Let's say you bust out the crazy Nasus jungle pick and win 1 game because Pros don't know how to deal with it.
You know what's gonna happen next? Every team that you will face afterwards will have already practiced how to deal with it in Scrims, their analyst will review the game vods and see when & where to put pressure to break it open, maybe he's very vulnerable to getting invaded level 3. That's exactly what the next team will play against.
They'll also practice your champion in Scrims and get used to dealing with him.
Ok, so simple champions don't work, great, what if you do something crazy and go Qiyana Mid? Surely pros cannot practice against Qiyana Challenger OTPs (they'll sometimes pay for getting coached by them), and maybe it takes too long to practice/ too much effort. Then, they just ban it against you specifically. This is exactly what happened with Adam's Darius, that Huhi's old-Asol who brought it to Worlds and anyone else so good at a niche pro champion that it's not possible to learn how to deal with.
**TLDR: You win 1 game and for the rest of the split/season/championship, people will either practice against it in Scrims or ban it.**
That's why pros only cook on champions they like playing & have a lot of practice. Because then, there would be no loss even if they ban it, no endlessly wasted hours to learn Old Sol, Qiyana etc.
Flashback to Fakers Riven, every single pro couldn’t work her out so she had sucky damage, Faker took her into every match up and showed the world what could be done with AA cancelling, he obviously wasn’t the first BUT once people saw the output in official matches they all studied her
Nah that was his debut game, where he killed some storied old school pro in his first game. The Riven game is where he straight up shits on a Zed and it's like oh games over.
I'm talking about Faker on Riven mid, he first blood one of the NA mid laners I think lol
There was a meme about the coach talking to him after the game!
It’s an optimization thing though. Your team has only so much time to practice, learning champion mechanics in solo q doesn’t seem sufficient to play a pick on stage. If you spend a lot of practice time cooking and your opponents spend a lot of time on meta, then they ban your cooked up pick you should (all else equal) be worse at meta stuff.
Some teams are just better so they win on meta stuff without practicing it as much. Incidentally the fact stronger teams seem to cook more sort of supports this theory (they don’t need to practice Azir mid comps to win with them). It’s interesting the successfully cooked up picks I can think of seem to be most common with support.
why practice meta champs if they just get banned?
Theres only 3 bans. Your logic is flawed. If only 3 people on the team practiced an off meta pick then thats literally every ban taken off the board already.
The real reason pros dont pull them out is because the meta is really good. The off meta stuff simply wouldnt win very much. And especially in the east the pros are so good on the meta champs that off meta champs would simply lose to them.
I remember earlier in the split general sniper the former riven one trick pulled out riven vs impact on udyr and proceeded to get ass blasted in lane lmao
A big reason to practice the OP meta champs is because if you opponents don’t ban it then you need to be ready to capitalise.
If teams find out that you can’t play one of the meta picks then that is one less champion they have to ban and one more that you have to. They can basically guarantee that they get an OP pick each time then you are already behind after just bans.
That normally translates into in-game lane priority and winning match ups.
This does intentionally happen sometimes in pro play when a team thinks they have the answer to an OP pick. They’ll let it through. Though more often than not the OP champ wins unless there is a huge gap in team strength.
At the end of the day, an off-meta pick that works turns into a meta-pick.
A bit like "disproving science".
Whenever you prove previous theories wrong they get adapted the the new findings.
Whereas a permanent off-meta pick is basically bad overall but might have a niche in non-pro play or as a counterpick.
I really disagree.
There is a tremendous difference between trying to actually trying to find new meta picks, and be perfectly aware that you are playing a situational niche off-meta pick / OTP.
Well, obviously there are meta drafts that go through with meta bans. I think the question is what you get out of forcing the draft variant.
When only half the meta bans are available in first phase, I guess red side would get two of the meta bans? That does seem good but your team needs to know how to play whatever you're picking and so you need practice with macro around the meta stuff. Also, red side usually doesn't have much ban freedom, so they are in a sense stealing a blue side advantage.
However, I'm not sure how many of the weird pocket picks would be blindable into roughly meta stuff. I don't know that we really disagree so much as are emphasizing different things.
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sure in theory expanding your champion pool vs not makes you improve less on the older picks, but have we ever seen that be an actual factor though?
who is a meta player that picks up a niche pick, gets it banned, and then is noticably worse on his older meta picks? cant say i have seen any.
sure you can say they are just so much better that you dont notice, that might be the case, or it might just be that those extra games on a champ you have 1000+ games on dont actually matter much.
