[0:00]SRG is running a terrifying group up comp with endless combo potential, while BTR in MPL ID is showcasing a draft so perfect that a single enemy mistake instantly turns into a full team wipe. So, what's the secret? How do MPL teams keep pulling off these perfect drafts every single time? Well, after watching MPL from every angle, and after breaking down draft after draft, I started to notice a pattern. Every perfect draft you see, it always falls into one of five core team compositions that Pros keep relying on: Engage, Poke, Split, Catch and Protect. Now, I know some of you will say, "Isn't this just the core main strats you always mention?" No, this is different. These are the foundation of those strats. Because if you use a team comp, but use the wrong strat, like using protect composition but running a pick off strat, it's not going to be effective because the comp simply isn't designed to do that. On the other hand, if you use a poke comp with group up strat, it works. Why? Because poke is a slow composition that wins through HP advantage, cool down and pressure. So grouping actually amplifies all of that. Okay, so with all that being said, let's talk about engage first. The key attributes of an engage comp are at least one initiator, at least one long CC, massive AOE skill, and a good executor, like this comp right here. Basically, this is the team that always attacks first. They don't wait for the perfect moment, but they are the one who make the moment. Understanding this team composition is super important because this is the most common composition you'll see across every MPL and even ranked. Next is poke. This one is the complete opposite of engage. This comp is for team that rely on tight coordinated play because they're insanely strong in the right situations. Since they can slowly stack advantages whether it's HP advantage, position advantage, or skill advantage. Teams that run poke comps usually have strong objective control because their heroes have short cool downs, longer range and easy to reposition. And because of that, poke compositions almost always have the upper hand during the Lord dance most of the time. Because they're not looking for a fight, but they will try to always poke someone who gets too close to their team. Like, if your enemy push, you pull. But if your enemy pull, you push. This is a slow composition, so you have to be patient and have an extreme amount of team coordination. So you cannot get horny for that one low HP guy at all because you have to stay focused on the objective. And this is a high risk, high reward comp. Like, you can't have a single miscommunication at all if you want to run this comp because this comp can fall apart easily if you're not careful. But if you execute it perfectly, this comp becomes super annoying to deal with because you can build a huge early gold lead early on just by forcing the enemy to recall over and over. Now, if you want to run this comp, your heroes need to have a power spike earlier than the enemy, and you absolutely need to win the range or the positioning, like this comp right here. Next, we have catch. This is a comp that basically tries to delete someone before their whole team even has the chance to react. The key attributes of a catch comp are they have long single target CC, high burst damage skills, and heroes that can get in and out of sticky situations easily. Now, this comp is almost always paired with the pick off strategy. You all know pick off is weak in straight 5v5 team fights because it only deals with one target, right? So to effectively use this comp, you either need to snowball the early game to build that early lead, or you must constantly force an unfair fight, whether by splitting the enemy up from the flank, or kidnapping someone before the fight actually happens to win the numbers game. Because if you just walk in and start a normal 5v5, you're going to lose every single time, even if you have the exact same amount of gold or level as the enemy. The main advantage of using a catch comp is that they are insanely strong in the early game because single target burst heroes tend to snowball super easily. They are also really strong in chaotic situations, like when the enemies are distracted, split up or panicking because it becomes way easier to flank someone. Moving on to protect. This comp is usually used when a team is running a scaling hero as their core damage dealer. Basically, someone who becomes absolutely terrifying in mid to late game, but can't protect themselves at all. Like this composition with jungler is sunshin plus cecilion, for example. You know these two are food in the early game, right, especially for Fanny. So the rest is basically just to protect the core so they don't keep dying. The key attribute of this comp is simple. You need a hero that scales insanely well into the late game, and you must wrap that hero with layers of protection because if that guy dies, the