A comparison of LCS bans and Solo Queue bans

The teams in the Leauge of Legends Championship Series consist of the best teams in North America, Europe, and Asia. Naturally, since we're talking about the best players in the world, casual and amateur gamers should do their best to emulate them. Now, this isn't necessarily true. So we're going to do a quick rundown of the most banned LCS champions and see if they're necessarily bans worth of Solo Queue.

NA and EU bans

A full analysis of Picks and Bans in NA can be found here.

So, these are just the top five bans. Honorary mentions include Xin Zhao, Elise, and Thresh. Now, if we look at Solo Queue, we see that Thresh, Twisted Fate, Hecarim, Elise, Zed, and Shen have been the most banned. Here, we see that Thresh, Twisted Fate, Elise, and Shen are similar. And its pretty obvious why, the global presence of Shen and Twisted Fate is incredibly strong in the current pushing meta. Thresh and Elise would also work, as playing against the easy harass by prenerf Elise was incredibly infuriating, and Thresh seems to be a better blitzcrank.

Image Courtesy of LolKing.net

But why are the other bans that are seen in LCS not the same as Solo Queue bans? Well the obvious answer is that League of Legends has a lot more players than they do LCS watchers. Outside of that fact though, it seems like it should be more. For instance, in the LCS we see a whole lot of Kayle picks and bans. Yet the same cannot be said for Solo Queue, even before the nerfs. Well, Kayle isn't a hard champion by really any means, and her damage and utility was and still is incredibly strong. So why aren't we seeing the same rate of bans? Well with Solo Queue and LCS, the biggest difference is the communication you have with your team, and for Kayle to work properly, communication is key for properly timing your ult for the ultimate clutch play.

However, the same is true for Shen with his Ultimate, and Shen is a much harder champion to play as he has a relatively weak laning phase, and his taunt takes quite a bit of mastery. So why is it that Shen sees so much hate in solo queue, and Kalye doesn't? Well, first off, we have to consider that Shen has been pretty much perma-banned in solo queue since his rework, and habit probably has a large part of this, I still see people banning Vi or Xin Zhao, even after their respective nerfs made them fall out of dominance. Alternatively, Kayle has only recently come into light with the Nashor's Tooth rework, and was nerfed pretty soon after.

Also, we see with Shen something similar that happens often in Solo Queue, and explains why Amumu, Nasus and Hecarim see such unusually high ban rates in Solo Queue. All four of these champions have relatively weak early games, and to counteract that, a rather strong late game. However, being able to shut down champions that are weaker early through early dragons or repeated ganks are a lot harder without solid communication, so when one of these champions is able to get farmed and suddenly appear, it looks like that champion is overpowered, rather than strong without an exploitable weakness, resulting in those champions being banned, and to be honest, that's fine, it really can be hard to exploit an enemy champion when you can't communicate properly.

So whats our conclusion? Well, we see that LCS and Solo Queue bans actually have some differences and some similarities, and the reason this is the case is just due to the different arenas that the two games are played in. However, I do have one request for all my fellow summoners: Please pay attention to what champions are being nerfed, and stop wasting your bans on champions that were banned months ago. Good luck on the Fields of Justice!