LR vs NORD: How LoLDraftAI Can Help to Improve Draft Preparation In Pro Play

While Los Ratones(LR) showed an outstanding performance in the NLC 2025 Winter finals, game 1 was a little bit of a struggle for Rekkles piloting Rakan. In this article we will show that Rakan was almost unplayable in the draft, what could have been a better pick and how LoLDraftAI can help prepare drafts in competitive play.

Why Rakan was a bad pick

First of all, let's see what LoLDraftAI thinks of the complete draft:

The overall draft is about even, with quite a bit of picks being suboptimal. However one thing that jumps to the eye is the -18% winrate impact of the Rakan. This means that on average, the same blue side draft with other supports would have 18% more chance of winning.

Here is how I would interpret why the Rakan pick is hard to play in this draft(as a Master tier support main, if that gives some credibility):

• No wombo combo with Rakan: blue side doesn't have any other snap follow up to the Rakan engage such as an Orianna, Yasuo or Hwei.
• High CC in enemy team: Rakan is squishy and can be easily one shot when CC'ed
• Low synergy with Ivern: Ivern is best with melee support that commit to the engage to get the maximum value out of Ivern E

What could have been a better pick in the moment

The support pick was on Blue 5th pick, with Poppy, Alistar, Braum being banned:

In voice comms, Rekkles was hesitating between Rell and Rakan. Here is the a rough transcript of the voice comms during that pick:

We know Rakan ended up not being a good pick, let's see what LoLDraftAI suggest instead.

LoLDraftAI is able to generate champion recommendations by predicting the winrate of a draft that contains that champion. In the following table, I included 2 columns:

• Pre-Viktor WR: The predicted winrate with the following picks locked:
  • Blue side: Volibear, Ivern, Cho'Gath, Ezreal
  • Red side: Camille, Skarner, Ezreal, Leona
• Post-Viktor WR: The winrate with Viktor also locked in for red side

Here are the meta support suggestions, filtering out banned or picked champions and more "solo queue" picks such as Xerath or Shaco:

It is quite telling that Rakan is basically the worst pick besides Yuumi. While it would take too much time to go over these picks 1 by 1, we can try to emerge a general pattern from the top suggestions. If we look at the best choices, we see they fit mostly in 2 categories:

• Roaming/Hook supports: Pyke, Thresh, Bard, Blitzcrank
• Melee Peeling tanks: Galio, Maokai, Tahm Kench, Taric, Shen

So why are Roaming/Hook supports and Peeling tanks good here? This is what we will see in the next section, seeing how LoLDraftAI could help with draft preparation.

Draft preparation with LoLDraftAI

While in soloqueue you can use LoLDraftAI to get champion recommendations, this option is not available in pro play. Instead LoLDraftAI can be used for draft preparation by filling only 1 side of the team and using champion suggestions. Here is what we can do to find good support picks:

By filling out only 1 side with the 4 champions we aim to pick, we can use LoLDraftAI to suggest Support picks, this will take into account only the team synergies since we do not see the enemy team. This is a strong use case to determine the best champion combinations. Here are the top suggested meta supports:

Here again, if we filter out the solo queue supports such as Shaco, Vel'Koz, we see the same pattern of:

• Roaming supports: Pyke, Bard, Thresh
• Melee peel supports: Poppy, Alistar, Shen, Galio, Taric

So why do these work so well in this Draft? While LoLDraftAI and AI in general is a powerful tool, it cannot explain its answers, so here is my interpretation.

1) Why Roaming supports work well

The roaming supports work really well because of a few factors

• Ivern and Cho'gath are good at ganking sidelanes, having an additional support that pairs up with them is really strong.
• The snowball potential of this draft is really strong, with all lanes being really hard to deal with once they are fed, and with Cho'Gath objective control to avoid throws.
• Ezreal can safely farm while the support is roaming, this avoids having to lane against the strong Leona Varus lane

2) Why Melee peel supports work well

Here are why I think melee peel supports work really well here:

• They are still capable of roams, while not as good as category 1, the same points apply.
• They pair really well with Ivern: their lack of reach is compensated by Ivern Q and they are super strong with Ivern E in early game fights.
• Most of them are strong in lane against Leona
• They are effective at protecting the only backline carry of this team: Ezreal. It's important to note that Ezreal will get focused hard, so having melee supports that can peel for him is important in case the game is even(in case of snowball, Voli and Cho can carry by themselves, which is pretty much what happened in the game).

Had Los Ratones had this preparation, they surely would have considered these champions in draft instead of just Rell or Rakan.

Conclusion

In this article we have seen how LoLDraftAI can be an amazing tool both in solo queue but also in pro play. While in solo queue it can give you champion recommendations on the fly, in pro play it can still help prepare and analyze games. We know from voice comms that the support pick discussion was quickly centered around Rell or Rakan, but if Los Ratones had the preparation from LoLDraftAI, they would have prioritized the debate around different picks and ended up with an better draft.