whole draft collapses instantly. To make this comp actually work, you need strong utility skills that can disrupt the enemy's movement and formations, and heroes that take a really long time to kill. In short, your front liner must be annoying, your support must be able to baby sit, and your whole team must be ready to sacrifice their whole body just to keep the carry alive. So with this comp, your team needs to stay grouped all the time. And protect your scaling hero no matter what, because if that guy gets kidnapped or even if your carry arrives a bit too late to the fight, you're going to lose automatically because this is the most carry dependent team composition in the entire game. Every fight is played around the carry because no carry equals no damage. No damage equals losing the team fight. This is also why most teams who are running a protect comp usually uses two scaling heroes because if you only have one and that one guy died, you suddenly have no effective damage dealer anymore. So you always want a backup, whether it's jungle mid, jungle gold, or gold mid. As long as you have at least one more late game threat alive, your comp can still work if one of your carry got kidnapped. In my opinion, this is the strongest team composition against the current assassin meta that only uses this hero and no one else because protect comps are super flexible in the draft phase. So most of the time, the team running protect will have an advantage and will naturally counter assassin junglers. And lastly, we have split. Not split push, but split, the least popular team composition in Pro Play because it's just too high risk, high reward. Why do I say it like that? Because this is the only comp that can threaten multiple things at once, especially if the enemy is running slow walking heroes. For a proper split comp, you need a strong hero that's hard to catch, someone with strong objective control, and a strong duelist and a good flanker. With this comp, you want to split the enemy apart and pressure multiple things at once. Basically, you want to make the enemy overthink, like should we contest Lord? Should we protect our main damage dealer, or should we defend our turret? If you do it correctly, you create a massive pressure where the enemy loses something no matter what decision they make. Like whatever they choose, it's the wrong choice. Now, unlike the core strats, these compositions don't fully shut down each other. But like, for example, poke is a hard counter to protect and a soft counter to catch. So what I'm saying is, a poke composition will have an advantage against protect or catch composition, but poke won't be as strong as when fighting split or attack. So if you want to get an advantage, you have to try to figure out what team composition your enemy is going for from the first three picks and the bans. And there's one hero you can put into literally any composition. Zhuxin. Why? Because her skill set is flexible. She can protect someone, she can split the enemy's formation, she can poke, and she's good as an initiator too. That's why a lot of teams keep first picking Zhuxin because aside from the fact that she can shut down every walking hero, she's also super flexible for the team. And if you're thinking, "Haiyaa, why so complicated?" Well yeah, of course it is, the topic is MPL level drafting. If you still don't understand drafting at all, you can watch this later so you're not lost. Now that we've covered all the team comps, let's talk about the draft process and what you should be thinking about in each stage of the draft. So first off, the bans. If you got the first pick, generally you want to cover your first pick with your bans, whether that means by banning its counters, or by banning other heroes so that the hero you want stays open. If you got the second pick, you need to identify what heroes you would absolutely hate to face if the enemy picks them early. So you ban them, so you don't have to waste energy dealing with that one annoying hero the entire game. There are four types of bans that MPL teams usually do. The first one, and the one used the most: Respect Ban. Basically, if the enemy is really good on a certain hero, then just ban it, no need to make your life harder. Like Kingkong, for example. He's insanely good at Fanny and Lancelot, right? No matter who he's fighting, those two heroes are always hard to counter and always carry in any situation when he uses it, right? So instead of stressing about it, a lot of teams just ban them, like TNC in the playoffs. From game 1 to 5, they ban Kingkong's signature hero Lancelot or take the LPH. Whenever Sanford gets Yuzong, you already know how scary his objective control and team fights become for the enemy backline, right? So yeah, to stay safe, Aurora just ban it. Basically, for a respect ban, you need to understand what kind of player you're up against, like what their comfort heroes are, their play style, and whether they