[2019] Champion pools are to small and the brilliance of FPX

I believe with FPX winning worlds that we have seen another team get out drafted because they can not simply play the same amount of champions as the other team. This is a problem with lot of pro teams this worlds. You lose such an edge in drafting if you don't have the ability to play what they play.

The best example of this being done properly is what FPX did in the draft against G2 in games 1 and 3.

They ban Syndra to stop caps who looked very good on it versus SKT. The response ban was the perma banned Pantheon which was a must ban for obvious reasons. They then banned Gragas which was a planned ban to take away the possibilty of G2 going Yasuo Gragas which would be a comfort pick for their bot lane. G2 then responds with the Qiyana ban as Tian's was very good against IG. Now this is where the brilliance of the draft really comes through for FPX. They then proceed to ban Kai'sa. This could be considered a very strange ban for a couple of reasons. First of all LWX was known for his Kai'sa in the LPL and according to analysts it was his best champion by far and Perkz doesn't favor the Kai'sa in this meta. However in doing so it gave G2 and ultimatium. Either give us Xayah which with Kai'sa gone and no ability to play Yasuo Gragas is the best adc in the pool by far or waste your final ban on your teams best pick allowing the rest of FPX to avoid any bans towards Gangplank or the Ryze(even though they didn't bother to go for it), while having Perkz off his main champion pool.

This is also shown in the Game 3 draft as the bans were almost the exact same. Except for the Xayah ban was replaced with a Rakan ban. G2 when faced with this ulitmatium again decided to bet that FPX wouldn't play the Xayah as LWX had not played many games on it to this point tending to favor towards the Kai'sa. FPX then took the Xayah first pick enabling them to get the stronger bot lane while still forcing G2 into banning something not relevent to the reasons they lost the last two games in the Rakan. This enabled a lot of freedom for the draft in FPX's favor.

These two drafts were won because of one thing. FPX could play the meta champions. It's that simple. Why did G2 have to ban Qiyana in every game on both sides effectively weakening their draft. It was because they couldn't play the pick. This is a major problem that has happend a couple of times at worlds this year. You could see it with TL and was one of the reasons they didn't make it out of groups.(NA fan had to give some love)

It is very important to be able to at the very least play all meta picks to a passable pro level as it provides such a major benefit in drafting these games. To give an absurd example of what I mean. Lets say that there is a pro player who we will call Scarra. Scarra has an insane Katarina. Good enough that it gets respect banned in ban phase 2. But in exchange for having this insane Katarina Scarra can't play Qiyana or Ryze at a passable pro level and if they picked either of those two champions for him his team would be much more likely to lose. The team in draft has a huge problem as unless they find a counter to both of those picks they are now forced to ban them or flex them into other roles on the team. This mean that the other team would either have to deal with less bans or know exactly where the picks are going as you know they can't go mid. This means that Scarra's team is sigificantly weaker in draft and has a much harder time in Best Of series.

The moral of the story is that you need to be able to play the meta picks at a passable pro level. You don't have to be the best on the pick if you are trying to DENY it from the enemy team. LWX is not a better Xayah then Perkz but it doesn't matter as if LWX is playing it Perkz doesn't get the chance to.

TL;DR People in the pro scene have been getting away with having pools that do not include all of the current meta champions and it leads to major failing in their drafts. I believe that every pro player should have the ability to deny a pick from an oppenent and while they may not hard carry like their counterpart they won't be completly useless either. If you want to break the meta first you must be able to play the meta.

I don't normally post things on reddit so this may be formated wierd and other errors in it. Please let me know.