Hey guys, today I want to go over lane swaps, and how it can be an easy way to get an advantage on your opponents. A basic lane swap works where you send your top laner to bottom lane, and your AD carry and support to top lane.





Why lane swap?

A few reasons.

You can shut down the enemy top laner. A lane swap can take an enemy team by surprise, and if the enemy top laner is a champion that has no sustain, and no ranged attack, then your support and AD will be bullying them so hard they won't be able to cs defend the tower. And if your solo laner, the one you send bot, is someone like Jayce or Vladimir, they can stay back, clear the wave, and just play the lane as safe as possible, the enemy team will have a hard time denying them cs. You are making the gamble that your solo lane will do better than their solo lane.

Another advantage is taking golems. Right now it is a common strategy for duo bot lanes on the blue side of the map is to take golems to give you a half level advantage, and a nice bit of gold. The experience lead will allow you to level up before your lane opponents, and can let you win fights to snowball the advantage towards your lane. But as purple team, you can't take golems while bot. and most junglers will be starting at wolves and the Ancient Golem. If you do a lane swap, it will allow you to take golems to get that early lead on your AD carry.

And one more reason to swap is to negate bad lane match ups. Say the enemy team picks a top laner that is extremely strong levels 1-5, and your top laner will get bullied and denied cs. Well if they're going to get denied and zoned anyway, why not catch your enemy off guard and send them bot? You can completely negate that champion's early game stength with a lane swap, thus stopping them from snowballing that strong early game into a strong late game.

A general goal to have when initiating a lane swap is to assert pressure. A common and successful means of doing this is taking towers as soon as possible. Your AD carry and support ideally will be doing a lot of damage to the solo laner's tower. The enemy team needs to make the choice between having mid and jungle go top to stop you, allowing your mid and jungle to roam, or let the tower fall and give your team a global gold advantage.

But if you ever find yourself playing against a lane swap, it does have some disadvantages. If the enemy team sends their adc/support top in a game against you, that means you will have a numbers advantage around Dragon, and the solo laner bottom may not even have a chance to ward, making it easier for your team to take an early game Dragon. Also warding the enemies buff that is closest to your ad/support (so if you are blue team, ward their blue), and you can often steal the enemy buffs because you will be able to out number and bully the enemy team out of their own jungle.

So in review, lane swaps are an easy and effective way to catch your opponents off guard, create advantages for you team, and I recommend giving it a try. I think it'd be really neat to see this strategy make it's way into lower levels of play, as I've almost never seen it in solo queue or even ranked 5s, and it's not because it takes too much skill or strategy that anyone less than high elo players can do it, but it's because people are not willing to try something new. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed, and maybe even learned something.