TFT: Teamfight Tactics Guide for Beginners Part 1, the Basics
By Josh Tyler
What are the champions?
To build a strong army, you need those pieces/champions we talked about (they can also be called “units”) and there are three ways to get them. The most common way that you will get units in the shop, which is the box at the bottom of your screen. The shop will display five champions at the start of each round, which you can buy using gold that you have accumulated (we’ll get into that much later on).
The second way to get a new unit is in the Carousel round, which takes place at the very start of the game and in the middle of each stage beginning in Stage 2. In this round, you don’t spend any gold, you just get to run out to the middle of the Carousel and grab whatever champion is still available.
The final way you can acquire a champion is to get lucky and have one drop during the player versus environment (“PVE”) rounds. We’ll discuss those later on, but basically, at the end of every stage, you will fight computer-controlled units, which will drop various goodies if you defeat them and this includes a random champion!
Each champion will have their own stats, giving them defined strengths and weaknesses. Some will be beefy tanks that don’t do a lot of damage, while others will be high-damage units that can die easily.
Each champion unit has at least one Origin and one Class, meaning that they will be able to synergize with certain other champions to get a benefit if you put multiples of the same class on the board at the same time. In addition, the champions will also have one ability or “ultimate” that they will cast if their mana bar gets full (it’s the blue bar over their head, above the red health bar). Which units belong to which Origins, Classes, and have certain ultimates is a lengthy discussion for its own article, but all you need to know is that you’ll want to buy certain champions because of these three factors.