actually win often on those heroes. The second one is Meta Ban. Just like the name, these are heroes that are currently strong, currently meta, and annoying to deal with. So you just ban them, like here, Onic ban Zhuxin, Yisanshin, and Haya. Zhuxin is a broken hero that limits the enemy's draft because she counters all the slow walking heroes if played correctly. Yisanshin and Haya farm insanely fast and are really hard to catch. Meanwhile, Alter Ego ban Kalia and Lancelot. Kalia is one of the best initiator in the current meta, and Lancelot is an S tier jungler, right? Banning Lancelot here is also a respect ban for Kairi, besides being a meta ban. The point is, meta bans are heroes that are super strong in the current patch and make the game harder for the opposing team. So you remove them to make the game a bit more easy. The third one is Synergy Ban. Usually done later once the enemy's draft starts to show a direction. Like here, Dewa picked Alice early, and Alice has a lot of possible combos. But the strongest one is Ruby Alice. Why? Because if Alice alts and hits five people, Ruby can pull five of those people too, making big team fights terrifying. And since Dewa haven't picked a gold laner yet, RRQ just ban Ruby to make sure the enemy's duo laners don't become too strong. And lastly, we have counter ban. This is when you ban heroes that can counter the heroes your team is planning to pick. Like here, Bran bans Fanny and Wanwan. That already tells you Bran are planning to use heroes that aren't agile. I mean, slow heroes become free alt activator for Wanwan, and they're easy food for Fanny, right? So they just ban them to protect their draft, especially since their lineup only has one dash. Counter ban can also happen in the second banning phase when your team composition becomes more obvious. Here, Evos ban Irasel and Harith. You can see Evos already revealed their heroes. They all heroes who rely on positioning and needs to dive forward eventually, and also, they have no cover heroes. So banning Harith and Irasel prevents strong flankers from getting into the backline, or at least makes whatever flanker Onic picks, if they even decide to use one, way more easier to handle. And yeah, that's it for the banning phase. Now, let's move on to the picks. So it doesn't matter whether you have the first pick or the second pick. What really matters in a draft is the first pick on your side because that one pick can literally dictate the entire direction the draft will take for both teams. So to make this less confusing, we're going to use this simple notation. B1 for first pick, R1, R2 for the first two red side picks, B2, B3 for the next blue side picks and so on. I'm sure you get what I mean. We're just using this to make everything easier to understand. And by the way, I'll be using the tournament draft pattern that goes like this because the whole topic is MPL style drafting anyway. But don't worry, you can still use this in rank draft too if you're playing as 5 and not solo. So, B1. For your B1, you should already have a clear idea of what you want to pick. The main thing you want from a B1 pick is you want to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy to answer it. That's the whole point of B1. There are two ways to achieve this. Number one, pick an S tier meta hero that's left open, or pick something extremely flexible. For example, Zhuxin. This hero is straight up broken, annoying to deal with, hard to catch, and honestly, needs to be nerfed again. There just aren't many good answer if Zhuxin gets picked really early. Why? Because she completely kills a lot of heroes that can only walk. On the other hand, Baxia is the perfect example of a super flexible hero. He can be played roam, XP, or jungle really well right now. That means your opponent has no idea where he's going to be placed, and he also fits into a ton of different team composition. He can be put in poke comp, engage comp, or catch comp. So it becomes really hard to counter draft a hero that's this flexible. Moving on to R1, R2. The first thing you should think about is, is the enemy's first pick vulnerable to something? Let's assume they pick Zhuxin really early. Now Zhuxin is insanely strong in long, drawn out, cramped up team fights, right? But she's really weak against repeated stun because they can cancel her second skill. And even though you can basically put her in any team comp, she's super weak at defending herself because all of her skills are not for running away. Her main skill is more of an engage skill, and as we discussed earlier, engage are weak against catch or protect heroes. So the heroes they want to pair with her later are likely to be also weak to catch or protect too. A perfect example is what Twisted Minds did to counter this. They pick Akai and Kalea. Kalea got picked early is mainly so Zhuxin doesn't get to walk in freely. Like if she tries to engage, she can get lifted and dragged away from her