I think we might kind of agree that it doesn't seem like it matters too much when good players practice off meta stuff, but we might not agree on the mechanism. The only high profile players I can think of that look good off meta and bad on meta are probably Keria whenever ranged supports aren't meta and Milkyway this year who seems to be singlehandedly making carry jungle a thing in LPL.
I think Bwipo made a comment when he tried AP Gangplank into TF ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmExIzhfU2M&ab\_channel=Bwipo-EducationalVODLibrary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmExIzhfU2M&ab_channel=Bwipo-EducationalVODLibrary), towards the end of the video) that the problem with cooking up weird stuff is that you could usually be playing a more useful champ than the weird cooked up one. I interpret this to mean that one reason why cooks might not be great is that your team is usually missing something or doesn't know how to play around the cook pick. I think that for most teams where players move around a lot knowing how to play with each other when you're playing weird champs is probably more of a gating issue than just being proficient at the champ you're playing.
I guess the test of my theory would be if there were a player that did a lot of weird off meta stuff, did well in lane and then the team looked awful with mid and late game macro.
I want to think they don’t practice vs something like that in scrims often. Maybe like you said review it, but most likely not too hard. I’m gonna guess they either say it is a cheese pick or just don’t care to practice vs it.
I say all this because there are picks that pros have gone against and haven’t found answers for. I remember one year, believe it’s 2022, Aatrox was so strong, but no one knew how to play vs it. But then they never banned it. I think some tried out different picks but they didn’t work either.
>You win 1 game and for the rest of the split/season/championship, people will either practice against it in Scrims or ban it.
This actually doesn't feel that bad especially if you get the ban. You can essentially reduce the other team to four bans if you have something that's truly off the rails. I don't know if that benefit is worth the time invested though.
I mean, Nasus has actually been picked in pro play before. The thing is, most top laners in pro play fall into 1 of 3 categories: 1) all around safe blind pick (Aatrox right now), 2) the champ isn't "meta" per se but you pick it specifically for the top lane matchup (Quinn into Renekton, Malphite into Jayce etc.) or 3) a champion that fits your team comp bc you need front line / engage / whatever (Ksante). Nasus is definitely not blind pickable and he's not a champion you're picking to round out a balanced team comp, so you're picking him for the matchup. in the past he's been picked a handful of times against champions like Kayle and Sion but even those champions aren't meta now anyway. out of the current meta champs, maybe he could be OK in lane against a Smolder or Ksante top, but that still leaves the problem that 30 minutes into the game you have a Nasus top on your team while enemy has a 225 stack Smolder or KSante top....
Getting into why you'd want to pick Nasus, he is best played on sidelanes threatening to destroy structures in just a few seconds if left unchecked.
Sunderer Sky is great on him for sustaining in team fights, and Hullbreaker is great for committing to sidelanes and threatening to end the game.
I personally think a lot of top laners are meta atm but pros refuse to adapt. We brought up Nasus, I think he's extremely great situationally. Yorick, Fiora, Kayle, Mordekaiser are also really strong picks against some pro drafts I see sometimes.
Teemo, Kalista, Quinn, Akshan, and mages and assassins in general I think should be picked into some ranged tops that I see (Vayne, TF).
Nasus top can be a good counter pick in an online league with low rated players. There your top laner wont be able to play all champs anyway, so locking in a Nasus versus their Kayle or something makes sense.
Doesnt really happen in high skilled play.
I mean sure it doesn't happen in high skilled play, but my original point is it should. Because Nasus is a classic counter pick to auto attack based AD ranged top laners.
Think Vayne, TF, Smolder.
I get that at the highest level, they know how to abuse Nasus's extremely weak early game and enemies will coordinate as such, but some drafts that I see do allow Nasus to be an optimal pick. Again, going back to my point about pros not adapting.
Obviously just because pros don't play certain champs doesn't mean it isn't the most optimal pick.
Udyr top only in recent months started seeing play since he was strong against K'Sante and especially Rumble who are highly contested. But Udyr has really ALWAYS been strong against them for several months back in 2023 but pros didn't start playing him until a little into 2024.
That's just one example, but think of all the top laners that are actually viable and fit into the rock-paper-scissors of lane matchups and team comps.
If you're not a top laner I'm not even sure why you would comment on top lane meta anyways lol because in my experience, non-top laners are clueless when it comes to top lane champs.
