How to prep for your fantasy League of Legends draft on Sleeper

February 2, 2022

by Brian Bencomo

I love playing fantasy football and baseball. I’ve been playing fantasy for several years now and have won my league multiple times, so this year I decided to jump into fantasy League of Legends. I’m doing it through Sleeper, which is one of the few places where you can play Fantasy League of Legends alongside DraftKings and Esports One. Unfortunately, unlike fantasy football and baseball, there is a dearth of information to help you prepare for your drafts. That’s why I wanted to share some of my own tips and advice with the fellow drafters out there. My team might flame out, but it won’t be because I didn’t do my research!

Know your league

The first and most basic piece of advice is to know and understand all the relevant details about your league. I’m playing in an eight-player League Championship Series (LCS) fantasy league on Sleeper. You can also compete in a League of Legends European Championship (LEC) fantasy league, but since the LEC spring season has already started and I know the LCS better, I opted for joining an LCS league. The LCS fantasy season will begin when the spring split starts on Feb. 5, so this week between the end of the LCS Lock In preseason tournament and the start of the LCS spring split is the perfect time to draft.

Competing in an eight-team LCS fantasy league, I can draft only players competing in the LCS, and I’ll be competing against seven others. Each of our teams will have five players – a top laner, mid laner, jungler, ADC/bot laner and support – just like an LCS team. With only 10 LCS teams, the drafting pool will include 50 players (plus subs and Academy players, some of whom will compete this season) and with eight people in the league, we’ll be drafting 40 players in total. That means the league is pretty deep – equivalent to a 16-team or larger fantasy football league.

The most desirable players to draft will get picked up within the first couple rounds of the five-round draft. If you’re playing in a six-team league, you’ll have an easier time getting the players you want. Oh, and it’s a snake draft, which is the most common way of drafting. So, the draft order reverses every round; the player picking eighth will get the first pick in the second round and so on.

Know the scoring rules

Who are the most desirable players? The ones that will get you the most points obviously. Again, pretty obvious, but it’s the most important thing to consider when drafting and it’ll help you get past just choosing just well-known players. Maybe you really want Brandon Joel "Josedeodo" Villegas on your team, and that’s great! But if you want to win your league, you gotta do some research. First, you need to know how your players score points in your league. Here’s the points breakdown in my league, which are the default settings on Sleeper:

Points gained by individual:

Kills: 3
Deaths: -1
Assists: 2
Minions: .01
Lane solo kill: 1
First blood: 1
Compare minions at early game (15 min): 2

Points gained via team objectives:

Soul drake bonus: 3
First drake kill: 2
First baron kill: 3
First turret: 2
Elder drake kill: 4

Pick and ban points:

Pick bonus: 1.5
Ban penalty: .5

Evaluating individual stats

Photo credit: Riot Games

In terms of deciding which players to draft, looking at past individual stats will be the most useful. You can see that kills are the most valuable individual stat, so looking at a player’s kill stats are especially insightful. Your first go-to should be stats from the Lock In tournament since they’re the most recent stats for these players and a bit of a preview of how these players might perform over a full spring season. LCS newcomer and longtime LEC player Gabriel "Bwipo" Rau led all players in Lock In with 53 kills.

One thing to keep in ming about Lock In stats is that they represent a small sample size, especially for teams that got eliminated early. Stats from 2021 for both the spring and summer splits will ultimately be the best resource.

Another thing to keep in mind with stats is that bot laners/ADCs tend to accumulate the most kills, and supports will often be among the leaders in assists. That’s just the nature of those positions, so drafting an ADC later in the draft might be ideal because you can prioritize high-kill leaders at other positions knowing that even a mid-tier ADC will likely get a lot of kills.