team and get gang banged. Also, the reason why Kalea is picked really early like this is so that the enemy doesn't grab any hyperactive diver heroes later. While Akai is simpler. You see, Zhuxin wins through insane zoning, but Akai is a hero who cannot be zoned because of his alt. So whenever there's an objective fight or a team fight, Akai can just break the entire formation apart. This prevents long group fights, which means Zhuxin becomes way less effective. But what if it looked like the enemy's draft doesn't have any weakness? Like here, Liquid first pick Yisanshin. He's flexible in a lot of team compositions and strategies. So what then? Now if that happened, you draft as if you're picking B1, where you want heroes that's really strong where it becomes a problem if the enemy doesn't counter it, or something very flexible like Team Falcon here. They pick Lapu, the XP laner King beside Arlot right now, and Baxia, a really flexible hero who can be put anywhere and can zone while also out from Yisanshin easily if put in the jungle. And both of these heroes can work well in any kind of draft due to their engage, disengage, and poking skills. Basically, you want to make it as hard as possible for the enemy to read your draft, just like when you were drafting a flexible first pick if you can't read the enemy's draft at this stage. Alright, next. For B2, B3 position, you generally have two options. First, pick heroes that have good synergy with your B1, or pick in a way that keeps the enemy blind to your strategy while not breaking your B1 Flex Pick. You also want to identify whether your hero is being targeted or not, so if there's a hero you want to take, either because it synergizes well with what you already have, or if you feel the enemy might ban or steal it after this pick. If that happened, you should grab it now before they get the chance. Like this, Aurora's first pick was Yisanshin and Harith, and all the junglers that can match Yisanshin in farming tempo were already banned. The only ones left were Joy and Hayabusa. Now, Joy isn't a viable option here because Harith can easily out maneuver her, which makes it really hard to gank the gold laner if Bran picks Joy. So the real option left is Hayabusa. Hayabusa is also a really good pick to pair with Kalia due to his burst damage with fast backup capability, and he can stick like a glue to his escaping enemy. That's why they lock Hayabusa here before he gets banned. As for Beatrix, she's the most flexible marksman in the entire game. She's a great high ground defender with her grenade launcher, she's amazing at picking people off with her shotgun, her team fight is amazing because of her SMG and grenade launcher, and she's also strong at poking or sniping down escaping enemy with her sniper. She can literally do everything. Moving on to R3. This is one of the most powerful pick position because by the time your enemy have shown their first three picks, you can already see what strategy your opponents wants to run. What their composition is, and even what kind of play style they're aiming for. If your R1 and R2 picks are strong against their first three picks, like this, TNC already looks super obvious they want to run a poke composition to win the objective fights because their heroes here literally can't kill anyone with just one combo. But they're really good at doing the push and pull because they're hard to catch. Meanwhile, Onic have a hero that loves to dive the backline first when the enemy are not ready. That means there's a high chance they're going to be using an engage comp, and they also have Zhuxin, a really strong objective control hero who can be put in any team compositions. And if we go back to this, engage composition has an advantage against poke, right? So if you already have that advantage, you use your R3 slot to support your first two picks. The most viable picks for this situation could be XP Lane Lapu, Phobius or Maybe Hida, Gold Lane Ruby and Irasel, Roam Khalid and Hilda. And here, Onic chooses Phobius. Why? Two reason. First, Wanwan. Every time Wanwan dashes, Phobius's purple bar fills super fast, so his alt becomes active constantly. Second, he's an engager who can be both an initiator and a sacrifice hero to force out enemy skills or make those poke heroes busy. Now, if TNC keeps picking those poke composition heroes in their before B5 position later, they're going to have a hard time during fights. But if your team is even in power, or maybe worse, at a disadvantage with your enemy, then we're going to do what's called a Pivot Pick. This is where you change your composition in the middle of the draft, and that's exactly why the R1 and R2 positions are usually flexible picks because they give you the freedom to twist your composition depending on how the enemy picks. For example, we can see Falcon picking Baxia and Yisanshin for R1, R2. Now, even though the roles are already obvious, like Yisanshin is clearly