Guides on drafting in Captain's Mode

The number one rule is to pick heroes that your teammates are comfortable with - particularly with newer players, it's better to get a mediocre draft that you can play well than a perfect draft that you've never played before. Similarly, don't pick combinations that require too much coordination to pull off unless you know your team is up to it.


That doesn't mean pick everyone the specific hero they ask for of course - try to get an idea of which heroes each person can play, or suggest heroes that you think would fit and see if anyone can play them. This tends to be a lot easier in a stack of course, where you know everyone will communicate!

Try to have a really high level plan for your draft from the start

If there's a certain hero that someone really wants or a strategy that you want to try, build your idea around that. For example someone really wants to play Dragon Knight mid, so let's draft around a push strat.

Keep your first set of bans and picks fairly generic - use your bans to remove heroes that you just don't want to play against (and that are popular enough that they're actually likely to get picked), and use your picks for flexible heroes that don't give too much away. Supports and offlaners tend to be good choices for your first picks, as do heroes like Mirana who can be played in multiple roles. Avoid first picking anyone that is easily countered (e.g. Sniper).

If in doubt, you can never go wrong with 'safe' pub performers like Necrophos, Wraith King, Lich, and so on - straightforward heroes that are hard to play badly. They may not be the most exciting heroes, but there's a reason that these guys tend to have the top pub winrates month on month!

In pubs, you're looking for 3 main things:

1. A cohesive set of picks/strategy
2. Heroes your team can play
3. Ease of execution

While you're doing this, you need to be analyzing the information they are giving you (via picks/bans), and hiding your draft through adaptive picks. Any strategy game has some element of getting more information and using it to poke holes in your enemy's strategy. If you can figure out their lanes or strategy, you can draft a strong strategy to break it.

Phases

Bans 1

These are usually current trendy heroes. Even if you have a strategy that can break the meta, you may still consider banning trendy shit because it keeps the other team from questioning your bans too much.

• If you have 1st ban
• You get first pick
• So you don't want to ban all the top tier shit -- force them to ban it or risk giving it to you
• If you have 2nd ban
• You get picks 2 + 3
• Think about strong combos to pick up

Picks 1

You want to pick up 2 types of things here:

• Generally strong heroes
• Heroes that do not give away your lanes

This usually boils down to stuff like:

• A semi-carry/utility that can be run as your 1, 2, or 3 (or any combination of 2 of those)
• A support that can be run in a defensive or aggressive trilane

Remember, a team consists of 3 cores and 2 supports. Usually you'll see combinations of 2 core picks, 1 core + 1 support, or heroes that can be a lot of things. Picking up 2 supports can give away your lanes.

Bans 2

You'll start looking at strategies now, so you want to ban out things that:

• Benefit their strategy (e.g. do they have lots of push? Wombo combo? etc.)
• Benefit their picks (e.g. they have Mirana, do you want to deal with Bane + Mirana? Or they have Ancient Apparition, do you want to deal with the Ancient Apparition buff on Weaver?)
• Hurt your strategy (e.g. we have lots of big ults, do we want to deal with Silencer? If you end up in 3v3, are there heroes that could win a 1v1 with your offlaner?)

These can hinge on a lot of things. Like, you may need your mid to do well for your strategy to succeed, so you might want to just ban out heroes that do well against your hero in mid so that lane is fine. Or maybe you want to run a defensive trilane, so you ban out some strong aggro trilaners.

At this point in time though, it's hard to ban out particular kinds of heroes. Most drafts are pretty open at this point since most captains don't want to pigeon hole themselves.

Picks 2

Here you'll start finishing the core of your strategy and potentially adapting a bit to theirs. You want to start piecing together what lanes are going to look like and making sure your lanes are set up to do ok, or at least that your strategy has potential to come back during mid game

Bans 3

This is your last ban. At this point you should have some idea of what they need.

Particularly, look at things like:

• Is there one hero that has some absurd synergy with this lineup?
• Is there one hero that would destroy one of your 1v1 lanes?
• Are they missing any type of hero (e.g. carry, mid, offlane, support)?
• Do they have initiators?
• Does it look like they want to aggro?
• How much level dependence do they have?
• e.g. if they have a lot of heroes that need lvl 6 to do shit, they might look for a jungler, or a hero that can do a lot before lvl 6
• How strong is their push and split-push?

Basically, you're looking for things that tie their strategy together, or heroes that poke a hole in your strategy.

Picks 3

This is your last pick.

• If you picked 1st, you get last pick

If you have last pick, it's easier to do pocket picks -- stuff they won't expect. They don't have an opportunity to react to it.

Otherwise, you're just looking to finish out your draft and make last minute adaptations. Some things may come together in this last phase, like you realize their Viper is actually going to be an aggro trilaner, or that Wraith King is going to support.

In Game

Sometimes you'll run into issues like you have no idea how they are running their lanes. In that case, you can do level 1 Smoke Ganks to sort of sniff the lanes out and potentially get a 1st Blood.

Other times, you may do level 1 Smoke Gank because you want to do an aggro trilane, but aren't sure it will succeed. If you get first blood via smoke, the aggro trilane will be very easy. If you don't, you may consider breaking down into a defensive trilane or some other configuration.

Attributes to Consider While Drafting

Greed

Greed comes in a lot of forms. But it is rooted in drafts that want a lot of XP or GPM.

