10 Bans Live in League of Legends Ranked Queues

The promised day is upon us, fellow League of Legends fans! At long last, the days of Riven, Yasuo, and Zac having any probability of appearing in ranked games are behind us. No more shall our laners feed these cancerous abominations. No more shall we smash the enemy Riven or Yasuo just to have them come back by exploiting our hapless teammates. A new day in ranked has dawned! A day where cancer gives way to serious play and the tier list goes all but ignored! Join me in rejoicing this glorious new era by banning Yasuo every game for now until the universe grows cold and dark!

Seriously, though, the new ten ban system has, at last, come to the ranked queues. While that, in theory, means that each game should now feature more bans than they previously did, that's not precisely the case. The new ten ban system, as anyone who's played a normal game lately knows, isn't comparable to the snake draft system that you might have seen the pros use. In fact, the new ban system isn't designed so much to increase the number of games that the average game has in it. While it will likely do so, the primary motivation behind the new ban system is simply to give every player a voice in champion select, as each player now has the opportunity to ban a single champion that they don't wish to play against.

The new system operates in two stages. First, each team chooses their own set of bans, but these bans aren't revealed to the other team until the end of the phase. During this time, teams can discuss amongst each other which bans they do or don't want to make. Simply banning nothing is now an option, as the new system has, at last, implemented a "no ban" option, which will allow players that might wish to not ban a champion for whatever reason to do so without accidentally screwing the Aatrox one-trick on their team. Players won't be allowed to ban the same champion that an ally has already banned, so the system might see a bit more use than it would have were it implemented in the previous ban system, where only Faker or his imitators would have used it.

After the first phase, both teams get to see the bans that the other team made during the second phase. It's important to note that teams can ban the same champions, so there definitely will be games with only 5 bans with the new system, though such an occurrence seems inconceivably rare. Finally, both teams go to into the pick phase as usual after another round of discussion time.

Also, a PSA for all of you newer summoners out there: the minimum number of champions required to enter ranked queues has increased from 16 to 20. For anyone that might be affected by this change, we recommend you make sure that you have picked up all the free champions that are available by following Riot Games on social media. You can obtain Alistar, Garen, and Tristana for free just by following Riot Games on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter!