[2019] I started prioritizing dragons over everything except nexus (willing to trade kills, towers, even Barons or inhibs!) as a joke/out of desperation, and my winrate skyrocketed.

Since preseason came out I've been playing a lot, trying and seeing what works. I've played a lot of 5 mans with friends as well (all around the same rank).

At first I was losing almost every single game, both solo and with the 5 man... it was honestly terrible. Complete stomps. We weren't playing especially badly or anything. Very unexpected and unusual for us.

We tried to identify what the problems were and it basically came down to the fact that early dragon control = wins, almost every time.

Related to this, we also realized that having maybe ONE scaling champ as insurance isn't bad, but scaling is almost irrelevant now. If you win early game your dragons will usually "outscale" the other team no matter what they've drafted. So draft early game, especially the jungler and something with bot prio/roaming mid, or they will be irrelevant all game.

Finally, top doesn't exist. You MAYBE clear top side sometimes as jungle, but don't bother ganking or roaming there as anyone. If you're not omnipresent botside, you're inting, because they will quickly pick up dragon and snowball. So just draft an independent split pusher top who doesn't even care if they're camped or feeding. Slap a tryndamere on that baby and afk split push so you can put pressure on the enemy team while you focus what really matters - dragons.

This was all kind of a joke at first between us, exaggerating the importance of dragons and kind of poking fun at ourselves for losing so hard. We even agreed to spam ping the dragon cooldown every 10 seconds or so.

But then the joke became less funny as we started winning. Hard. Game after game. Even on off roles or champions we don't have experience with but just fit the strategy.

I'm sharing this with reddit because its still mostly a joke but feels uncanny. Is this really the secret to season 10? What do you think about it?

I've been seeing a lot of "if you lost the dragon soul you deserve to lose, it's meant to close out games" - but I think people underestimate that to guarantee that you basically have to dedicate your entire existence both in draft and in game to that objective. That's a lot of mental adaptation, especially when trading objectives. Assuming people do catch on, is it a positive change?