Riot Games has shaken up League of Legends esports with the Fearless Draft system, an experimental format introduced in this year’s regional splits—and so far, it’s been working like a charm.
In a best-of-three series, League players can ban 10 champions each match, but now, with Fearless Drafts, any champion they choose in match one becomes unavailable for the rest of the series. This takes away meta champions over time and forces pros to get deeper into the woods by choosing uncommon picks. This is a great change of pace in the competitive space, and I love seeing forgotten champions appear more often on stage—and my only issue is that Fearless Drafts won’t be in every major tournament this year.
No more handshake matchups between the two most-played meta champions in a lane. We’re already witnessing a lot of variety in terms of champion choices in multiple competitions. Take the LCK Cup 2025, for example, where we’ve seen picks like Elise support from Keria, which has also been a hot choice in Korean ranked matches.
The Spider Queen has the highest win rate among supports in the LCK Cup who’ve played 10 or more matches at the time of writing. While Elise’s support has always been good in ranked matches in the right matchups, her appearance in a tournament by a prominent player gives confidence to more ranked players to give her a shot.
Players looking to try offbeat picks to grow their champion pool often pick champions based on what esports players choose on stage. Now, the support pick is developing into a meta champion, as seemingly every region is trying out Elise support in their matches.
Elise isn’t the only one: We’ve seen an Anivia top lane, Tryndamere in mid, and even Shen support make a comeback in the esports scene. Apart from these spicy picks, some champions like Tryndamere moving to mid or Corki cementing its place as an ADC show how several champs have moved from their traditional roles and become flex picks. All this flexing has made drafts far more interesting and open-ended for players—and it’s almost exclusively thanks to Fearless Drafts.
As League’s champion meta evolves, pocket picks always make matches more interesting. Everyone remembers the famous Caps Vayne pick in the mid lane against Misfits in the EU LCS 2018 semifinals. The seemingly off-meta choices made the match very fun to watch, especially since Caps could’ve picked the meta champion, Corki, but didn’t—and ended up winning the match anyway.
League game designer David “Phreak” Turley confirmed in his video that Fearless Drafts weren’t abruptly introduced in 2025’s new season. He explained how Riot consulted every professional esports team in the scene to finalize the Fearless Drafts that we see in action today. The developer also made sure that teams were aware of this upcoming change in 2025 and had rosters with players who knew “more than 12 champions” if the team didn’t want to face serious problems during the split.
The initial response was “positive,” from esports players, which gave Riot the confidence to go with the system in 2025 as a trial for esports. Now, it’s one of my favorite parts of watching the game.
Choosing these off-meta picks pushes pros to increase their usual champion pool. As more champions are taken off the table, one of the fundamental problems that players will eventually face is the lack of champions in their particular role, such as ADC. If the role’s champions get heavily banned or flexed into other roles, players will be forced to go for a random pick or lose priority in the lane. Thus, it will provide a big challenge for them to prove their skills on less meta-dependent champions and still perform at the highest level.
And ultimately, the knock-on effect of expanded champion pools and flex picks also helps lessen one of the biggest barriers to entry to League. The 170-strong roster is challenging for new players to learn, let alone play them and study up on match-ups. As pros are forced to choose more diverse picks, forgotten champions get an opportunity to share the spotlight on the stage, and it also allows players new and old to watch them in action, utilized at a high level.
While Fearless Drafts are set to go away after the First Stand tournament in March, I would definitely love for Riot to bring back the system in all matches for 2026, breathing life into the meta with more exciting champions in League esports.
Published: Feb 12, 2025 01:22 pm