Evo's Rift: A look at Picks/Bans by a Diamond Player

Loyal readers, passerbys and league addicts, welcome to my series of articles designed to teach you how to LoL (5v5 Summoners Rift). Not only will I explain to you every general step of approaching the game, but I will also drown you in theoretical brilliance. I am 'evo' a diamond euw player committed to spreading knowledge of the game, feeding to win and proving superior game sense trumps greater mechanics.

The pick/ban phase is a stage we are all accustomed with. From the trials and tribulations of attempting to get people to respect pick order in soloq, or try and first pick Kassadin (rip), to creating structured team compositions in 5v5. There are many factors to take into consideration during the pick/ban phase - many of which don't follow any form of chronology - so I'll be highlighting the most important.

For the sake of the article I will assume the game type is premade 5v5 Summoners Rift. I'll start by breaking down the elements of this phase of the game and will separate them as much as possible although most tend to intertwine.

The very first thing to consider is what side you are picking for. Blue vs. Purple, a debate that confuses newbies and infuriates veterans. The blue side is given the first pick advantage, an arguably more difficult top lane to gank and the potential to steal dragons over the wall. It can also be said it is given a strategically superior position in approaching the Baron Nashor, as there are more open and safer areas from which you can approach the area. All of these things are very important to consider when picking and banning.

If there is a valued or OP champion, (such as Kassadin for a while in the last few months), it was vital to ban them if you are on purple side, since blue side can leave them open for first pick, which essentially means purple side has only 2 bans to their name. Obviously there is counter play to these champions when teams are premade, but the problem is the counter play options are very limited, or reliant on very unpredictable circumstances in the game, thus it is easier to use a ban to avoid such difficult scenarios. It can also be argued that champions with little top lane mobility, such as Ryze or Mundo are better on blue side as a simple tribush ward tends to fend off ganks, because going through the river is an annoying deviation from a standard jungle rotation, on top of which the wraiths tend to be warded, making ganking hard.

The general trend is pick what's strong, as these picks tend to be solid in the meta. The meta is what defines how the game is played, and depends on things such as champion balance at that point in time, the items available and the style of play used depending on the region (as made obvious by the uber aggressive chinese teams). The seemingly farm heavy season 2 meta saw champions such as Orianna and Karthus being first picked, whereas the majority of season 3 was dominated by Kha’zix and Zed.

Teams still deviated from the meta with champions that were just OP such as Diana, or built team comps for strong champions that did not fit, such as Vayne bot lane during the era of Corki/Ezreal/Graves, and this is very much possible but is something that has to be carefully considered. If the meta is wombo combo, you want a reliable escape on your adc. Or perhaps you choose to just build a team designed to peel; it all depends. In a premade 5s team, the best approach is to first know what it is that you can play comfortably, then see what fits best together whilst simultaneously learning what is considered strong if you do not play it. The next step is pick strategy which can work in two main ways – pre determined team comps, or counter picks.

If you have a few team comps prepared, depending on bans you can eliminate those that you cannot play, then pick the champions that are concurrent in multiple comps (these tend to be the OPs, such as pre nerf Kassadin, pre nerf Zed, Shyvana/Renekton). Then depending on the enemy picks you can either pick champions that counter those but still fit in the comp (e.g. they pick Orianna, you pick Ziggs since he is strong + fits into your comp). These can be out of the meta champions too, thank you Lord Youngbuck for bringing out the Donger.

There are more things to consider when picking team comps since they have to coincide with your gameplay strategy. If you want to snowball your top lane Jax against an enemy Shyvana, and they have jungle Lee Sin, a Kha’zix pick is much more useful than Amumu for the 2v2 potential, otherwise you will get consistently counterganked and thus annihilated. If you have a Vayne bot lane, maybe picking Renekton top instead of Mundo would be better to have more pressure on the map to deviate the enemy’s attention elsewhere. This brings me to another point; picks have to have certain tradeoffs, be it a weak lane phase for a strong teamfight, or strong poke potential for low 5v5 teamfight power, so do take these things into account when creating a composition.

There are a multitude of scenarios to take into account when going into pick/ban phase, from comfort to pick strength, balancing early game with later game, managing objective control, considering split push potential, poke vs hard engage, the list goes on. But play what you believe to be strong, and execute your strategy efficiently and you will win the game. The best example of this was the extremely unorthodox split push Nidalee brought out by Stanley in the season 2 World Finals in the TPA vs Azubu Frost series. Their high pressure strategy combined with last picking Nidalee to deny some counter play worked brilliantly, and is a great example of strategy doing work.

This article was very mixed up since there are so many factors to consider in no particular order, but I believe this is a good framework to consider when entering a very important part of the game. Look forward to the next instalment of this series!