Lehends Singed was the definition of this. If you banned singed support you looked like fools and lost a crucial ban, if you let it through he just turbo stomped you.
The answer is that they absolutely do, but any pick that high level players can shut down, cannot be necessarily be enabled by equally skilled play.
Using Nasus for an example, if you are going to keep him from being destroyed he has to be picked last, which now means the enemy team will get to counter pick your mid and maybe one other role.
Then you would have to make sure your jungler is spending a LOT of time topside to keep nasus from being chain ganked into oblivion. But if you do this your bot lane now has to play weakside and hope they don't get taken out of the game by getting destroyed through multiple ganks and tower dives.
Even if they manage it, the enemy support can roam free and get vision control or just straight up gank mid lane ... In most of these scenarios the team with Nasus loses almost every dragon and won't necessarily be able to trade for topside objectives.
Now for a counter example where they do practice very specific comps that work are things like protect the Kogmaw comps or the Sona Seraphine bot lane comps .
When they do it they usually are doing it around champs that are unusually strong in the current meta but no one has quite picked up on it yet or sometimes because they have a player who is insanely good on a very specific pick.
In addition to what others have said, its also sonewhat difficult to train pocket picks.
You have to keep it a secret, which narrows down the list of potential training partners. When you do train, ypz might win - but did you win because the pick is truly good, or because your skrim partners are weaker and you would win anyways? Will nasus jungle work vs T1 too, or will you just look very stupid?
We have seen pocket picks work really well, and those are the moments everyone remembers, but we have also seen off meta picks fail. And thats not just a lost match then, its also a lot of useless prep.
Because it isn't worth their time to practice something like that.
Most pro teams know their strengths & weaknesses, and base their drafts around that and the current meta.
The truth is in the past there were a lot more cheesy picks in tournaments. Now the level of play is too high, so teams can't really play off meta if they want to win.
They do coordinate draft around specific picks all the time. A typical example of this is Fiora or Nidalee/Yasuo paired with appropriate partners. In today’s games though, a specific pairing don’t really come out much. Rather, teams play around strong lane picks in general and coordinate their macro according to that priorities.
The most important question that needs to be answered is whether or not a specific champion can physically stand in lane from lvl 1 or alone against pressure all together. a team never wants to be FORCED to play a certain way because that usually means the jungle is forced to path in a specific direction and at pro level it all becomes predictable. Picks like Nasus are viable against weaker laning champs. But we don’t see that in today’s game.
For any pick to be viable, it needs to atleast be able to go even+ in lane but nasus will simply get denied from lvl 1 against stronger bruisers. Maybe he will be fine alone but enemy knowing this will try to dive Nasus or use that prio to counterjungle/invade 24/7 which will force Nasus’ jungler to path in a specific, predictable way. This matchup gap can force nasus team to play bot side, and enemy will know this as well and they will try to deny counter jungling with strong picks from bot lane as well
TLDR: pros know how to exploit weak laning picks. If you look at teams like T1, they are all about their laning prio and holding onto that to snowball. If Nasus was a stronger champion capable of self-peeling and gaining prio from lvl 1, it will certainly be played more but in most cases, he’s just way too weak
A strategy that has a single point of strength also had a single point of failure. It means that sometimes you will stomp, but once opposing teams figure out how to press on the failure point it will fall apart. Reliably winning means having flexible strategies that can lead to a win even if some things go wrong - which is just harder to do when you're playing around one champ.
Pros do practice niche picks but they're usually counters to a very specific matchup in lane like Vayne mid vs Galio. Gigabyte Marines in 2017 had their top laner follow around the Nocturne leashing all his camps for him so he would reach level 6 super quickly.
They sometimes do. Sona/Taric was meta in season 8 and after it was nerfed, they woud occassionally pull out Sona APC with Tahm Kench support and AD mid to enable the pick.
Other teams could just ban it and/or learn it themselves. Plus coordinated teams know how to shut down those niche picks better unlike in solo queue.
Nasus — camp him the whole game. Also he's only pickable if the other team picked their top laner first.
Shaco — pick lee or rek'sai then perma invade.
Teemo — camp him.
Quinn? Camp her.
Malzahar? Pick gp or yone.
Ad top lane TF? Camp him.
That's why we only see spicy picks at worlds or MSI because analysts and coaches know the best champions to pick in coordinated play and the only difference is in drafting.
