played with different builds which offer a different playstyle

the core idea of a flex pick is to conceal information so as to achieve a similar effect as picking later; it is non-committal.

theres one more category to add here before proceeding, which is a neutral pick. it basically describes a champion which is largely resistant to counterpicking. it either has inherent value in every game, or the champion can be played in different ways even with the same build, thereby allowing it to slot in various compositions.

remember when i said B1 inevitably shows information? what if blue side flex picks/neutral picks B1? this way, if red side answers with a champion that counters one of the modes of the B1 champion, you simply play the B1 champ in the other lane/mode, thereby alleviating or dodging a bad matchup. there is a additional benefit of flexing champs this way, in that it can cause the enemy's counterpick to turn into a blind pick.

if this sounds like a win-win scenario, it kind of is. what this means, is that the red team can and should do the same thing to blue: what is supposed to be a blind pick in R2 can turn into a flex pick, and blue will respond by doing the same thing to red, and the draft quickly turns into a game of flex chicken, where each team is trying to make picks while allowing themselves to further pivot later down the line. information concealment is achieved by virtue of having more options and a lack of commitment.

and this to me is the ultimate sign of lack of draft understanding in the pro scene. the fact that most drafts are concluded without ever entertaining a single flex pick show a lack of appreciation and understanding of the draft metagame. drafting should be a graceful chess match where teams are constantly trying to out-maneuver the other through flexibility and hiding information, but in many games in the current scene the way the coaches draft is akin to racing to see who can dig themselves into a hole faster.

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happy drafting~