going jungle, and Baxia is either roam or XP, but the composition is still flexible. These two heroes can still fit into either a catch composition or an engage comp when paired together. Yisanshin because of his alt and his farming tempo, Baxia because he moves fast and has a strong zoning. The problem, TNC is picking heroes that all engage first too. Everything in their draft is front line, dive or initiation, so it's already super clear TNC is going for an engage composition too. So if Falcon wants to get the advantage, they can't pick another engage heroes because if they do, their draft becomes even in power with TNC. You see, engage composition versus engage composition eliminates any real team advantage beside the individual hero power. So how do we twist the draft to gain the upper hand? If we check this again, engage is weak to catch and protect, and the two heroes Falcon already locked can be placed inside a catch comp too beside engage because of their skills. So what they need is a hero that pushes their draft toward catch, not engage. And that's why Falcon's pick of Selena here is perfect. Why? Because she's insanely strong in catch composition. Her first skill gives vision, which lets your team find a target who's alone or isn't guarded to kidnap. Her second skill has a really long stun, so her team could back her up in time, and her burst is already painful as hell even at level one, while also making Yisanshin's farming speed significantly faster. So here, they basically twisted the draft from engage to catch using Selena as the pivot. Now for the rest of their picks, they can just grab more heroes that fit into a catch composition to keep countering TNC's draft even harder. And it's much easier to twist the draft at R3 where you've only shown two heroes, then it is on Blue side at B4, B5, where you've already revealed three heroes plus a removal of four extra heroes in the second banning phase. But remember though, you still need to know whether the enemy comp is super weak to a specific hero. There's no need to twist your draft if there's a game defining hero available like this. Omega is running an engage composition because all their heroes are the one who needs to get close to their enemy. Falcon is also running an engage composition that's extremely hard to stop because their Kiki's skills cannot be canceled before the skill duration ended. So how do you deal with unstoppable CC? One way is to dodge it, but it's going to be hard to dodge those kind of skills, or you can pick Diggie, since his ultimate can shut down enemy CC entirely. But here, Diggie isn't just viable at all because first, Grock is obviously the roam already. Second, there's Zhuxin, and Zhuxin destroys every walking hero for free, and it's really easy to bait Diggie's ultimate. The other option is to make them eat their own unstoppable CC. That's why they pick Valentina, so Dizzy doesn't get confused when the team fight starts because Valentina can shut down Falcon's movement by stealing Akai's ultimate to protect the team and flip the entire fight. Or by stealing Arlot's ultimate to jump them before they're ready. So that's R3. You either make your draft harder to read or you twist your draft so you're going to have an advantage. Alright, moving on. This is the red side's most impactful draft position. Why? Because you can make the enemy miss read your bands and your earlier picks. Let's look at this, here Twisted Minds already has two strong front liners, and from their bands, they remove heroes that really threatens their backline. People will assume Twisted Minds wants to play a positioning based comp, right? So Bran bans Granger because Granger can be a problem if there's good front liners. And that's why they get baited. Twisted Minds locks Harith instead, an agile hero, backline diver, and a flanker. So Bran gets completely baited by the bans and previous picks. So in R4, you usually have two choices. You do a blind pick on purpose just like Twisted Mind and bait the enemy into preparing for the wrong thing, or you pick another flexible hero to make your draft even harder to read like this. Here SRG already has two flex picks. Then they add another flex pick with Xborg, who can go jungle, XP or gold. Now, even though the jungler is 100% going to be Lancelot, and the comp is clearly going to be engage, their laners are still super flexible. It's hard to read because both Lapu and Xborg are strong in either gold or XP. So for the laning phase, they're completely safe. They can swap depending on what the enemy picks next, and that also makes the enemy laner confused as hell because they don't know whether they'll be facing Xborg or Lapu in the lane. Now this is probably the strongest position in the entire draft phase because Blue Side has one big advantage. The enemy has already revealed their plan with their previous picks, so it should be pretty easy to identify what strategy and composition they're trying