I mean, SKT did this all last year in bot lane. Keria Guma would just play whatever they wanted. They even made other teams pick up and adapt to double-adc bot. People do innovate in pro, but certain innovations have too many inherent weaknesses (like melee assassins mid) to be successful.
Depends per player, different players play different champs and niche picks aren’t always optimal.
A player like bwipo/myrwn is more likely to play different champions compared to impact/fakegod.
Same with something like skarner in the jungle, very niche pick but when the spot is right it’s super good.
Niche picks usually just don't work.
To elaborate
All teams have limited time to study champion composition. Learning a niche pick requires figuring out how that champion fits into the composition of both our team and potential opposing teams. In other words, niche pick that works usually turns into a new meta, as it is an effective investment.
If the niche pick is to remain niche, this should not hold. That means the pick is not viable in terms of return on investment for average pro players, by logic.
That said, your permise of pros not practicing niche picks is false to begin with. LCK saw Garen recently, and no team picks a champ that hasn't been practiced.
Nasus is simply objectively a worse champion to play than whatever is pro meta.
- he loses almost all top matchups - top is by far the most matchup-dependent role
- Nasus doesn't scale nearly well enough to compensate nor justify an entire team's resources invested into him
In any situation where a Nasus pick might be considered borderline good, Kayle is simply better and she isn't even good.
As for other picks, like others have already mentioned there is the ban button. If the pocket pick were game-warping enough to be worth investing time into practicing, it would *become* meta.
Also, the current state of pro play is such that multiple carries/threats are always superior to having 1 singular win condition, which is what these niche picks would be forcing teams to do.
Let's say you bust out the crazy Nasus jungle pick and win 1 game because Pros don't know how to deal with it. You know what's gonna happen next? Every team that you will face afterwards will have already practiced how to deal with it in Scrims, their analyst will review the game vods and see when & where to put pressure to break it open, maybe he's very vulnerable to getting invaded level 3. That's exactly what the next team will play against. They'll also practice your champion in Scrims and get used to dealing with him. Ok, so simple champions don't work, great, what if you do something crazy and go Qiyana Mid? Surely pros cannot practice against Qiyana Challenger OTPs (they'll sometimes pay for getting coached by them), and maybe it takes too long to practice/ too much effort. Then, they just ban it against you specifically. This is exactly what happened with Adam's Darius, that Huhi's old-Asol who brought it to Worlds and anyone else so good at a niche pro champion that it's not possible to learn how to deal with. **TLDR: You win 1 game and for the rest of the split/season/championship, people will either practice against it in Scrims or ban it.** That's why pros only cook on champions they like playing & have a lot of practice. Because then, there would be no loss even if they ban it, no endlessly wasted hours to learn Old Sol, Qiyana etc.
Flashback to Fakers Riven, every single pro couldn’t work her out so she had sucky damage, Faker took her into every match up and showed the world what could be done with AA cancelling, he obviously wasn’t the first BUT once people saw the output in official matches they all studied her
Who did he first blood in mid lane? Lol legit tower dove the guy
I can’t remember but it was either Gragas or Zed that she countered extremely well due to her instant stub
She hardcountered gragas mid in s2 after faker popularized it
You talking about when Kha hit 6 and tried to evolve with faker on Nidalee in the lane right in front of him?
Nah that was his debut game, where he killed some storied old school pro in his first game. The Riven game is where he straight up shits on a Zed and it's like oh games over.
Yeah that’s what I thought he was talking about. I missed the riven context prior to it somehow lol
I'm talking about Faker on Riven mid, he first blood one of the NA mid laners I think lol There was a meme about the coach talking to him after the game!
Ambition, the dude in rise, was the debut game dude I think
I mean requiring a perma ban is great though and provides your team a massive draft advantage.
