The Mid-Season Invitational is officially behind us and with the Summer Split looming in the not-so-distant future, we’re getting closer and closer to the next split of Fantasy LCS. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be walking you through everything you need to know ahead of the season to crush your friends and claim all the bragging rights therein. But, before we get to long lists of power-rankings and detailed guides on drafting, I figured we should start by polishing up those mechanics.

Which brings me to today’s topic: trading.

If you didn’t notice that Riot added trading functionality towards the end of last season, then you weren’t the only one. It was added to the system near the end of the season, and if your league was like mine, very few people took advantage of it, apart from cheeky attempts to trade Bjergsen for whoever you had on your bench.

But there are some major implications for the way you can think about Fantasy, now that trading is built in, and now that you don’t need to agree to complicated add/drop deals to pick up players you want, you’ll want to consider the option. Obviously there a lot of ways to use this tool, but here are a few to consider.

The sleeper pick

One of the most obvious ways to abuse trading to your advantage is to use it to get sleepers. The first thing you need is a middle of the pack player, who has been doing well, but who you’re willing to lose. Then, take a look at the schedule to look for any teams that are on an upswing and have an easy week. From there, you can trade your average player for their average player, but win weeks almost for free off the huge influx of points.

One of the best teams for these little streaks in the spring was the Copenhagen Wolves. Though they did not finish as strong as the likes of Gambit and H2K – who also improved dramatically during the split – when they won, they won hard. I was able to win an easy week in the middle of the season by picking up three of their players for the week, and riding the free points to victory. If you’re on the lookout for trends like that, a player like Freeze who was fairly undervalued at the beginning of the season could be a spectacular trade.

This won’t work all the time, obviously, and it's not always a substitute for having some of the top-scoring players on your roster. But the weeks it does work will almost definitely make giving it a try worthwhile.

The big trade

Sometimes, in the middle of the season, you might decide that your big pickup is not performing up to your standards, and that you can do better. If you’ve got a highly-valued player who you think is going to be falling off, or who you think you can upgrade, it’s probably almost always worth offering them up for another extremely contested pick.

Depending on how closely your opponents are monitoring the scene, you might be able to drop you power player before they fall from grace and stay ahead of the curve, or just straight-up upgrade.

The package deal

If you’re like me, then in January you drafted according to who was most highly valued at the beginning of the split and got burned when so many favored teams going in did terribly. If you face a similar plight come the second half of the 2015 season, the answer might be a bit more complicated than a simple one-for-one trade. But, to compensate for your lack of ace carry, you might be able to get one of your opponents to agree to a package deal.

Basically, this involves trading in a similar way to what had to be done before trading was added. Convince your opponent to agree to trade some top player for one of your players, then drop a few more desirable middle of the pack players, who they can pick up. It might hurt, but having a solid option for your mid, ADC or flex pick can be a big part of grabbing consistent wins, and sometimes you have to break a few eggs.

Obviously there are a hundred possible trades, and I won’t get into power rankings in this article, but hopefully these options are enough to get you thinking, and help you get ahead or stay afloat this summer.

After all, who cares if you’re platinum? Winning at Fantasy is the real challenge.

Sean Wetselaar is a Toronto journalist who covers Fantasy LCS for theScore, among other things. He thinks Fantasy is a lot of fun, but lost in the Spring to a guy who only drafted TSM. He hopes trading will prevent that from happening again. You can follow him on Twitter.