Written by Jordan "Leviathan" Thwaites

Goodbye best-of 1’s; no one is going to miss you, except all of the horrible coaches that are about to be exposed during draft phase. The coaches that will draft the same composition back-to-back for the quick 0-2 loss. The coaches that pigeon hole themselves into a composition right from their first pick. The coaches that pick their siege-centric team a split push composition, only for them to siege with it and lose the game.

A good player can play all genres of his role. Whether it be tank or utility, carry or waveclear -- he can adapt to the teams needs. A good coach can craft and assemble the correct draft, communicating his vision of victory to his team, using his jungler to orchestrate the map movements that he is visualising in his mind. A good team has both of these elements, but one cannot exist without the other.

To win a game of League of Legends, you must destroy the nexus, but the nexus towers are protected by the inhibitors, which are protected by inhibitor towers (thanks, captain obvious). You won’t need much strategic diversity at this point of the game, but you have a lot of options to arrive at this game state. The most common conditions of victory that have lasted the test of time include the following:

          - Siege; Gather your teammates together and attempt to take objectives. Nullify enemy engage attempts, putting priority on tower elimination.

          - Hard Engage; Force fights using engagement tools that can’t be ignored. Win the fight, take an objective, reset and repeat.

          - Split Push; have 2-3 attacking lanes, read and react to enemy pressure and always trade positively.

          - Objective Control: Priority on champions and strategies that can control contested areas. Force your opponent to choose between fighting when they’re behind or giving you free objectives.

          - Poke: Deal lots of damage unexpectedly and control objectives during a quick power play.

    The patches will change which strategies are most popular and which champions will be used for them, but win conditions remain a constant. For as long as inhibitors protect the nexus, we will be tasked with creating a game state where we have exposed more of our enemies inhibitors than they have of ours. We will call this a closing scenario. To get there, we must use one of the traditional conditions of victory to achieve a closing scenario. But how do we decide in which manner we want to attempt victory?

    Picking a win condition is a complicated process. You must first analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the individual players on your team. Check playstyles of your players, their champion pools, their synergies with teammates and overall team direction. If your team is not rich with skill or strategic diversity, then my first comment will be that you are a bad team and you should work on this immediately -- but secondly, you will not able to effectively use this information, but rather be a victim of teams that can. One-dimensional teams are abusable in a sense that a team playing a strong, well executed “rock” strategy can lose games to a team that plays a mediocre to poor “paper” strategy.

Example: Team A can play a hard engage composition perfectly, but they force hard engage each draft. Team B likes to play siege compositions, but realizing the inevitable stylistic mismatch with team A, they decide to play a split push composition. Even though team B is less comfortable on this strategy, it should give them a higher chance of winning than to play comfort because it’s being countered.

    I have a created a hypothetical LCS metagame for the sake of example. These numbers are completely made up and not a good reflection of metagame analysis but are helpful in proving my point.  Let’s say the following viable strategies are the following:

          - Double TP Siege

          - Last pick mid counter split

          - 2 tank 2 carry hard engage

          - Good stuff (5 meta picks)

    These Compositions have the following win percentages against each other:

          - Siege wins against Split 70% of the time

          - Engage wins against Siege 70% of the time

          - Split beats Engage 70% of the time

          - Good stuff wins 50% of all games against the above 3 strategies

          - Obviously in the mirror, all strategies are 50%

Photo - Lolesports

What’s the best composition to train in this environment? If you expect a lot of Split, then you’ll want to prepare Siege. If you expect Siege, then prepare Engage. If you expect all of them to be played equally, then Good stuff wins 50% of the time, but what about the other ones? The math is as follows: (0.25 * 0.7) + (0.25 * 0.3) + (0.25 * 0.5) + (0.25 * 0.5)

= 0.25 * (0.7 + 0.3 + 0.5 + 0.5)

= 0.25 * 2

= 0.5

Each composition on average will have a 50% win rate.

I don’t want to devolve this article into a topic about metagames, so if you’d like to learn more about them, user Piemaster has a great article on starcity games on the topic.

    What we know so far:

          - There are different ways to win games of League of Legends

          - Each teams draft and desired win condition has a % of success in relation to the enemies draft and win conditions.

          - Knowing what the enemy is going to play is supposed to influence our decision making on what condition we choose.

          - Having limited conditions is a weakness.

So how do we make sure that we’re fighting fair when we’re entering a best-of series?

1. Have more than one strategy and draft ready

Pick a few heroes that you can select in the first and sometimes second rotations in draft that can play multiple lanes or strategies. Some champions in the game are very narrow in their usage, such as Nasus who is an S+ split pusher but lacks in other areas. Other champions can fill multiple jobs in a team, like Lucian or Lee Sin. These are the types of champions you want to select in the early rounds so you can have options when finalizing composition and victory conditions. If your first 3 champions picked are Lucian, Alistar and Kindred, then you can pick any type of solo laners and you should do just fine. Likewise, taking champions like Nocturne, Lissandra and Poppy in your first rotations somewhat “lock” you into a grouping composition; you can no longer pick an ADC with weak wave clear, and you limit your options.

2. Research the enemy, and research yourself from the enemies perspective

    Often times I’ve seen teams waste a week’s preparation in trying to counter an enemy’s style, only for the enemy to show up with something different than they expected because the enemy went deep into the meta and decided to play your counter. Be ready for two common scenarios: The enemy will not adjust to us at all because they feel their best strategy is better than what we can come up with to beat it -- or the enemy will make a strategy designed around beating our main strategy. Your draft should include solutions to both problems.

3. Don’t be afraid to triple ban the functional champions of a composition you just lost to

    Going 21-7 with Alliance was made easier by the fact that teams refused to adjust to us during the week. We would create a new strategy at the beginning of the week, refine the champions we wanted to use, and we got the same compositions back to back frequently. If you drop a game to a team who is considered to be of lower skill level, drop some bans on the champions that allow the composition to function in the way they used it. The mid laner started splitting right away? Ban out his assassins and pick something to bully assassins. Support player are carrying with playmakers? Get rid of Bard and Alistar and put him on a peeler. In general, if they’re having success with something, make them have success with something else.

4. Be able to identify if you lost because of composition or player error

    Sometimes you get out drafted, sometimes you get outplayed, and as DJ Khaled once said, “Congratulations, you played yourself”. Get slowly grinded out of a 0-0 game? You got outdrafted. Caitlyn flashed your Malphite ultimate? You got outplayed. Missed the ultimate completely? You played yourself. Learn the differences and adjust when you need to, not because you feel the need to.

5. Don’t be afraid to go off radar if it feels right

    Aphromoo reminded us of this during MSI with Sona, picking champions that are generally narrow and not considered meta can have its advantages. Your opponent's preparation can be discarded, gaining you an edge over superior coaching staff. If you know the champion’s strengths better than the opponents or simply have a unique way of executing, you can swing a series and put the enemies on life-tilt with a well-timed Cassiopeia top.

6. If you win game 1, stick with the strategy for game 2

    If you go up a game with a strategy, force them to show how they intend on beating it before abandoning ship. Returning to the strategy in game 3 is not a good feeling and can cause doubt in the squad if you switch it up and drop game 2, and it forces your opponent to show more cards in their deck of strategies to you to allow for a cleaner game 3. They will be less inclined to switch up what was working in game 2, allowing you more accuracy in dismantling their game 3 draft.

Coach Kkoma with his team backstage. Photo: Lolesports  

Coach Checklist:

      - Make an inventory of the possible champions your players can play.

      -  Make compositions fit to each condition, finding champions that overlap in the process.

     - Open discussion with your team on which strategies they enjoy the most, which ones they feel are weakest, and the scenarios they’d see themselves playing them.

     - Create identical data for your enemies and cross reference. Find overlappings in playstyles, pools and draft to raise or lower priority.

     - Establish a Pick priority. Start with, “if nothing is banned or picked, who do we take?” And then work down from there. Be sure to incorporate conditional clauses in your notes. “If X gets banned, then Y is #2, but if it’s not banned, then Z is #2”

     - Lay out the primary conditions for each strategy with your team. Make sure they understand that when you play a solo lane focused composition, the bottom lanes responsibility is, “don’t lose us the game”. This can be a hard concept for some players to understand.

     - Plan for everything. Have plans for all 3 games -- have plans for all draft ban/pick combinations. Plan for one of your players getting ill (looking at you, EULCS teams with no dietary coach!) and plan for the subs they could potentially bring in. Data can always be saved for later.

Leviathan was previously coach to Season 4 EULCS Summer Champions Alliance. If you enjoyed this piece, connect with him on Twitter at @LeviathanLoL. 

Photoes from Lolesports