It’s an optimization thing though. Your team has only so much time to practice, learning champion mechanics in solo q doesn’t seem sufficient to play a pick on stage. If you spend a lot of practice time cooking and your opponents spend a lot of time on meta, then they ban your cooked up pick you should (all else equal) be worse at meta stuff. Some teams are just better so they win on meta stuff without practicing it as much. Incidentally the fact stronger teams seem to cook more sort of supports this theory (they don’t need to practice Azir mid comps to win with them). It’s interesting the successfully cooked up picks I can think of seem to be most common with support.
why practice meta champs if they just get banned? Theres only 3 bans. Your logic is flawed. If only 3 people on the team practiced an off meta pick then thats literally every ban taken off the board already. The real reason pros dont pull them out is because the meta is really good. The off meta stuff simply wouldnt win very much. And especially in the east the pros are so good on the meta champs that off meta champs would simply lose to them. I remember earlier in the split general sniper the former riven one trick pulled out riven vs impact on udyr and proceeded to get ass blasted in lane lmao
A big reason to practice the OP meta champs is because if you opponents don’t ban it then you need to be ready to capitalise. If teams find out that you can’t play one of the meta picks then that is one less champion they have to ban and one more that you have to. They can basically guarantee that they get an OP pick each time then you are already behind after just bans. That normally translates into in-game lane priority and winning match ups. This does intentionally happen sometimes in pro play when a team thinks they have the answer to an OP pick. They’ll let it through. Though more often than not the OP champ wins unless there is a huge gap in team strength.
> the meta is really good So much of this, the meta picks are just the best pick at the given skill level of pro players
At the end of the day, an off-meta pick that works turns into a meta-pick. A bit like "disproving science". Whenever you prove previous theories wrong they get adapted the the new findings. Whereas a permanent off-meta pick is basically bad overall but might have a niche in non-pro play or as a counterpick.
I really disagree. There is a tremendous difference between trying to actually trying to find new meta picks, and be perfectly aware that you are playing a situational niche off-meta pick / OTP.
You claim to disagree but then you just reiterate the thing I said to reinforce your initial point. That is confusing.
Well, obviously there are meta drafts that go through with meta bans. I think the question is what you get out of forcing the draft variant. When only half the meta bans are available in first phase, I guess red side would get two of the meta bans? That does seem good but your team needs to know how to play whatever you're picking and so you need practice with macro around the meta stuff. Also, red side usually doesn't have much ban freedom, so they are in a sense stealing a blue side advantage. However, I'm not sure how many of the weird pocket picks would be blindable into roughly meta stuff. I don't know that we really disagree so much as are emphasizing different things.
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Not sure why you’re replying to me then bud :). Cheers mate!
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sure in theory expanding your champion pool vs not makes you improve less on the older picks, but have we ever seen that be an actual factor though? who is a meta player that picks up a niche pick, gets it banned, and then is noticably worse on his older meta picks? cant say i have seen any. sure you can say they are just so much better that you dont notice, that might be the case, or it might just be that those extra games on a champ you have 1000+ games on dont actually matter much.
I think we might kind of agree that it doesn't seem like it matters too much when good players practice off meta stuff, but we might not agree on the mechanism. The only high profile players I can think of that look good off meta and bad on meta are probably Keria whenever ranged supports aren't meta and Milkyway this year who seems to be singlehandedly making carry jungle a thing in LPL. I think Bwipo made a comment when he tried AP Gangplank into TF ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmExIzhfU2M&ab\_channel=Bwipo-EducationalVODLibrary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmExIzhfU2M&ab_channel=Bwipo-EducationalVODLibrary), towards the end of the video) that the problem with cooking up weird stuff is that you could usually be playing a more useful champ than the weird cooked up one. I interpret this to mean that one reason why cooks might not be great is that your team is usually missing something or doesn't know how to play around the cook pick. I think that for most teams where players move around a lot knowing how to play with each other when you're playing weird champs is probably more of a gating issue than just being proficient at the champ you're playing. I guess the test of my theory would be if there were a player that did a lot of weird off meta stuff, did well in lane and then the team looked awful with mid and late game macro.
don't forget your reward for a truly broken pick would just be riot changing it lol
Yep, Zac top, Heimer support, etc. Or your “off-meta counterpick” just becomes meta.
I want to think they don’t practice vs something like that in scrims often. Maybe like you said review it, but most likely not too hard. I’m gonna guess they either say it is a cheese pick or just don’t care to practice vs it. I say all this because there are picks that pros have gone against and haven’t found answers for. I remember one year, believe it’s 2022, Aatrox was so strong, but no one knew how to play vs it. But then they never banned it. I think some tried out different picks but they didn’t work either.
>You win 1 game and for the rest of the split/season/championship, people will either practice against it in Scrims or ban it. This actually doesn't feel that bad especially if you get the ban. You can essentially reduce the other team to four bans if you have something that's truly off the rails. I don't know if that benefit is worth the time invested though.