Oracle’s Elixir is one of the most comprehensive League of Legends statistical sites that you can use, and it’s the one that I looked at. You can look up player stats by region and split. The stats for most of the players eligible to be drafted will be found in the 2021 LCS summer and spring split lists. However, there are a handful of players who are new to the region this year from Europe, Korea, China and Southeast Asia. So in order to assess these players it’s important to look over their stats from whatever region they played in last year. Although these regions are all generally considered more competitive than North America, players sometimes have a difficult time adjusting to playing in a new region, so that’s something to keep in mind.

Who to draft first?

When drafting on Sleeper, the players are all arranged in a certain order, presumably according to expected performance. Right away, I noticed Søren "Bjergsen" Bjerg was the top-ranked player. He was retired for a year, but is clearly expected to be at the top of the league. Looking at his Lock In stats, he doesn’t have the most kills, but his 15.6 KDA, which takes into account kills, deaths and assists, is by far the highest among players who played at least six games. And he and Team Liquid played 13 games, so that’s not a small sample size for Lock in. In 2020, he was top 10 in both kills and KDA during both the spring and summer splits.

Should you draft him first? He’s probably a very safe pick, but might not necessarily have the most potential when taking into account kills. Next on Sleeper’s draft board is European import Steven "Hans sama" Liv. He had the third-most kills and fifth-best KDA in Lock In, and when looking at his stats from last year, you’ll see that he had the most kills in the LEC last spring with 103, and had the fourth-best KDA with 6.3. So he’s a solid option.

A trio of 100 Thieves players – Felix "Abbedagge" Braun, Can "Closer" Çelik and Ian Victor "FBI" Huang – are listed next on the draft board. How do they compare to each other? FBI had the second-most kills last spring, but was much further down the list in the summer when Closer had the eighth-most kills and the third-highest KDA. Abbedagge is unique in that he was in the LEC during the spring and LCS during the summer. He wasn’t among the leaders in kills in either split, but he was a top 10 player in KDA during the LCS summer split.

Photo credit: Riot Games

Right below that trio is Evil Geniuses’ Kyle "Danny" Sakamaki. He finished last summer with the most kills in the LCS as a rookie, and he picked up a pentakill during Lock In. He’s a player that I would consider drafting first not only because he has the potential to improve during his second year, but also because of EG’s potential as a team this year.

The next two players on the draft board are EG’s Kacper "Inspired" Słoma and Immortals’ Tristan "PowerOfEvil" Schrage. Inspired is another player coming over from Europe, and he finished top 10 in KDA during both the spring and summer splits. PowerofEvil was 11th in kills in spring and then dropped to 26th in the summer but was 5th in KDA. Looking at both of these players, Inspired had a strong Lock In tournament and is probably the better option if you’re drafting seventh or eighth.

Considering team objective point potential

Team objectives will also earn your team points but this is very hard to predict and not something that you can easily factor when drafting players. Last year, TSM led the league in first baron kill rate in both spring and summer, so having TSM players on your roster would have given you a lot of extra points for this stat last year. However, in 2020 they were not first in this stat category, and their roster is very different this year, so there’s no telling whether the team will be as good at killing baron first.

The best teams in the league will generally be better at team objectives like getting the first baron and drake kills. This year, it would appear that having more Team Liquid, Evil Geniuses, Cloud9 and 100 Thieves players on your roster will likely improve your chances to get more of these team objective points on a week-to-week basis. You’ll notice that all of the top eight players on Sleeper’s draft board are on Team Liquid, Evil Geniuses or 100 Thieves with the exception of PowerOfEvil. Not only are they all strong individual players, but they’re on teams that are expected to perform well and thus pick up more team objective points.

Pick and ban points strategy

Pick and ban points are not a factor when drafting, and will be very unpredictable on a week to week basis. Essentially, each week you can pick a champion for each of your players, and if he plays that champion, you’ll get bonus points. You can ban a champion for each of your opponents’ players, and that will negatively affect your opponent’s points. The only way to strategize for this is to pay attention to your player’s champion picks from week to week. With more data as the season goes on, you’ll be more likely to get these picks and bans right later in the season.

Lead photo credit: Riot Games