What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Today we wanted to talk about a bunch of broken tricks that challengers are abusing that the
rest of the player base doesn’t, with the hope that some of you incorporate these tricks
into your own gameplay and start to feel yourselves improve as players!
And since I’m not a challenger player myself, joining me today is gonna be pants are dragon
who helped put together the list and make this
video today!
The first trick we want to talk about is all about abusing the lack of vision from unwarded
brush on the map.
Everyone is familiar with brush and the role it plays in the game to let you move unseen,
but most players don’t even come close to taking advantage of it often enough!
Something you can often see from watching Challenger players play is how often they
will dip and weave in and out of the brush, which is always worth doing even if it’s
just to get your opponent second guessing what you’re up to.
If you watch closely though, you’ll see it goes a step deeper - they are often using
the brush to hide specific actions.
For example, say you want to cast an ability, but you want to take the enemy by surprise
or just hide the animation to give them less time to react.
If you’re into the habit of moving in and out of the brush, you can use that time to
fire off an ability, or even just an auto attack, hide the animation by abusing the
lack of vision.
The same goes for minion aggro - if a brush has no wards in it, the minions cannot see
you in the brush, so you can shake off aggro that you gain after harassing an enemy with
an auto attack by walking into the brush and resetting it.
The next one is all about mind games, and it can be really hard to get into the habit
of doing but super powerful once you learn to exploit it.
Let’s use an example to explain it - say you’re up in the top lane, stood next to
your caster minions, and you see the enemy jungler has come to gank because you have
the river brush warded.
It would be really natural for most players to just immediately run towards the tower
- after all, that’s where they are going to be safe from most ganks.
But as long as their jungler isn’t coming directly to you, you can assume they are waiting
for you to move into a disadvantageous position - maybe a bit further towards the enemy tower,
or closer to the brush they are hiding in.
This gives you the time to play a pretty mean trick - just pretend to be oblivious!
Move forward slightly then back again, so that you can stay at a safe distance while
also making the enemy jungler think you have no knowledge of where you are.
You can even take it a step further by using a ranged harass ability on the enemy then
quickly backing out, you’re essentially taunting the jungler and making him think
that you are probably going to end up going towards him or making a mistake, even though
you are aware of him the entire time and you can still just move back to safety once he
eventually does reveal himself.
The benefit here is that you are wasting a lot of the time he could spend farming or
ganking other lanes - and every second counts in a game like League!
Most players in the ranked queues have at least heard of minion wave management, since
it’s talked about during pro games and other discussions, but most don’t even bother
to learn how to do it themselves.
I admit, it sounds pretty technical when you first hear about the concept, but it’s actually
a lot simpler to do once you’re used to it, and you can definitely use a few of the
tricks without needing crazy mechanics.
For example, to freeze a lane you can tank minions and stagger minions until you are
fighting the minions where you want it to freeze, then kill enemy creeps to match exactly
your own wave - for example, leave 1 melee and 2 casters if that’s how many you have
on your own wave.
The real pro trick here though is to drag the minion waves to gain different advantages.
For example, when the enemy wave is on it’s way towards you, you can take the aggro then
quickly dip into the brush, and do this a few times to stagger the wave and throw it
out of balance, making it naturally push.
You can do the same to drag minions upwards in the lane and dip back into the bush, or
even drag the wave towards your jungle to try save a couple of creeps that would have
originally been killing by those minions.
You should also know how to create your own giant minion waves that you can use to storm
an enemy base.
The way to do this is to kill two caster minions on a balanced wave - the melee minions have
way more health, so it will take your wave so long to kill them that the next wave will
actually have time to spawn and catch up.
These can happen a few times in a long lane where the first two towers have gone down,
leading you to have a minion wave strong enough to solo an inhibitor tower.
It’s a bit of a double-edged sword tactic though - you have to prepare this trick 3
minutes or so in advance, and you need to make sure the enemy laners don’t have the
time and space to head back and clear the wave.
At it’s best, this trick will get you
a free inhib turret.
At it’s worst, you are losing 5-6 waves worth of farm.
The next trick is about ward placement - it’s easy to fall into the trap of just plopping
down a ward in the usual locations, maybe in front of an objective or in a brush looking
over a common gank path, but these places are often super easy to counter with a pink
because the usual pink spots will check for these wards.
