BO3 Draft Preparation: Strategic Bans and Champion Pools

Most amateur teams treat a BO3 as three independent games. They draft game 1 as well as they can, then improvise the rest by reacting to whatever just happened.

That is exactly where series are lost. In a BO3, game 1 already constrains game 3: everything you show, the opponent sees, and they get two drafts to exploit it. So the draft is prepared at series level, not at game level.

• Memory: in soloQ nobody remembers your previous game. In a BO3 the opponent has seen your pick, how you played it, and will adapt their bans.
• The format: fearless or not. In fearless, a champion once played is removed for the rest of the series, which changes the entire pool depth calculation. Check the ruleset before preparing anything.
• Sides: blue side takes first pick, red side answers last. The series alternates, and a draft prepared for blue side does not hold as is on red.

Those three points alone invalidate the most widespread approach among amateur teams, which consists of preparing one ideal composition and trying to force it every game.

A draft is not prepared on match day, it is prepared when you write down what your team can actually play. The baseline: three mastered champions and two backup champions per player.

Why three and two. Below three solid champions, two bans are enough to neutralise a player. Above five, mastery gets diluted and you end up with picks that work on paper and fall apart in a match. Three plus two is the balance point for an amateur team playing two to four nights a week.

Identify the gaps, not just the strengths

Once the pools are written, ask the real question: which composition styles are we unable to play? If none of your five players can hold an engage composition, the opponent does not even need to guess, they will see it in one game and lock you in it for the next two.

• Can we play a front to back engage composition?
• Can we play poke or a siege composition?
• Can we play a scaling composition that accepts suffering for twenty minutes?
• Can we play a split push with the map discipline it requires?

Two playable styles is the viable minimum. A single style, and your series is decided before the bans.

The one-trick trap

A player who only plays one champion is excellent in soloQ and expensive in a BO3: a single ban turns him into an ordinary player, and the opponent knows it from game 1. That is not a reason to drop him, it is a reason to have him work on two alternatives that fill the same role in the composition.

First phase bans serve three distinct purposes, and most teams only ever use one of them.

• The comfort ban removes an individual pick: an enemy player's signature champion, the one with a wide history and results behind it.
• The systemic ban removes an entire composition: a champion without which their preferred style stops working.
• The protection ban removes an answer to your own plan, to secure the pick you actually want.

The most frequent mistake is banning the strongest champions of the patch. A strong champion the opponent does not play is a free ban handed over. What matters is not absolute strength, it is strength for them: what they play, what they know how to play, and what their style depends on.

With no information on the opponent, fall back on systemic and protection bans, which only depend on you. That always beats banning off the patch tier list.

By the second phase, half the draft is already on the board. Re-banning a generic threat at that point wastes two bans, and those are often the two most decisive of the game.

• Close the answers to what you have just picked: if your composition has a known weakness, remove the most natural response to it.
• Lock down the flex champions still available, the ones that let the opponent hide a role until the last pick.
• Remove the direct counter to the player you want to put in a winning lane.

A good way to check: if your second phase bans could have been decided before the draft even started, they are doing nothing.

• Game 1: the draft that reveals the least. You play solid, you do not show your best plan, and you watch what they prioritise.
• Game 2: you exploit what they showed, with the side now flipped. This is the game where comfort bans finally become informed.
• Game 3: the pick you held in reserve from the start, the one they have no reason to ban because they have never seen it.

That reserve is the hardest part to hold: it means accepting not to play your best card in game 1. It is also what separates a team preparing a series from a team playing three games in a row.

When you lead 1-0, do not change what works: keep your draft structure and let the opponent take the risks. When you are behind, do not change everything either. Change one thing, the one the first game genuinely exposed, and keep the rest stable.

Preparing a draft does not mean predicting twenty picks. It means showing up with three short documents, decided calmly, that spare you from thinking under the clock.

• Three target compositions, with the pick order that gets you there.
• Three answers to the compositions the opponent plays most often.
• The ban list by priority, split into comfort, systemic and protection bans.

Those three documents are prepared once per tournament and adjusted in a few minutes before each opponent. That is infinitely more effective than improvising during the thirty seconds of the ban phase.

Champion pools in a spreadsheet have two flaws: they are never up to date, and they say nothing about what the player is actually worth on that champion.

On HexCore, champion pools and compositions live in the same place as the team's game data. You see what each player can play, you build your target compositions from there, and the series history tells you what an opponent you have already faced prioritised. The draft sheet described above stops being a document you maintain by hand.