The Smite World Championship is right around the corner and teams pulled all sorts of strategies to get a bye straight to the Top 8 at Hi-Rez Expo. In addition to Dignitas and a pair of former world champions, Splyce auto-qualified to HRX. To achieve this feat, they often ran a composition with four magical characters. This team composition has a unique damage profile and ways to cover its weaknesses. In this article, we will examine the Splyce composition and how it converts risks to wins.

Team compositions with four gods of a single damage type tend to crop up in the pro scene right before Worlds. This year, a composition with four magical characters has made some noise. Many pro league team compositions right now have three magical gods, with a Mage middle and two Guardians, but this heavily magical composition replaces the Hunter with Freya in the duo lane. A carry Assassin is played in the jungle to provide physical damage.

In general, this extremely magical team composition is designed around teamfights. Professional Smite games are often decided from teamfights, so weaker lanes can be drafted to bring a bigger impact in the mid game. Once all the pieces are put together, this Splyce composition becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Freya is a major component of this heavily magical composition. When eschewing a traditional Hunter, Freya is a great substitute. Since her rework, Freya is able to maintain ranged auto attacks during teamfights. Freya can hold pressure in the early game and has a devastating late game. Freya is tuned more as a burst character than for sustained DPS, but each basic attack still does a fair bit of damage, especially in the late game. Northern Lights and Polynomicon have low enough cooldowns that Freya can consistently throw out devastating bursts capable of nearly one-shotting squishy targets.

Freya is a strong magical carry and the best Mage to play in the duo lane.

Guardians are played a lot in the solo lane. In general, they lack the lane pressure a Warrior brings, but make up for it by bringing more crowd control. Utility and healing Mages are often being played in the short lane where they can build up a few items and levels before impacting teamfights. The solo laners in a four-magical composition aren’t anything out of the ordinary, just strong meta picks.

In this magically focused composition, the mid laner is a god that can easily apply Spear of the Magus. Gods such as Ah Puch and Zhong Kui have damage over time abilities that can apply, stack, and maintain the protection debuff. Penetration and similar effects are important in this composition because the enemy is likely to build a lot of magical defense and the lower you can reduce these protection values, the more damage the carries will deal. Ideal mid Mages have large area of effect abilities and teamfight prowess.

Similar to the mid lane, the job of the support is to bring magical penetration. Artio and Cerberus are the best supports for this role because their protection reduction is easy to apply in an area. Other supports, such as Sylvanus, Fafnir, and Ganesha, also have penetration built into their kits, but it is harder to apply and sometimes requires an ultimate. Artio and Cerberus being strong meta supports that have flex potential in drafts means you can pivot towards or against an extremely magical comp depending on the rest of the picks and bans.

Mid laners and supports are used to reduce the protections of enemies.

Compositions with four physical gods often leave the magical damage to their Guardian. However, Splyce's four magical comp uses an Assassin jungler as the sole source of physical damage. The enemy team is likely to focus on magical protections, allowing the Assassin to deal more damage than normal. In addition, any physical protections bought to mitigate the jungler mean less defense against the rest of the team. If the jungler gets going, the enemy team can be in an itemization predicament. Conversely, if the jungler gets shut down or doesn’t have much impact, the opposing team is free to focus on the magical portion of the team composition.

Because the jungler is the only source of physical damage, it needs to play a large role in the team composition. Choice Assassins need to bring utility, crowd control, and damage. A jungler with at least a decent early game will be able to stay relevant or ahead and be able to contribute to teamfights by the time opponents are building protections. Gods such as Ne Zha, Mercury, and Ratatoskr still deal a lot of damage with bruiser builds while disrupting teamfights and terrorizing opponents. The jungle role feels pretty open in the four-magical compositions because plenty of Assassins fit the criteria.

The jungler is the sole physical threat in this composition.

The key to running four magical gods on one team is to bring loads of magical penetration. Protection mitigates damage according to this equation:

Damage taken = raw damage x (100/(100+ protections))

As the protection values rise, damage taken decreases. Penetration acts to reduce the protections that damage has to fight against. As protection values get lower and lower, damage scales up more and more. At the point where protections are reduced to zero, true damage is being dealt and opponents are taking the damage noted in ability descriptions.

Cerberus and Artio bring easy magical penetration in their kits through Ghastly Breath and Decompose. Both Guardians have cone abilities to cover multiple targets or snipe the primary target hidden in a crowd. Ghastly Breath can strip as much as 42 protections in one cast and Artio’s passive can stack 2% protection reduction up to 8 times. As noted above, reducing a character’s protection has a large impact on their incoming damage.

Itemization is another way to give your team penetration. There are several items that reduce the enemy’s protections. Void Stone is strong tank item built by supports and solo laners. Its passive aura reduces the magical protection of nearby enemies by 20. This significantly weakens the enemy front line, softening them up for both magical carries. With the protection reduction from Void Stone and other items, the support can deal significant damage to carries on their own and outplaying opponents can result in kills and won teamfights.

Stone of Binding is an underappreciated item that was highly valued by Splyce support Aror. He finishes this item right after boots. Stone of Binding provides some magical power and both defenses. Its passive provides 15 penetration for 5 seconds to nearby allies every time you land a crowd control ability. When the support initiates or just uses abilities in a fight, their whole team does more damage for 5 seconds. A well-timed initiation giving your entire team 15 penetration can end a fight quickly.

Spear of the Magus and Demonic Grip are two more items that reduce enemy protections. Both items stack from on hit effects. Spear of the Magus procs on ability hits and ticks, reducing magical protection by 10 and stacking 5 times. Demonic Grip stacks on basic attacks, reducing magical protection by 12% and stacks 3 times. Penetration-like effects stack in a specific order. First, percent protection reduction takes effect, then flat reduction, then percent penetration with Obsidian Shard, and then finally flat penetration from items. When used correctly, several sources of penetration can be used to tear through multiple protection items.

Several penetration items are used to increase the composition’s damage.

Compositions with four magical gods do have some weaknesses. When replacing a Hunter with a Freya, the tower damage of a team goes way down. Freya can deal some damage to towers with Polynomicon, but while that item is on cooldown, she doesn’t do very much. Freya can also just get banned. It is hard to run four magical characters without Freya. Sol or Chronos can be replacements, but Freya is just a better character than those two.

When the whole team, or even just the jungler, gets behind, opponents can build magical defense and mitigate loads of damage. If the magical comp can’t get enough penetration online early enough, they can get snowballed on and be useless in teamfights. For all the strengths a four-magical composition has, it can just fall behind like anyone else.

In a run to qualify to the final stages of the Smite World Championship, North American team Splyce ran a series of compositions with four magical gods. This damage profile forces the opponent to build lots of magical defense, especially when Freya gets going, but allows its hypercarry jungle to bring the damage. A game where the jungler or Freya gets behind feels rough for the composition, but penetration helps the magical carries have an impact late game. Hi-Rez Expo and the Smite World Championship are quickly approaching, and teams are going to have developed new and interesting strategies that will be exciting to watch and analyze.

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