League of Legends How to draft & execute a teamfight composition

The Execution

Draft and execution are two completely different things. A team can head onto the Rift with a perfect team composition yet fail to come out on top due to not following their win condition. When it comes to teamfight compositions, the win condition couldn’t be any clearer – win the game through teamfights, and here is a quick explanation on how to achieve that win condition.

Early Game (1-15 mins):
In the early stages of the game, the composition plays out like any other. The jungler focuses the lanes with strong match-ups to try and get a small early lead, but the main focus of the first 15 minutes of the game is to stay even by tracking the enemy jungler and preventing any snowball opportunity from the enemy team.

On an individual level, your job is to focus on farming and helping your jungler/laners in the early game. A teamfight composition is not built for the first 10 minutes, but instead to win 5v5 fights in the mid and late game. Ideally the jungler will find opportunities to gank and edge ahead in gold early on, but its absolutely fine to leave the laning phase on even footing, especially when facing a team looking to snowball.

The first opportunity to take a lead will present itself with the first dragon contest of the game. While its unwise to risk falling behind for Ocean or Cloud Dragons, if the enemy team is willing to group up for an early drake, it is an opening for a teamfight. Establishing early vision control is key to winning this early skirmish around the objective, so ideally the support and jungler will group up and spread wards around the river and into the enemy jungle to create teamfight opportunities.

Mid Game (16-25 mins):
Unsurprisingly, this constant control of vision around major objectives is key to maintaining control of the game and constantly threatening a teamfight. Pre-20 minutes the focus should be on dragon and mid lane control, grouping up as often as possible and spotting out potential opportunities to 5v5 and take towers/dragons.

After the 20 minute mark, Baron is the name of the game. Ensure waves are pushed out and use this time to establish vision control around the top river, looking to create areas of darkness for the enemy team. Use this darkness to pounce on any enemy misstep, immediately starting the fight and using the subsequent numbers advantage to take Baron or push down inner turrets.

In some scenarios, the enemy team will not venture into darkness, or will have a split-pusher set up to dissuade any potential fight. In these cases, starting the Baron is often a smart choice, forcing the enemy to walk into darkness to contest allowing easy access to a teamfight.

Late Game (25 mins onwards):
At this point in the game, a single teamfight could decide the outcome of the match. Fortunately, a teamfight composition is obviously set up to win these teamfights. Therefore, continuing to set up vision around Baron and looking to start a fight at every opportunity is the key to success. Whether its from a gold lead or from behind, a composition created to 5v5 has every opportunity to come out on top in a teamfight later in the game.

Often it may be difficult to begin skirmishing when knocking on the walls of the enemy’s base, however at this point its important to pick the right time to engage. Either drawing out an enemy carry or forcing a fight through long range engages (such as Ornn’s R – Call of the Forge God) is a crucial step to closing the game out. Provided a tank begins the fight, carries shouldn’t be afraid of enemy turrets, and should instead follow-up on the engage and pump out damage in the teamfight.

No doubt there are situations in which a team falls behind in the early game and has no control over the map, however any gold disparity can be turned around with the aid of game-changing abilities, such as Rumble’s R – The Equalizer, Kennen’s R – Slicing Maelstrom, or Miss Fortune’s R – Bullet Time. Ultimately, in the late game, all it takes is one successful teamfight to take down the enemy’s Nexus, and that is always possible with an intelligently drafted teamfight composition.

In conclusion, these compositions may not be the most successful strategy in League of Legends, but they’re by far the easiest to draft and execute. The clear win condition presented by these teamfight comps means even the lowest ranked solo queue players can find a way to contribute to their team’s victory by picking in accordance to their team’s set-up. It’s much easier to execute this strategy in flex queue or Clash, however knowing where your teams’ strengths lie in solo queue champion select could be the difference between a victory and defeat.

Will you be crafting a teamfight composition in your next ranked game? What champions will feature? Let us know in the comments!