Implementing more bans into regular play had us asking some tough questions: “How many bans is enough bans?“, “What happens if everyone gets the pro draft?“, “Should we just remove Yasuo and Camille from the game to save time?”

In the upcoming system, everyone gets a ban and all 10 players ban simultaneously. After the ban phase concludes, each team’s bans are shown to the other, and the pick phase continues as normal. Bans can be duplicated across teams.

YOU get a ban, and YOU get a ban

Our ultimate goals for 10 simultaneous bans are: to make champ select fairer for everyone, to give everyone more control over the ban phase, and if possible, to lower the time it takes to get to game. We didn’t go with the split draft format from professional games (six bans, six picks, then four bans, four picks) because we want to even out individual players’ power in champ select.

When we looked at the perks of the system currently implemented in pro play, the split draft (particularly when you know your own team’s strategies and opponents’ playstyles) just didn’t copy-paste well to regular play. Check out the announcement post for more info, or keep reading below.

Don’t wanna lane against Blitz? Take him out. Feel like running Tryndamere top? Ban Teemo. It also doesn’t matter where you land in the champ select order – everyone has an equal chance to ban something they don’t want to see. You won’t be able to ban the same thing as a teammate, but both teams can ban the same champion.

Though some games may have fewer than 10 unique bans (in the case of duplicates), we’re hoping this eliminates the chance of some champions being permabanned – y’all know who we mean. We don’t think we’ll see many games with fewer total bans than before, but we’ll keep an eye on this if it becomes more than a wild edge case.

Other 10 ban formats

Let’s take a look at a few of the other formats we investigated before choosing the simultaneous approach, and some pros and cons of each. When we were deciding which best fit the bill for regular play, we were specifically looking for a few things:

Equalize player agency as much as possible

Remove the random champ select order for bans

Reduce time to game, where possible

We’re gonna get a little technical here, so bear with us: