The 2v1 Lane Swap

In Competitive League of Legends the Lane Swap is a strategy that is executed throughout the competitive Leagues more frequently than in Solo Queue. The Lane Swap strategy in League of Legends is one strategy that requires an enormous amount of team communication and cooperation. This is why, generally speaking, the Lane Swap only happens in the highest level of competitive play, and rarely seen in ranked Solo Queue. Despite this, the Lane Swap strategy is something that you can implement in your ranked 5's games with your team and is one strategy that every team should keep in the back of their minds. Throughout this article, we will take a look at the reasoning behind the lane swap and learning what are the essential keys to the success of the Lane Swap.

When Should You Lane Swap?

As a team, it is important to know not only how to implement the strategy, but also when to actually use it inside of your ranked games. The Lane Swap is not something that should be done every game and should be used appropriately. Here are some of the factors that you and your team can consider while going through the Draft Phase of Champion Select in order to determined if the Lane Swap is the best strategy to use for this particular game.



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1. Your Duo Bot Lane will find itself in an unfavorable match-up.

If you find yourself playing an immobile ADC such as Jinx, the Lane Swap is something that your team can implement in order to ensure and simple and safe Lane Phase. By moving your Duo Lane to the Top side of the map, you ensure that you will not find yourself in a bad situation if the enemy team counter-picked the Bot Lane. This way in this example, your late game hyper carry will be able to safely farm in a 2v1 situation in the Top lane. In order to optimize this Lane Swap, it is recommended to freeze the wave when it is pushing slightly toward your tower and have your support, preferably a Thresh or an equally tanky support, zone out the enemy top laner and deny them not only the Gold from the CS, but also an XP disadvantage which can allow for easy kills for the ADC or even a gank from the Jungle in order to further this disadvantage.

2. Have a Hyper Carry get Solo Farm.

When you pick a composition in a “Protect the ADC” style, having a good lane swap is important to ensuring that your carry gets to the late game point that the champion needs. Champions like Kog'Maw or Vayne are very good examples of this as both of these ADC's need some time before they get to the late game carry potential they both have. Swapping your ADC to the top side will allow these ADC 's to get the gold and a few items before they come in for mid game team-fights.

3. Denying the Enemy Top Laner.

Sometimes in Lane Swaps it is not always about getting your team ahead, but rather sometimes it is better and more advantageous to place their Top Laner behind. For example, if you find yourself going up against a Top Lane carry like Jax or Riven who has the potential to snowball out of control, placing a duo lane in the top side so that you can deny them farm is the best way to safely delay the power spike of those Champions.

4. Objective Control

Back in Patch 4.4, the Lane Swap was seen more frequently for taking down the bottom tower due to the fact it was the lowest health tower on the map. This was seen by rotating the Jungler in after a gank and even having a 4- man push strategy becoming popular to fast push the bottom side of the map in order to gain dragon control. Although it has been a long time since we have seen this strategy in particular, the principle behind the matter is what makes the Lane Swap such a strong philosophy on how to play the game.

For example, you could easily, after the Lane Swap, have the Support come in with Mobi Boots as well as the Jungler hitting mid lane with a 3 man gank that could not only lead to a tower advantage but also releases the pressure in mid. So while the wave is shoving into the tier 2 you can make a rotation to Dragon. Again this is only one example, as there are an endless amount of possibilities to making moves to get vision in the enemy jungle, or just created massive 3v1 or 3v2 disadvantages.

There is no “Perfect” way to achieve victory. League of Legends is always a game of strategic diversity and many variables. This strategy will be one that you will see in competitive play due to its ability to have a low-risk high-reward scenario. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this article and if you have any questions or comments you will be able to reach me on Twitter: @TheRealistSloth