League of Legends has put a lot of focus on Clash lately and with it becoming a constant, many friends are teaming up to try and win these pseudo-competitive matches. While overall play can win fights in the game and grant you advantages, we would like to give you another edge that sometimes goes under the radar. You can really put your team above the opponent by learning how to effectively draft.

This guide will give you the tools needed to gain minor advantages in Clash by learning how to build an effective team composition, how to research your opponent accurately, and how to adapt your plans mid-draft. If you follow these simple, but overlooked, principles you should go into each game with advantages in at least 3 of the 5 roles on the team. This overall should give you a 20% increase in potential to win the game even before minions spawn.

What Makes an Effective Team Composition?

While team compositions are not the focus of this article, it is still extremely important to understand what makes a good composition. In short, a good team composition is when the five champions for your team all work well together to complete certain goals. Now, this is a bit of a misnomer and I believe that the attainable goal is to have at least a group of 3 characters that synergize well together. The other misnomer about team comps is that they win through a single goal. Having multiple win conditions is extremely important because flexibility is much more important in the current meta.

So what things should you look for in a team comp? There are actually two tiers of compositions, I will split them into major and minor comps. Major comps are comps that focus on full game play, also known as macro. Teamfight and splitpush are two examples of major comps. These are pretty self-explanatory as the main focus of the comp is in the name. Each of these major comps uses their namesake to gain advantages over the enemy team and push your team to a win. Now let's look at the more nuanced and important minor comps.

When we talk about minor comps, we are talking about synergies between two champions. Probably the most well known combos are Yasuo/Gragas (thanks LCS/LEC) and Xayah/Rakan. Thinking about Yasuo/Gragas specifically, this minor comp would be considered an engage comp. Engage comps are focused on just what they sound like, they go in and start teamfights. Major comps that benefit from engage comps are the obvious teamfight, but also the less known pick comps. Another example of a minor comp would be Ziggs/Caitlyn, which would be considered a "seige comp." Siege comps focus on removing turrets from the map from afar but can also set up for major objectives like Dragon and Baron with great set up. I recommend that you pick one Major Comp and two or three Minor Comps that fit under that umbrella.

Pre-Game Planning and Practice

Now that you know about building better team comps, it's time to group up with your friends and talk about what you want to play. Obviously you want to hop into normals and customs with your desired team to practice together. However, one of the things that falls by the wayside is learning and utilizing power picks and building the comps around them. If you play with your friends enough, you probably know who the best players are and what champions each person is comfortable on. You should almost always build around the best champion of your best player. Whether that is your midlaner's Zed or your jungler's Sett, giving your best player a chance to carry the team will be the biggest advantage to get a win.

There is a chance though that this pick could be banned out. We will talk about the scouting phase of clash later on in the article but you should know that you can't always rely on your best player getting their go-to pick. This means that learning to play around any player on any of their best champs is ideal. The more flexibility you have in draft and team comps the more potential you have to win. Every game is going to be different and your opponents will not always prioritize the same picks and bans, knowing how to play multiple different comps will allow you to work around any speed bumps in the draft.

Scouting - The Clash Equivalent to Coaches and Analysts

Many players see Clash as the closest they will get to playing on an LCS stage in a truly competitive environment while others see it as a way to test their mettle against some of the others topping the Solo Queue Charts. However, there is one important difference between Clash and Pro Play. In professional play, there is a large support staff behind the five players on stage. The staff of each professional team has a group of coaches and analysts that watch games and focus on different parts of the matches. The coaches and analysts will know the champion pools of the opponents and what current team comps they are focused on.

To make up for this lack of pre-planning, Riot gives you about six minutes of time to scout out your opponent. You want to use this time wisely and there are multiple things you can do to do that. Before we get into those tips it should be noted that sometimes the information is misleading. The champions and roles of those opponents might not be what they are planning to play during this clash.

First, take screenshots. This sounds like a simple and easy thing to do but it is honestly one of the most important parts of the scouting phase. Put these screenshots in a group chat like Skype or Discord so that they can be referenced at a later time. Taking a screenshot of each tab in the scouting screen is incredibly important as each tab has essential information.

This first tab will tell you both the ranks of each player on the enemy team and how they have performed on different champions in their ranked games. This usually will give you a good idea of the main role each player and what champions they are comfortable enough on to play in ranked games.

This second tab will tell you the mastery levels that those players have on different champions. This is another way to get an idea on the champions that these players invested their time on outside of just ranked. This could tell you that someone loves to play a champion in a role they dont get as much time on in the ranked queues.

The third and final tab is the Clash History tab. This tab gives you an idea of what roles and champions your opponents have played in previous Clash tournaments. This is honestly the biggest font of information on your opposing team in most cases. Usually teams will stay together throughout multiple Clashes and this tab shows you the games that they won and lost on.

On top of the in-client scouting tabs, you should also look up your opponents on OP.GG or another site. Because you are given the names of the players you are fighting against, you can check their match history through that site or app. This information can be used to see if the team has been practicing together. This can tell you how good their practice is going and what types of comps they have been most successful with.

Using the example here, my team decided that we wanted to prevent the AD Carries from getting on their comfort picks so Miss Fortune and Jinx were going to be banned. We also saw from OP.GG that their mid and top were both practicing Akali recently and wanted to remove that heavy threat.

The Draft - Flexibility and Knowing Your Comp

Before I show you the draft of this Clash game, I want to talk about my team and our priorities in the draft. One of the things we talked about before queuing up for Clash was that we wanted our midlaner to play Kassadin because we knew his strength in the current meta. We also knew that the enemy midlaner had recently played Kass and knows it well enough to play in ranked. That being said, our midlaner had also told us that they knew enough counters to Kassadin that this contested pick would have been a fine champ for us to play into.

I have labeled the champions in the order of when they were picked in draft and I will explain each part of the draft and what decisions were made in the draft. First of all, the first phase is Ban Phase 1, when each team gets to ban out 3 champions, one at a time. Our team was first pick, meaning that we banned first as well. As stated in the last section, we decided to ban MF, Akali, then Jinx. Our opponents used their scouting phase to make the choice to ban out our Sett jungle, Senna ADC, and Zac Jungle. Something that I can't talk too much about in this example is knowing how to change bans based on the opponent's bans. In a later game this clash we actually had talked about if the enemy team banned Lee Sin, we would refrain from banning the Zac so that we could first pick it over their jungler.

I talked about our team deciding that we wanted to pick Kassadin for our mid lane but were not prioritizing it because it is extremely vulnerable to certain Attack Damage Midlaners. What we decided to do instead was prioritize the Lee Sin for our jungler. The opposing team then picked up Sylas and Caitlyn at picks two and three. At this point we were not sure where the Sylas was going so we wanted to pick up our AD Carry in Aphelios and a Top/Support Flex Pick of Swain.

The Flex Pick - A Secret Weapon of Psychological Warfare

In this phase of the draft I want to talk about the importance of Flex Picks. Both teams here have picked something that could flex between multiple roles. One of the main things about the way draft happens where teams trade off picking one or two champions at a time. This allows both teams to actually counterpick champions that were picked before them. If you can actually pick a champ that has two or more roles it can be played effectively in, it will allow you to avoid being straight up counterpicked. This can allow you to counterpick something against the enemy to create an advantage before minions spawn.

After we picked up the Swain and Aphelios, the enemy team picked their support in Leona and we moved to Ban Phase Two. In the second ban phase our team still had Mid and Top/Support to pick while the opposing team could still be picking for Top/Jungle/Mid as Sylas could go in any of those roles. Our team looked back at the screenshots we took during scouting phase and focused our second round of bans on Junglers because we believed that the Sylas had a good chance of going into Mid and we could still Flex Swain between Top and Support depending on what they picked. The enemy team decided to ban out Mordekaiser and Urgot as they had seen our Top had played those quite a bit in previous games and probably thought that the Swain was going Support.

The enemy team then pulled out an interesting pick with the Udyr for Jungle. We had already picked our Jungle, so we were really looking to pick up our Kassadin in this rotation and decided to pick up a Nautilus, which we also knew was a Top/Support flex pick for us. This allowed us to see what their last pick was to see which champion we wanted to put in the top lane. Once they picked up the Cho'Gath we had Nautilus go Top with Swain being the strong Support to back up our AD Carry.

From this you can see that we worked into picking our main focus of the Kassadin, grabbed a botlane that synergizes better than the opponent and was still a high threat Bot duo. Our Jungle felt comfortable in the matchup against Udyr and our Top picked a good champion to deny Cho'Gath easy ult stacks in lane as well as good engage. This meant that we felt like we had advantages in all five roles, which is the ideal of a good draft.

Play the Game!

After analyzing our draft, you should notice that our Major Comp is "Teamfight" based and we have the Minor Comps of "Engage", "Assassination", and "Pick". This coupled with our full team advantage gave us a lot of confidence in our chance to win this game easily. We then went on to win the game in convincing fashion by using these advantages gained in our draft.

Recap - The Main Takeaways

Draft has a lot of moving parts and you should not expect it to go perfectly 100% of the time. There will be games where you get outdrafted, other games where you outdraft the opponent, and even other games where the draft looks even between the two teams. It will also take you a little bit to know every little nuance in the draft and ban phases. This being said, the main things you should take away from this guide is the following:

1) Practice and learn your team's best Comps. Know which Major and Minor Comps you play best and practice many iterations of them.

2) Use your scouting phase wisely. Take screencaps and look up your opponents on OP.GG or another app/site.

3) Ban the biggest threats and prioritize your best champions.

4) Utilize your Flex Picks. Find champions that can be played in multiple roles to avoid getting counterpicked.

5) Take the advantages from draft and push them to win the game.

I hope this guide helps you and your Clash team draft better and that helps you win more games.