Doublelift claims LCS pros “don’t play for the team” in League drafts
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When you have great players on your team, there’s a delicate balance between giving a person a pick that has all the tools they need to carry and making sure they’re champion works with everyone else’s on the team.
Comfort picks or champions that have carry potential are given to these great players. Unfortunately, in an LCS team, everyone has the ability to carry – some more than others – which makes comp building much harder.
Doublelift says that “the path to being a pro player is not by being a team player,” which can reflect in Champion Select on stage. This can result in “people [that] don’t want to take one for the team and pick for comp.”
“A lot of times comps looked really f**ked up because people don’t want to play hard matchups where a mistake is really punishing and they’re spending most of the game farming under turret and trying to get defended from dives,” he said.
It’s here where he distinguishes being a role-player as opposed to the team’s main focus. He praises former Team Liquid teammate and World Champion Jung ‘Impact’ Eon-yeong as someone who understands the importance of filling in key supplemental jobs in a comp – not something DL sees too often.
“Almost no pro player got to where they are by playing for the team,” Doublelift said. “Basically you became a pro player because you were selfish, you put yourself in winning positions, you carried your team to high Elo, and then when you got to high Elo you focused on refining your own gameplay.”
This affects the bigger picture because then you end up with compositions that are filled with these power picks that, if they falter or don’t pan out how the player expected, leaves a team in a bad place.
“It makes your comp scale bad, or creates a huge vulnerability in the comp. Pro players would love to play the lane-bully side. But in a team game, the lane bully side is just too all-in on early game and you’re just outscaled real fast,” Doublelift explained.