to run. To make the most out of B4 and B5, you want to either fully counter the enemy draft with these two picks, or build a draft that's really hard to answer by stacking synergy picks, so your team has a lot of strong hero combos. You also want to pick heroes that can't be countered by just one hero because there's a big chance the enemy will use their R5 as a counter pick later. Like here, BTR picks heroes that really counter Onic's draft. Alice counters Onic's positioning heroes, Lunox counters Harith and Phobius, and not only that, the way you counter Lunox and Alice is completely different. Lunox must be bursted or baited before she can use her full combo. Meanwhile, Alice needs someone that can out damage her sustain. This puts Onic's R5 in a really awkward spot because if they choose to counter pick, they can only counter one of them. Or another example, Evos picks heroes that can jump to the backline to counter Onic's draft, which has damage dealers who rely heavily on positioning. They also pick Guinevere to combo with Zhuxin. The combo basically works like this: when Zhuxin lifts someone up, Guinevere can immediately alt the lift the target, so she doesn't need to use her second skill first. You see, if she uses her second skill first, it becomes predictable because of the mark. This way, the combo hits faster and cleaner. They also paired it with Lapu, one of the best backline divers right now. So here, no matter what Onic does, Onic will be forced to burn their escape skills the moment one of these guys jump in. And once those escape tools are gone, these two can kill literally anyone for free, especially since Onic is running nothing but squishy heroes here. And Onic can't even pick a cover hero later because if they grab something like Hylos, then Wanwan and Zhuxin will be able to deal damage without any punishment. So if they try to fix the draft with a cover hero, they'll just end up suffering in every team fight. Now you get what I mean by a draft that's really hard to answer by stacking synergy picks, right? And finally, that brings us to R5, the strongest position in the entire draft. Because in this pick, you can instantly swing the draft in your favor. You have a lot of options here. You can go for a surprise pick, a power pick, or even just a safe pick depending on what the enemy does. Like in EWC 2025, the S test that Onic picked on R5 completes their draft perfectly. Because S test completely shuts down every hero TLPCH has. TLPCH heroes are mostly Zoner and DPS, not burst heroes. I mean, yeah, Arlot does have burst, but his burst isn't like Yodora or Fanny that can delete someone in under a second. Arlot's full combo usually deals around 3,000 ish damage at most. And that can be patched up easily by S test healing, and even reduced with early game Dreadnought armor. It's the same with Fredrin too. Even though he can one shot with his skill 4, it's still the same as Arlot, and it's not a guaranteed hit because you can dodge it. Second, Liquids DPS is an anti-tank DPS. Claude's damage depends on the target's Max HP. If the enemy Max HP is low, his damage won't hurt as much as to a tank with massive HP. This S test makes the whole team tankier and prevent Claude from getting that massive health pool value he usually shreds. So the squishy gets tankier without increasing their Max HP, while the tank gets tankier because of the heal. Basically, nobody expected Onic to suddenly run an Ube strat in this meta, and Liquid didn't have anything that could counter that combo. So Onic ended up winning the game because of that surprise R5 pick. That's a surprise pick, but what about a normal pick? If you want to do a normal pick, you need to pick a hero that can realistically counter at least three heroes from the enemy's lineup like this. Turkey is running a split composition because these heroes can mess up the enemy formation really hard. But their damage dealers are trash in the early game. Hayabusa is his snowball. Claude needs at least his first core item before he can deal some meaningful damage. So how do you stop snowball heroes? First, you pick a hero that's super strong in the first minutes and around the turtle, so the snowball hero has no chance to actually snowball. And picking Xborg here is perfect. Xborg is already really strong from level one because of his passive. So no matter who he faces in lane, he can win the match up pretty easily. He's also hard to gank and really easy to escape with, which makes it even harder for Hayabusa to activate his snowball. On top of that, Xborg is a flexible hero, which makes Malaysia's lane unpredictable because both Xborg and this guy are strong in either gold or XP. So Turkey has no clue who they'll actually be fighting in lane, and just like that, four of Turkey's heroes got soft countered by a single Xborg pick. That is how you ruin a comp before the game even starts. idk like the video or something
[25:46]So yeah, that's it.