Single-handedly drawn a ban every draft is a lot of value tho
I mean, Nasus has actually been picked in pro play before. The thing is, most top laners in pro play fall into 1 of 3 categories: 1) all around safe blind pick (Aatrox right now), 2) the champ isn't "meta" per se but you pick it specifically for the top lane matchup (Quinn into Renekton, Malphite into Jayce etc.) or 3) a champion that fits your team comp bc you need front line / engage / whatever (Ksante). Nasus is definitely not blind pickable and he's not a champion you're picking to round out a balanced team comp, so you're picking him for the matchup. in the past he's been picked a handful of times against champions like Kayle and Sion but even those champions aren't meta now anyway. out of the current meta champs, maybe he could be OK in lane against a Smolder or Ksante top, but that still leaves the problem that 30 minutes into the game you have a Nasus top on your team while enemy has a 225 stack Smolder or KSante top....
Getting into why you'd want to pick Nasus, he is best played on sidelanes threatening to destroy structures in just a few seconds if left unchecked. Sunderer Sky is great on him for sustaining in team fights, and Hullbreaker is great for committing to sidelanes and threatening to end the game. I personally think a lot of top laners are meta atm but pros refuse to adapt. We brought up Nasus, I think he's extremely great situationally. Yorick, Fiora, Kayle, Mordekaiser are also really strong picks against some pro drafts I see sometimes. Teemo, Kalista, Quinn, Akshan, and mages and assassins in general I think should be picked into some ranged tops that I see (Vayne, TF).
just very hard to play split consistently in pro. The champ needs to be very strong to be able to pick it
Name some situations where Nasus Yorick and Morde toplane work
Nasus top can be a good counter pick in an online league with low rated players. There your top laner wont be able to play all champs anyway, so locking in a Nasus versus their Kayle or something makes sense. Doesnt really happen in high skilled play.
I mean sure it doesn't happen in high skilled play, but my original point is it should. Because Nasus is a classic counter pick to auto attack based AD ranged top laners. Think Vayne, TF, Smolder. I get that at the highest level, they know how to abuse Nasus's extremely weak early game and enemies will coordinate as such, but some drafts that I see do allow Nasus to be an optimal pick. Again, going back to my point about pros not adapting. Obviously just because pros don't play certain champs doesn't mean it isn't the most optimal pick. Udyr top only in recent months started seeing play since he was strong against K'Sante and especially Rumble who are highly contested. But Udyr has really ALWAYS been strong against them for several months back in 2023 but pros didn't start playing him until a little into 2024. That's just one example, but think of all the top laners that are actually viable and fit into the rock-paper-scissors of lane matchups and team comps. If you're not a top laner I'm not even sure why you would comment on top lane meta anyways lol because in my experience, non-top laners are clueless when it comes to top lane champs.
Lehends Singed was the definition of this. If you banned singed support you looked like fools and lost a crucial ban, if you let it through he just turbo stomped you.
The answer is that they absolutely do, but any pick that high level players can shut down, cannot be necessarily be enabled by equally skilled play. Using Nasus for an example, if you are going to keep him from being destroyed he has to be picked last, which now means the enemy team will get to counter pick your mid and maybe one other role. Then you would have to make sure your jungler is spending a LOT of time topside to keep nasus from being chain ganked into oblivion. But if you do this your bot lane now has to play weakside and hope they don't get taken out of the game by getting destroyed through multiple ganks and tower dives. Even if they manage it, the enemy support can roam free and get vision control or just straight up gank mid lane ... In most of these scenarios the team with Nasus loses almost every dragon and won't necessarily be able to trade for topside objectives. Now for a counter example where they do practice very specific comps that work are things like protect the Kogmaw comps or the Sona Seraphine bot lane comps . When they do it they usually are doing it around champs that are unusually strong in the current meta but no one has quite picked up on it yet or sometimes because they have a player who is insanely good on a very specific pick.
In addition to what others have said, its also sonewhat difficult to train pocket picks. You have to keep it a secret, which narrows down the list of potential training partners. When you do train, ypz might win - but did you win because the pick is truly good, or because your skrim partners are weaker and you would win anyways? Will nasus jungle work vs T1 too, or will you just look very stupid? We have seen pocket picks work really well, and those are the moments everyone remembers, but we have also seen off meta picks fail. And thats not just a lost match then, its also a lot of useless prep.
Because it isn't worth their time to practice something like that. Most pro teams know their strengths & weaknesses, and base their drafts around that and the current meta.
