Being able to understand both Korean and English has been a blessing for me when uncovering ideas and strategy involved in professional League of Legends, but one thing I’ve noticed with the English speaking side of analysis is their rather obnoxious view on itemization and draft, often calling out players or coaches for either buying the “incorrect” item in a given situation or drafting “badly” into the enemy composition.

The biggest reason why this has stuck out as a sore thumb to me is the attack League of Legends Pro League (LPL) has been underfire by the NA public for what they view is bad itemization and drafts. This became extremely evident to me after the 2020 Summer LPL Final between JD Gaming (JDG) and Top Esports (TES). In the late game both mid laners bought Morellonomicon, which a lot of analysts see as a gold inefficient item (92.97% cost effective) when its passive cannot be utilized effectively.

So let’s look at Morellionomicon’s sister item, Liandry’s Torment. Liandry’s when looked at without its passive is actually even more cost inefficient with 78.43% gold efficiency. Now this is why both items are situational. Their value derives from how effectively the champion or player can apply their passives in a given game. The player in question, Yagao, was playing Zoe at the time where, if Zoe is played correctly, has a difficult time stacking these madness stacks effectively for the passive to be worthwhile. So let’s say that both items are bad in this circumstance. So then, my question would be what would Yagao build next?

If any real cost analysis was looked at before hand, you’ll find that many of the mage items are not cost effective without taking the passive into account. In fact Morellonomicon having a 92.97% gold effeciency is actually one of the highest out of all the mage items without any prerequisites.

Now this brings up another question on my side. Why do people care so much about itemization? Well, funny enough Riot Azael actually brought this up recently in a tweet:

[Riot Azael’s Twitter Post] (https://twitter.com/riotazael/status/1304484647988940803?s=21) (I can’t show these as twitter cards at the moment. I will try to fix this later on)

I agree with him that the biggest reason why people argue about itemization and drafts is because it is so easy to do on paper. It does not require immense amounts of game knowledge to debate with direct numbers to use for argument. Furthermore, it’s difficult to say a certain approach is wrong because of how difficult it is to gauge value on item passives and how a playstyle can be adapted to effectively use an item. However, I also agree with Isaac in the fact that it’s overtaken the value of discussion on gameplay, which is more valuable in talking about when determining why a team won. JDG did not lose to TES just because Yagao bought Morellonomicon. JDG lost because of a series of outplays and macro mistakes throughout the game, for example Kanavi’s urgency to create more space by pushing too far into Karsa’s jungle to get caught out or knight’s hidden Syndra Q to hit a surprise stun on Kanavi and LvMao in their fight to contest dragon.

I also think the overbearing discussion on draft and “bad” champions exist for the same reason arguments about itemization, it’s too easy to theorize and talk about who wins what matchup and in a vacuum which champion composition plays better. But there’s way more factors that play into this as professional players can be creative or just better than their opponent, making losing matchups into winning ones or factors such as jungle pressure creating a different game state than expected. I will like to go into examples of why I personally don’t believe in “winning” or “losing” drafts with examples where teams could win with compositions where people have often said they have the “losing” draft.