How Strategy Changes the Flow of the Game

When you go into a game, the general consensus is you want to pick something that beats the opponent, more with regards to solo-queue rather than ranked fives. With ranked fives, the team composition is usually a lot more organised and coherent in its structure. This article is going to look into some of the more common strategies that are played, professionally and sometimes in pre-mades and some of the stranger strategies that you see top level teams pull out when they try to get an edge.

Generally, your main goal is to counter the enemy strategy and the plays they make. This process starts from the picks and bans. You want to ban the champions that will hinder you the most, and pick the ones that play the way you need to. There are some cases where bans are targeted at specific players, but this is usually only in tournament play. A good example of a champion that was rarely let through the picks and bans in solo queue is Shen. When you try and play a split push strategy, Shen does really well at pushing lanes, taking down turrets and consistently being a threat across the map, as his ult is a global ability that allows him to join team members wherever they are, regardless of his location at the time. It also places a large shield on them so they are protected while he teleports in. This means that he can push a side lane until he is needed.

The counter to this strategy, though not easy to accomplish if the split push is performed correctly, is vision. Vision is your main ally and pink warding is their worst enemy. If you can counter-ward them and keep their vision to a minimal, it increases the risk of their split push, and can make them think twice before pushing too far. This is because they can't see your movements when you're not in vision, so they cannot tell accurately where you are on the map, meaning you can get the jump on them while their guard is down, and if this happens too much then they just end up feeding. Not easy but it tends to help. Poke compositions tend to help as well, since their aggressive style of play means you constantly have the enemy on the back foot, which means that the split pusher will more than likely come to help rather then try to take turrets.

A poke composition is another type of strategy widely used because of its early game aggression and the ability to snowball if you pull it off. This strategy has been very strong and common in normals and ranked (solo and fives) because of how advantageous it becomes when you manage to get the correct people ahead of the enemy early.

You always tend to stick with ranged champions that deal a lot of burst damage or can kite easily when needing to back off. This allows for constant damage output and harassment. Champions like Jayce, Nidalee, Draven and Lulu, for example, tend to be quite common picks when it comes to a poke composition team. The AP Nidalee spear is excellent at chunking health on important champions. It's also recommended to have a lot of CC with your team for when the enemy tries to get aggressive; an example would be Karthus' Wall of Pain. This places a wall that slows any champion it comes into contact with, allowing for easy kiting and harassment when getting aggressive or escaping a fight.

Gap closers are a poke composition's worst nightmare This one mechanic counters all that the team have in order to stay alive. This and hard CC will allow you to close the gap between you and the enemy team. The main weakness of a poke composition is their lack of defence in most cases. The damage dealers will almost definitely be squishy and easy to kill, and with a gap closer or hard CC you will be able to close them down and either kill them or force them from the fight, either way ending it in your favour, you find that champions like Nocturne with his long ranged lunge ultimate, Paranoia, and Leona with her Zenith Blade and Solar Flare stopping an enemy in their tracks will make this possible. Another key factor is catching the enemy out of position. If you kill a key player on their composition before a team fight this gives you free reign to engage at will and wreak havoc on the rest of their team. Remember a poke comp relies on getting ahead for maximum damage, so if you cut that off then they don't tend to do well.

So those are the more common strategies you see in League, however I would like to talk a little bit about a strategy I have recently seen played in the LCS by Velocity eSports in their game against Team Dignitas. It was a strategy that relied heavily on NOT team fighting, and more running the enemy team around the map while pressuring where there were openings. One of the key giveaways that this strategy is being used is they put Ezreal in the jungle. I know when saw it I was dumbfounded for about ten minutes (note I hadn't seen their previous games where they had used it).

The reason that the jungle Ezreal pick worked was because of his “Blue Build” and the fundamental jungle item Spirit of the Elder Lizard that allowed this to work. What occurred was a game of immeasurable pressure from all fronts; all Velocity seemed to do was attack a turret and then leave when Team Dignitas would answer with any form of aggression, meaning that they could then rotate and pressure elsewhere. This is a very strong, very advanced, strategy that allows you to force your enemy to pretty much hand you turrets on a plate, simply because they cannot answer to all the pressure you are throwing at them. It gives you complete map and objective control, meaning that you can take Barons, Dragons, and eventually inhibitors, pushing them to the very brink of just crumbling during the mid game. Almost an unbeatable strategy if played correctly, at the moment anyway.

Something I did notice in the result of this game however, and in this case specifically, was more down to pure inexperience than just the weakness of the strategy. When Team Dignitas held the push for the inhibs and forced Velocity back, they seemed to just, stop. Maybe because they didn't know how to play this style in the late game, or maybe because they couldn't, but once Team Dignitas got their foot in the ground they pushed back harder and harder and after countless bad engages and poor calls, they suddenly started rolling over the team, with Velocity being unable to do anything to stop them and eventually losing the game to Team Dignitas, but it does beg the question; If Velocity had this strategy completely worked out, and it worked in the late game, how do you answer that?

If they are forcing you to run after them and catching you out and taking your turrets, and you can't stop them, how can you win? Honest answer, you can't. However I believe that there is a way to counter this, by using global abilities and summoner spells like teleport. If you are running a split push composition, then you are by all means trying what they are, but using a more passive kind of style. If you combine that with teleport and a lot of well placed wards, then they lose that ability to stay away from you and you force them to fight. If you can manage to establish a foothold in your jungle with wards and keep them from warding it, they are going to have an issue with keeping away from you. This is basically a more aggressive split push where you are trying to make them move to where you are pushing rather than holding them away, and to counter it, you run a composition with a lot of CC and a few teleport spells. Overall the strategy works, but I can see this being figured out and countered soon.

So this was my look into some of the strategies both common and interesting, about how they work and how they can be countered. Hopefully this allows you to see how strategies work and are used, and maybe will help you in the future. Good luck!