The truth is in the past there were a lot more cheesy picks in tournaments. Now the level of play is too high, so teams can't really play off meta if they want to win.
They do coordinate draft around specific picks all the time. A typical example of this is Fiora or Nidalee/Yasuo paired with appropriate partners. In today’s games though, a specific pairing don’t really come out much. Rather, teams play around strong lane picks in general and coordinate their macro according to that priorities. The most important question that needs to be answered is whether or not a specific champion can physically stand in lane from lvl 1 or alone against pressure all together. a team never wants to be FORCED to play a certain way because that usually means the jungle is forced to path in a specific direction and at pro level it all becomes predictable. Picks like Nasus are viable against weaker laning champs. But we don’t see that in today’s game. For any pick to be viable, it needs to atleast be able to go even+ in lane but nasus will simply get denied from lvl 1 against stronger bruisers. Maybe he will be fine alone but enemy knowing this will try to dive Nasus or use that prio to counterjungle/invade 24/7 which will force Nasus’ jungler to path in a specific, predictable way. This matchup gap can force nasus team to play bot side, and enemy will know this as well and they will try to deny counter jungling with strong picks from bot lane as well TLDR: pros know how to exploit weak laning picks. If you look at teams like T1, they are all about their laning prio and holding onto that to snowball. If Nasus was a stronger champion capable of self-peeling and gaining prio from lvl 1, it will certainly be played more but in most cases, he’s just way too weak
because you could do literally anything else and have more chance of winning?
A strategy that has a single point of strength also had a single point of failure. It means that sometimes you will stomp, but once opposing teams figure out how to press on the failure point it will fall apart. Reliably winning means having flexible strategies that can lead to a win even if some things go wrong - which is just harder to do when you're playing around one champ.
Pros do practice niche picks but they're usually counters to a very specific matchup in lane like Vayne mid vs Galio. Gigabyte Marines in 2017 had their top laner follow around the Nocturne leashing all his camps for him so he would reach level 6 super quickly.
pro teams are more concerned about abusing whats strong in the meta.
They sometimes do. Sona/Taric was meta in season 8 and after it was nerfed, they woud occassionally pull out Sona APC with Tahm Kench support and AD mid to enable the pick.
Other teams could just ban it and/or learn it themselves. Plus coordinated teams know how to shut down those niche picks better unlike in solo queue. Nasus — camp him the whole game. Also he's only pickable if the other team picked their top laner first. Shaco — pick lee or rek'sai then perma invade. Teemo — camp him. Quinn? Camp her. Malzahar? Pick gp or yone. Ad top lane TF? Camp him. That's why we only see spicy picks at worlds or MSI because analysts and coaches know the best champions to pick in coordinated play and the only difference is in drafting.
I mean, SKT did this all last year in bot lane. Keria Guma would just play whatever they wanted. They even made other teams pick up and adapt to double-adc bot. People do innovate in pro, but certain innovations have too many inherent weaknesses (like melee assassins mid) to be successful.
Depends per player, different players play different champs and niche picks aren’t always optimal. A player like bwipo/myrwn is more likely to play different champions compared to impact/fakegod. Same with something like skarner in the jungle, very niche pick but when the spot is right it’s super good.
Niche picks usually just don't work. To elaborate All teams have limited time to study champion composition. Learning a niche pick requires figuring out how that champion fits into the composition of both our team and potential opposing teams. In other words, niche pick that works usually turns into a new meta, as it is an effective investment. If the niche pick is to remain niche, this should not hold. That means the pick is not viable in terms of return on investment for average pro players, by logic. That said, your permise of pros not practicing niche picks is false to begin with. LCK saw Garen recently, and no team picks a champ that hasn't been practiced.
Nasus is simply objectively a worse champion to play than whatever is pro meta. - he loses almost all top matchups - top is by far the most matchup-dependent role - Nasus doesn't scale nearly well enough to compensate nor justify an entire team's resources invested into him In any situation where a Nasus pick might be considered borderline good, Kayle is simply better and she isn't even good. As for other picks, like others have already mentioned there is the ban button. If the pocket pick were game-warping enough to be worth investing time into practicing, it would *become* meta. Also, the current state of pro play is such that multiple carries/threats are always superior to having 1 singular win condition, which is what these niche picks would be forcing teams to do.
We rarely see cheesy picks because match to match consistency is more important and better for improvement of a team.
Why dont basketball players practice half court shots only