Sources: Fearless Draft set to return for the remainder of 2025

"Fearless Draft" — a League of Legends drafting rule set that prevents champions from being played twice in a series — will be the Lolesports draft format for the rest of the competitive year, sources told Sheep Esports Tuesday. Fearless Draft will be the competitive format for every Riot-operated tournament for the rest of the year, from the LEC, LCK, LPL, LTA, and LCP to MSI and Worlds.

Riot has made a historic decision: This will be the first fully-implemented change to the competitive draft phase since the fourth and fifth bans were introduced.

Split 1, originally intended as a pilot for the new format, saw inordinate success in every domestic league. Viewership and retention, especially in LCK and LEC — where other factors changed minimally, compared to the LCP and LTA — were significantly higher this year, and the new drafting rules received overwhelmingly positive feedback online.

In a poll conducted by Sheep Esports online with 14,000 respondents, 90% of fans indicated that they'd like to see Fearless Draft return for the rest of the competitive season.

Though League of Legends esports remains the biggest esport in the world by far, critics have argued that the scene has struggled to modernize. Compared to VALORANT, Riot's other major competitive title, different games in a series usually look very similar. There aren't new maps over the course of a series, and side selection — in most metas — just changes which team gets certain champions in a given game.

Fans have watched the same champions traded back and forth hundreds of times, and the competitive scene has stagnated — Fearless Draft is a breath of fresh air, incentivizing champion diversity, pocket picks, and innovation. As a series goes on, teams are forced to build out novel strategies for compositions that fit their styles and respond best to their opponents.

Fans love it for a reason — Riot, in turn, moved quickly to lock down the format for the rest of the year.

While a sweeping analysis across all regions could provide a fuller picture, the LEC's Winter Split format, which has remained unchanged from last year, provides a unique opportunity to measure the impact of Fearless Draft on champion diversity.

Interestingly, in the LEC Winter Playoffs, the introduction of Fearless Draft does not appear to have significantly increased the total number of unique champions played. However, it has notably reduced the frequency at which the most-picked champions are selected. This trend was also observed by Flora "Arailla" Parmentier, former LEC analyst for Astralis.

Notably, Azir — the most-played champion across 2024 and 2025 winter playoffs — was picked 23 times in 2024 but only 13 times in 2025, despite appearing in the same total of 14 different playoff series.

How Fearless Draft will fare for the rest of the year remains to be seen, but the pivot demonstrates Riot Games’ willingness to adapt and respond to community feedback. Just last month, Riot also reversed its decision to remove Hextech Chests from the game.

It’s worth noting that some details of this story may be missing, as the information comes from sources who are not directly involved in this decision but know it originates from Riot Games. When contacted for comment, Riot Games declined to elaborate.