Greedy drafts work when you can avoid being pushed in early and are careful not to give up a lot of deaths. If you can do that, your heroes will be far stronger than theirs and can eventually brute force their way to victory. You see EG do this a lot (as of The International 4-era EG).

Greedy drafts look like:

• Junglers that need farm (e.g. Enigma)
• Many heroes that want level 6 to be effective
• 3-4 heroes that want a significant amount of farm

Push & Team Fight

In order to win, you need to destroy buildings.
Now you can draft to do this in a number of ways:

• Get pushers
• Get split-pushers
• Force team fights, win them, then push
• this can be countered by split-push -- unless you can push early enough and hard enough that they cannot avoid it ==> you need pushers anyway here
• Stall until your heroes are farmed (e.g. draft stuff like Tinker, Keeper of the Light, and good high-ground defenders)

Initiation

You need a way to start fights. Often, this falls onto a hero with Blink. But if you cannot make an opening, you fall into situations where you just sit there and wait for them to come to you, or have a staring contest.

There are other ways to get around this though. You can have heavy push with a hero like Tidehunter. Even if he doesn't have Blink, it makes them 2nd guess engaging you because he can ult and now you don't need to initiate. But this hinges on forcing them to come defend or lose tower after tower.

One thing to be wary of is drafting a hero like Sand King or Earthshaker as support, then relying on them to initiate. If they have a bad early game, your initiation won't come online for a while. In contrast, a hero like offlane Centaur Warrunner should be able to get Blink in a timely fashion regardless.

Items

Two big ones you want to think about are:

• Arcane Boots
• Mekansm

As of late, Mekansm tends to fall on mid or offlane (and aggro trilane carries) to pick up because of the early engagements that are popular now. If you leave Mekansm to a support, you may not have it till 25+ minutes in, at which point you may have lost the game. So carefully consider who is going to be your Mekansm carrier and make sure they have the resources to get it by the point you want it.

Also look at the number of natural Arcane carriers vs. the number of heroes that are mana hungry. If you have several cores that want mana, then draft a Wraith King (who typically builds Power Treads), your team may be hurting for mana all game.

Support Duos

If you want your supports to be active early on, make sure it is a combination that can get done. What you typically want to avoid are things like:

• 2 supports that badly want lvl 6
• A support with an unreliable stun and no setup (setup doesn't have to be the other support, but mid or the carry better have something)
• 2 set-up supports (e.g. Bane and Shadow Shaman do similar things and will not be able to get kills)

DPS

You also need to make sure your lineup can get kills. Crowd control and utility is great, but if you have no one that can dish out the damage, it goes to waste.

This isn't just during mid and late game either

Early game, especially in the trilane, you need to watch for low DPS. Like a lane with Anti-Mage, Bane, and Visage has extremely low damage output until level 3 or so, and even then it's fairly low. An offlaner could just bully them, or an aggro trilane would destroy them.

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Time to splurge about my experience with Captain's Mode! One of the best things about playing Captain's Mode in low-level pubs is that you can discover your own pub meta.

In my experience, people play a lot worse in Captain's Mode than in All Pick. This can be due to several factors:

• They don't have a wide hero pool and the captain picked something they're not good at
• They don't know how to trilane, but do it anyways
• They don't know how to properly support

Consequently, pubs Captain's Mode is a story of people imitating pro's but having no idea what they're doing.

When playing  Captain's Mode, you should not be jumping far out of your comfort zone

Now, I'm not saying that you should play like you do in All Pick and everyone just picks their own hero. You're queueing Captain's Mode because you want a coordinated team and want to trust your teammates.

What this does mean, is that you should listen to your teammates' hero preferences when picking heroes.

You might get some that insist on playing a difficult hero and then proceed to feed. Whatever, there are always bad apples in pubs. But most people perform well with their favorite heroes.

For banning and picking

I won't get into the nitty gritty details because it's honestly not that important when you're just learning. Your first picks should either be a top contested hero, or a versatile hero that won't lock up your lineup and be counterpicked easily.

Finally, there definitely are OP heroes in low-level pubs, and there is a trend as to who is OP

You should not be afraid to pick them. They can be divided into the following categories:

Strong laners

This one is kinda iffy, but the idea is that most people don't know how to cut their losses instead of taking mad harrass for a single last hit. Think Skywrath Mage and Lich.

Stuns. You can never go wrong with stuns

Draft 5 heroes with stuns if you wish to. It makes lanes, ganks, and teamfights so much easier to execute. On top of that, people usually don't know to get a Black King Bar, so you don't really fall off in the mid-late game much.

Pushers and teamfighters. This is the most important category

A lot of people have the tendency to group up mid at 10mins in the game and just push. They don't know how to gauge both side's strength based on the lineup. They don't know how to avoid teamfights. They don't know how to delay and farm. They will just meet you head-on into their Doom. Draft a Death Prophet, Necrophos, Disruptor, or Jakiro.

Notice how a lot of the top pub winrate heroes fall into the above categories. Above all, just have fun. You're not gonna draft like a pro and win suddenly. Experiment, and look back on your Captain's Draft games and analyze your drafts. Think about how your lanes went and your midgame.

Oh, and you should play some Captain's Draft so that you be forced to broaden your hero pool and maybe put more variety into your future drafts.