In League of Legends, it can feel great when you build and snowball a lead. It feels like you can suffocate your opponents and take what you want. However, there is almost always a way back in for your opponents if you can’t bring the game to a close efficiently by utilizing your win condition and avoiding overextending. That one shut down on their AD Carry or extra elemental drake might be all they need to keep the game alive.

Understand Your Comp's Win Conditions

How should you actually approach your opponent’s nexus in order to get that last hit? This is defined by your team composition’s strengths and weaknesses versus your opponent’s. It feels like every other game that you hear “We Scale!” even though this might not be true, or just not that straightforward. You need to understand not just when your team is at its strongest but what is the most effective tactic once you’re at this strong point. If you have an Ornn, Azir, and Aphelios all on the same team then it is quite obvious that you’ll outscale most compositions with simple grouping and teamfighting.

A team composition with Twisted Fate and Tryndamere can similarly outscale their opponent but with a much different look. While the teamfighting composition will want to pull their opponents into a grouped scenario the Twisted Fate and Tryndamere composition will look to pull their opponents across the map. This should put your opponents at a consistent disadvantage while looking for individual picks and objectives while your opponents scramble to match you. There are also team compositions that simply don’t have scaling as a main win condition. A team composition with Syndra mid and Pantheon jungle or top might not have consistent damage to get through an effective frontline in teamfights but they can quickly snowball the game with proactive map control in the early- and mid-game. Focus on understanding the strategy that allows your team the best opportunity to win.

Prioritize Your Objectives

Knowing your win condition is not enough to get you across the finish line, you also need to execute effectively which requires correct prioritization. The early game proactive composition needs to prioritize different things than the scaling team fighting composition. Prioritize what your team needs then prioritize what your team has available to take.

An early game composition will need to take every objective available to them as they come. This should start with heavy prioritization of drakes and plates since they might need a Dragon Soul to make up for the stat buffs to match heavier scaling compositions and they will need it as fast as possible.

Plate gold will also help them snowball their gold lead faster. One thing that can help you with these other objectives is a good early Rift Herald however it is suboptimal to pick this up at the expense of slowing down your drake stacking. A scaling composition that is facing them will look to deny quick drake stacking and gold scaling but keep consistent income through more minor objectives like a constant intake of minion waves and jungle camps. When it comes to the biggest buffs in the game like Baron Nashor and Elder Dragon it’s obvious that these can be large win conditions for any team once they get them. The point where these can differ between compositions is how to capture them. You will rarely be able to get these objectives without the enemy team contesting. So how will you outmaneuver your opponent?

You simply use the strength of your composition. For an early game proactive composition, you’ll want to catch an opponent when they’re alone or weak and snap on the Baron as early as possible so you can knock down the opponent’s base. For a scaling team fighting composition, you’ll want to delay the opponent’s advances towards Baron until you are able to get your carries on strong item spikes. Once you reach your spikes, you then want to force the opposing team to fight you at the baron.

Probably the hardest approach would be the split pushing composition that includes champions like Twisted Fate and Tryndamere. You want to pull the opposing team across the map and then attack while they’re vulnerable. This may look like taking a Baron when they try to collapse on a side lane or it may start with catching an important carry in rotation to the wave that you have been pushing or simply just taking towers if they don’t respond to you in time.

As for Elder Dragon part of fighting for it is also denying or securing the Dragon Soul. As a scaling composition denying an early aggressive composition each elemental drake early on buys you an extra 5 minutes of time to continue to fight for the Dragon Soul. If you can delay them from the Dragon Soul and Elder Dragon for long enough then you can start to take control and get the Dragon Soul for yourself once the scaling kicks in.

The early aggressive composition is obviously going to fight this from happening with their superior early strength to the best of their abilities. The split push composition will not generally be online for the earliest drakes but will play for picks similar to how it plays around drakes. If they can get early drakes and want to avoid fights in the mid-game then they could even potentially trade inner and inhibitors towers for the opponents to have a few drakes.

It’s also important to prioritize what is available to you and not overreach for objectives in your opponent’s control. If your opponents are in control of a certain objective then you should work your way around the objective especially if you have a lead in other areas of the map. If your team is in the lead and the opposing team commits resources to a certain objective you can out trade them across the map if there is too much risk in fighting them in the current game state because of their control or item spikes. For example, if your bot lane recalls and the opposing team immediately goes for a drake then it may be unavoidable to contest even with a lead. However, you can trade up for a quick Rift Herald into dropping the first tower and accelerating your gold lead.

Towers are important in ending the game but are most commonly grabbed during power plays.

Make Power Plays And Know When to Make Them

Power plays are generally how you’re going to get most towers towards the end of the game. A power play is simply an aggressive push you can make once you create pressure on the map. This pressure can come from a forced rotation from a split push or killing your opponents. It also comes when you get strong neutral buffs like Elder Dragon or Baron Nashor. These are the times in the game that are most crucial to ending a game strong.

When you get an opportunity for a power play you need to immediately strike and get the most out of it, but you also need to make sure to avoid overextension.

Avoid Overextending

Now all of these objectives simply tell you how to secure leads and create opportunities to do the real final purpose of league. This final purpose is to take down towers and take down your opponent’s base. These objectives all should help you to use your lead to take towers as you can push your opponents back or spread them across the map. While you’re pushing for these towers with your lead it’s important to never overreach and put yourself in a situation that allows for the opponent to utilize their team’s strengths or simply give them a burst of gold to come back into the game. This requires a sense of when your opponent can begin to turn your siege against you.

Very obvious indicators are when you’re pushing after a winning teamfight and your opponents begin to respawn. They will have full resources along with spending their gold when you haven’t gotten a chance to buy yet. Situations like this can happen anytime your opponent has reset and you haven’t. Be sure to cut off your power plays once the opposing team can come at you in a group.

One successful collapse can completely blow open the game with strong neutral objectives going into the opponent’s favor potentially. It is the most harmful if you are in a situation where your opponent’s outscale you and you need to end the game on a timer.

Always reset as a group after a power play so your opponent cannot stagger death timers allowing them a power play of their own.

Power through your opponent’s nexus and good luck in Solo Queue.