How to Win Draft in League of Legends & Why Blueside is “OP”

Part I

Believe it or not, winning a draft does not revolve around knowing which champions are currently “op” or “meta”; rather, a true understanding of the game and champions’ actual power levels along with how they interact with each other. There is little to no point in knowing an answer if you do not know how to recreate that answer or why it is an answer. Knowing a formula will allow you to consistently find an answer regardless of other variables.

The first and most egregious mistake made by teams consistently for years is “handshaking” picks in roles. For example, Rell and Leona in the support role at the ongoing Worlds 2024. Rather than use critical thinking and create an actual advantage for yourself in draft with counters such as Janna or Poppy (Poppy has seen some play, but not enough relative to how good she is), teams will often just autopilot and “handshake” the matchup.

For example, look at this Leona handshake into Rell by DK against TES. They see 4 dive champions showing, and still decide Leona is the best pick. Imagine a Janna here, or a Tahm Kench.

DK vs TES Game 2, Worlds 2024 Swiss Stage

This can often be seen in other roles over the years (Maokai vs Sejuani jungle, Azir vs Corki mid, etc) with game-breaking counters existing the whole time (ex. Olaf/Trundle, Aurelion Sol), yet never (or extremely rarely) picked. Why teams seemingly refuse to pick such champions is a whole other conversation (“LCK didn’t play it”) that I won’t be delving into at this time. It’s also important to consider a champion’s value in the draft overall and not solely the lane matchup. For example, Janna or Poppy vs a full dive comp, or Xerath/other long range vs a comp with little engage gain exponential value in teamfights even if their lane matchup isn’t the best.

FlyQuest drafting since the LCS Summer Finals has very much been a breath of fresh air, and their matches vs HLE/GEN in particular gave me the motivation to write this. Because it is not FlyQuest playing “weird” or “cheese” champions, they are simply demonstrating a much clearer understanding of draft and the game. They showed both the willingness and the ability to pick lesser-played champions in excellent spots for them, nullifying multiple advantages that HLE/GEN would otherwise have had over them.

For example, the game FlyQuest won against HLE, they drafted Nunu. Let’s take a look at their comp and why Nunu fits well. He has a strong carry toplaner that he can build supportive for, he doesn’t mind being double AP with mid because he can itemize Abyssal Mask easily, and Nunu combined with Kalista is probably the best objective secure in the game. Looking at the enemy champs that were showing, Nunu is very good against all 3 because he offers excellent zone control and the only way to stop his snowball is Zyra E.

HLE vs FLY game 2, Worlds 2024 Swiss Stage

Another thing to consider is that while other strategies such as 1–3–1 do exist, the majority of League of Legends games come down to a 5v5 teamfight at drake 3 or 4. Therefore the relative expected strength of your champions at ~20–23 minutes as well as the synergy and teamfighting strength of your composition should be a strong consideration in draft.

Part II

The infamous quote from T1’s coach Polt after their MSI finals loss in 2022 was this: “The reason we lost was because we weren’t able to play on the blue side three times.” But is blueside really OP?

To answer that question, we must examine how a draft actually works. A draft is typically a “call and response” format. Blueside makes the first “Call”, and typically one or both of redside’s first 2 picks are responses to that “Call”. Blueside then gets 2 responses of their own, and so on. So in a typical draft, blueside is “leading” the draft because they have the first “Call”. Leading is easier than responding, and that is what I believe leads to the misconception that blueside is “OP”. Objectively it isn’t better than redside, in fact I actually believe redside is the better side IF you are skilled enough to make use of it. However, blueside being easier to draft from combined with the failure of teams to make use of or perhaps even understand redside drafting has led to this connotation that blueside is overpowered. Let’s look at the DK vs TES draft again in the below image. The biggest mistake of the draft was the Leona handshake into Rell, and that ended up losing the game for DK.

Calls and Responses in draft

Yone is an excellent “Call” on the Worlds patch for B1 as the champion is exceptionally strong and can (although it has rarely been done at Worlds) be flexed to top in addition to his main role of mid. Combined with Sejuani and Jax, this is in my opinion the BIS topside on the patch. TES has a decent first response with Aurora and Skarner, two other very powerful champions like Yone, but they fumble with a weak K’Sante pick on R3. An example of what should have been picked on R3 is Poppy (strong against 3 dash champs already showing & can be flexed either top or support). TES “Calls” with Rell on R4, which can be a pretty vulnerable pick but they feel safe to do so since Poppy and Renata are banned. DK completely fails the response with the Leona handshake into Rell and Miss Fortune, ultimately losing them the game when there are other picks available such as Janna and Ezreal.

As aforementioned, one draft mistake is handshaking role matchups, and especially on redside you want to avoid this. This is because one of your main advantages on redside is flex picks and the last pick of both rounds of the draft. However, too often this simply ends up as being one solo lane maybe having a counterpick and nothing else. In such cases it is quite easy to understand why people might feel that blueside is better or OP, because they have not used redside correctly.

For a correct usage of redside, let’s look at GEN vs FLY game 1. FlyQuest picks Seraphine early knowing that GEN will think it is support. They bait out the Leona pick as a “response” to the Seraphine, and then respond with their own counterpick of the Alistar, flexing Seraphine to mid into an acceptable matchup for her since GEN blindpicked a “safe” midlaner in the Ahri. If we examine the draft order, GEN effectively “blinded” 4 of their champions, all roles except adc. This is precisely what redside’s goal should be nearly every game, force the enemy into safer “blind” picks so that you can leverage the flexibility of your responses.

GEN vs FLY game 1, Worlds 2024 Quarterfinals

Of course, leveraging flexible drafts requires both the willingness and ability (through practice) to do so (able to play/flex unique or “non-meta” champions), and as previously mentioned, for a myriad of reasons most teams are seemingly unable to do that. I am hopeful after FlyQuest’s demonstration that more teams will be willing to practice and work on their own drafts rather than just copying what is played by the perceived best players/teams.

One more concept to keep in mind as blueside especially is that if your “Call” is not strong enough, the enemy team simply doesn’t have to “Respond” to it and can instead make “Calls” of their own, turning the tables on you. An example of this was in the 100T vs R7 series, in which 100T picked B1 K’Sante twice, as well as R1 once. This priority was quite confusing to me because K’Sante is not a strong enough “Call” and R7 felt comfortable to make their own “Calls” by blindpicking Ezreal and taking Renekton into K’Sante, a winning matchup. 100T pick Lucian Nami and by this point have completely lost control of the pace of the draft, which as blueside you should be leading.

100T vs R7 game 2, Worlds 2024 Playins

Hopefully you have learned something new in this brief insight into drafting in League of Legends. Of course, this is only scratching the surface so I am open to any questions!