In fact, the best way to learn to place normal sight wards is to learn where the usual pink
ward spots are - for example, in the river brush next to dragon, the tri-brushes near
top and bot lane, and the brush at the back of red buff.
The higher in the ELOs you climb, the more likely that you’re going to find pink wards
in these locations, and you can’t always head over to check and clear them out, so
it’s important to know how to ward around them.
Control wards actually have a 900 unit radius - although that doesn’t go through terrain.
That means when warding a potential gank path or objective, you should look and think where
pink wards are likely to be placed, then place your sight ward in a way that won’t be spotted
while still covering the pathway to give you information about enemy whereabouts.
Let’s use the river brush near bot lane for example - it’s usually going to get
pink warded by the purple side because it will clear vision and help their jungler ganks
bot.
That means any wards you have in that brush or in the vicinity will be cleared out.
That being said, you could place a vision ward a bit further up the lane - for example,
just in front of dragon pit.
It would be outside the range of the control ward, while also giving you an early warning
about enemy junglers moving towards bot lane from blue - and it also could keep an eye
on dragon for you too!
There’s tons of these spots around, so make sure you actively think about where pink wards
are likely to be placed, and how you can hide wards outside their range or around pieces
of terrain to give yourself a vision advantage that is hard to deal with!
Our fifth trick is really about greed - a lot of players in lower elos will be pretty
happy after winning a dragon or baron fight and taking that objective, but then they often
recall, since they are low on health and want to spend their newly acquired gold.
What you should actually be doing after winning an objective
is counterjungling!
When enemies are dead, there’s not much of a threat of dying, and you’ll usually
have a minion wave pushed up.
This means you have time to head into the enemy jungler and steal away camps for free
gold, and sometimes you’ll even get away with stealing buffs.
League is about changing advantages together - and although it’s becoming more common
for people to rotate between objectives, it’s still rare to see people actively counter-jungling
when the enemy team is dead until you reach the high skill ratings.
Abuse this strategy to give yourself more of a gold lead, and deny the gold, experience
and buffs from the enemy team.
Our next trick is about baiting objectives.
It’s really easy to set your sights on a target like Baron, but going straight for
it is often a mistake since the enemy team might be ready to collapse on you.
Honestly this is one of those things you have to get a feeling for - when to start an objective
and when to bait it out, but the easiest way to pull it off is to ignore the idea of capturing
the objective you’re baiting.
For example, if you have a strong split pusher on your team, you can split your focus up
and send them to another lane where they could pressure an inhibitor for example.
The rest of your team can hover around Baron, causing map pressure that pulls the enemy
team's attention.
You don’t even actually have to try take Baron, just stay grouped and near it to force
the enemy team to focus on you, while your split pusher takes down turrets for free.
This works even better if you have someone with Teleport, since you can use this strategy
to force the enemy team to send at least one person back to defend - and then have your
teammate teleport back to help take a 5v4 fight.
Don’t commit to an objective you know the enemy team is being contested, and make sure
you consider the whole map when you are planning to make an aggressive play, and you can be
rewarded with really clean wins where the enemy team feels like they have no way to
stop you.
The last trick for today is something that a lot of lower ELO players never consider
even though it’s often a really easy thing to do.
If you have an enemy champion low on health, often they are going to want to recall to
spend their gold and recover lost health.
If you’re a ranged champion or a tanky melee champion, you can often poke at them or move
into range to threaten them into cancelling a recall, which stalls them out and makes
them waste time.
It all comes back to trying to gain tiny advantages - even if that just means stalling an opponent
by seconds.
Players will often try to recall after finishing clearing a wave for example - but stalling
them and forcing them to recall when you want them to might be just enough time to let your
next minion wave get back to lane, forcing your opponent to risk farming those creeps
while low, or forcing them to back and miss the cs while also risking getting their tower
pushed.
Anyway that just about wraps up everything on today’s broken tricks that challenger
plays are abusing that you don’t!
You might notice how often we say ‘it seems like a small advantage,’ but that’s often
what separates Challenger players from the rest - they actively use all of these tricks,
and all of those small advantages add up to a lot and allows them to dominate games against
less prepared players.
We hope you all enjoyed the tricks, make sure you let us know in the comments how they work
for you, or maybe suggest your own trick that you want to see featured in another video
like this some day!
Big thanks to for joining me, check out his in the description!
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time.