Riot Games has announced the implementation of the Fearless Draft system across its entire League of Legends (LoL) competitive ecosystem in 2025. But what is Fearless Draft and why is it a game-changer for the esports scene? Here’s what you need to know.
Image Credit: Riot Games
Riot Games to introduce Fearless Draft in the first split of the 2025 LoL competitive season
The new draft mode will take the headlines in the first part of the new season, which will be split into three different stages. The first splits of all the major competitions will have the Fearless Draft implemented, including the new international event, First Stand.
Riot is testing the waters to see how the community will respond to the new game mode and whether there are good enough reasons to implement it to a bigger extent in the upcoming years, with the potential of seeing Fearless Draft becoming the standard for competitive play.
What is Fearless Draft?
Fearless Draft is a drafting mode that affects Best-of series, such as the best-of-threes (BO3) or best-of-fives (BO5). The concept is straightforward: a champion cannot be chosen more than once during an entire series, making the pick unavailable for the following matches.
To make an example, if a team selects Ahri in Game 2 of a Bo5, that champion is automatically removed from all the following games within that same series, and in this case, the mid laner will have to pick other champions. This is mainly to incentivize different types of strategy, drafts, and test players’ ability to play a wider range of champions.
The two variations of Fearless Draft
It’s important to distinguish the two version of Fearless draft that can be used:
- Soft Fearless Draft – Teams cannot use the same champion for the rest of the series but the enemy team can still choose that given champion (once) in one of the subsequent games.
- Hard Fearless Draft – Both teams won’t be able to get access to a selected champion for the entire series. In other words, a Bo5 series will see 50 unique champions being played. The 10 bans will still be applied.
With the goal of reducing redundancy and the excessive abuse of meta picks on specific patch notes, Riot Games is looking to encourage new ways to make the game more exciting by increasing diversity and raising the teams’ ability to create strategies and drafts around the new rules. To see the Fearless Draft in action, make sure to tune to the start of the new season in January.