The Apex Legends meta shifts every season, but things can get a bit stale – especially at the highest level. Pro players min-max every possible element of the game, meaning that ALGS tournaments can start to feel highly predictable (in how teams will play, if not who will win).
For what it’s worth, I quite enjoy the defensive meta at present. Bubble fights are a blast from the past and an expression of pure skill – it doesn’t matter what abilities you have, if your gunplay isn’t up to scratch, you’re not winning that 3v3. However, nine matches of similar endgames in the Year 4 ALGS Championship finals proved a bit much. Luckily, that’s changing next year.
As announced in the Year 5 blog, the Apex Legends esports scene is shuffling things up by introducing a Legend ban system. There’s also a mind boggling 480-player LAN, but that’s another story.
How Will The ALGS Legend Ban System Work?
The Legend ban system is incredibly simple: the most picked Legend in each match is banned for the rest of the series. In most cases, this will be just the five remaining matches, but in Match Point finals, the likes of Newcastle and Gibraltar could be banned in perpetuity.
There are a couple of caveats. If the last Legend of a class is banned, the first one to be taken out is re-added to proceedings. There are also robust tiebreak rules, which I break down in the article linked above.
That’s it. The players are voting with their picks, and will have to be more adaptable as the meta shifts over the course of a series. As viewers, we’re in for a treat. We’ll see more Legends, more playstyles, and more unique strategies being rewarded. Aurora’s Mirage pick this weekend netted them an incredible 10.8 percent win rate – it’s this kind of ingenuity that we’ll see more of going forwards.
Is The Legend Ban A Good Thing?
Players will undoubtedly complain, but the Legend ban system is going to change competitive Apex Legends for the better. It’s a decision that seems to have gone down unanimously well on social media, which is a first, and fans are excited to see how it shapes the game when Pro League kicks off on April 6.
Take the Championship final, for example. With every team picking Gibraltar in the first round and Exo Clan the only team not taking a Newcastle, Gibby would have been banned first. I feel like he would have been replaced by a different defensive Legend – Loba, Mirage, and even Lifeline may have been popular choices.
After Game 2, Newcastle would be next. With both shield characters banned, team compositions would really shift. Rampart’s pick rate would plummet, as she’s mostly utilised as a Newcastle counter, meaning that we’d have entirely new team compositions by the third round of play. I’d expect to see a lot of Catalyst and Valkyrie in play for their help on the rotations, but who would be picked as an anchor? The same defensive Legends that replaced Gibby spring to mind, but there’s plenty of room for experimentation.
We could even see Pathfinder get some love in this hypothetical situation.
Players would not only get to see an entirely different meta form as early as Match 3, there would be a sub-meta that players would have to navigate in order to be the best. This is where coaches like Raven and Winnie come in. What’s the best team composition in a lobby with no Gibraltar? How does this shift your playstyle and your Legend picks? The teams with the best strategies will prosper.
Players will have to think on their feet, too. We saw Phillip ‘ImperialHal’ Dosen putting in the work on livestreams in order to learn how to play Newcastle comfortably before the Championship. A Legend Ban meta will reward players who put in the hours and can adapt to playing a range of different characters.
Respawn has created such an interesting and varied roster of Legends that we could very well see three or four different metas in one Match Point final. We could go from shields, to gases, to scans, to full aggro, to something we’ve never seen before. Will RevTane return? Will game designer John Larson’s prediction come true and see Alter finally get their time to shine?
Whatever happens, 2025 is a great time to be a fan of competitive Apex Legends, and it’s far more likely that you’ll see your main being used on the biggest stage of all.
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