Fearless Draft is the new way to draft in competitive environments to spice up the tournaments, as well as upset the power levels of the professional League of Legends matches – and it’s here to stay. Riot Games has announced on lolesports.com that after a Split and an International Event of Fearless Draft, the new format has been tried and tested and will be used for the remainder of the 2025 competitive League of Legends year.
Fearless Draft to Return Every Split in 2025, Players Will Have to Adapt
Riot Games saw the success of Fearless Draft in all regions as it was introduced to try out in all of the Best of Threes and Best of Fives of the LTA, the LEC, the LPL, the LCK, and the LCP. While players and viewers were initially unimpressed by the changes, Fearless Draft was quickly becoming a success, creating crazy compositions and rewarding teams that had a vast champion pool and could adapt quickly to the meta.
After Split 1, the organizers of the various tournaments received positive feedback, so Fearless Draft is here to stay for the entirety of 2025, starting with Split 2. This won’t change the formats of the various regional and international tournaments, so Best of Ones are here to stay for now. However, the Mid-Season Invitational and the 2025 League of Legends World Championship will have Fearless Best of Threes and Best of Fives in their respective segments after the Bo1 Swiss Stage at Worlds, for example.
What is Fearless Draft?
Fearless Draft is an improvement of the draft system that we got used to over the past decade. In a Best of Three or Best of Five series, teams start out by picking champions all the same: so three bans for each side, then three picks, then two additional bans and two more picks, with Blue Side having the advantage of first pick, while Red Side can counterpick with their last pick.
In Fearless Draft, however, the champions that someone has picked cannot be played again. There are two versions of Fearless: soft Fearless and hard Fearless. In the former, only the team that picked a given champion can’t pick them again, while in the latter, nobody can play a champion that any players picked during the course of the series. Hard Fearless Draft was the version players were playing in for Split One of 2025, and that will be the version that is going to be prevalent for the remainder of the year. You can find out more about Fearless Draft in our Fearless Draft Guide here.
Overall, Fearless Draft has been a success in both regional and international matches. It gave way to picks such as Pantheon in the jungle, who hasn’t seen professional play ever since his rework back in 2019. It also brought picks such as Camille and Kennen out of the bench in the finals of the inaugural First Stand tournament – as well as grace us with Hanwha Life Esports’ Support, Yoo “Delight” Hwan-joong’s Gragas support.
While Fearless Draft is not perfect, and some champions are very unlikely to see professional play until they get a significant rework. However, it did achieve the goal of shaking up the meta of proplay a bit, which has become stale no matter how the developers tried to shit the meta. With more of the roster of League of Legends used, new tactics could emerge, which should mean that the power rankings of the pro world change – as we’ve already seen after Karmine Corp made it to the finals of First Stand.
