Early Game or Late Game Team? How to Find Out Which One You Are

You find out whether you're an early game or a late game team by looking at your own games, not at your champion picks: split your results by game duration, compare your gold diff @15 with the final result, and check which drafts you actually win with. The lol early game vs late game team question sounds like a matter of style, but your match history already holds the answer. Most amateur teams have an identity they never chose. This article shows you how to find it, and what to do once you know.

LoL early game vs late game team: why it matters

A team that doesn't know its identity drafts at random. One game you pick a dive composition, the next you pick two hypercarries, and in both games half the team plays as if the plan were the other one.

Knowing where you win changes three things:

• Your draft. You stop picking compositions that ask for a game you don't know how to play.
• Your in-game calls. You know when to force and when to wait.
• Your practice. You know which half of the game costs you the most, so you know where to spend scrim time.

It also stops a common argument. "We always lose late" and "we never win lane" can both feel true after a bad week. The numbers tell you which one is real.

Step 1: Split your win rate by game duration

Start with the simplest cut. Take your team games over a few weeks and group them by how long they lasted. Three buckets are enough: short games, medium games and long games. Then write down your record in each.

Here is an example. The numbers below are hypothetical, made up to show the method, not taken from real data.

In this example, the team wins most of its short games and loses most of its long ones. That points to an early game team, or at least a team that is much more comfortable when the game ends fast.

Two warnings before you draw conclusions.

Short games are not always early game wins. A game can end early because the other team surrendered after a bad start, or because one of you was carried by a single fed player. Duration tells you when you win, not how.

Small samples lie. Eight games in a bucket is a hint, not a proof. Keep adding games and check that the pattern holds over several weeks before you rebuild your draft around it.

Step 2: Compare gold diff @15 with the end result

Duration tells you when games end. Gold diff at 15 tells you who was ahead when the laning phase ended. Put the two together and you get a much clearer picture.

For each game, note two things: were you ahead or behind at 15, and did you win or lose. That gives you four groups.

Now look at where most of your games land.

• Lots of "ahead, win" and "behind, loss": the early game decides your games. Whoever wins the first 15 minutes usually wins. That's an early game team, for better or worse.
• Lots of "behind, win": you come back. Your team is comfortable in long games and in teamfights. That's a late game profile.
• Lots of "ahead, loss": this is the group to watch. You're not a late game team or an early game team. You're a team that wins lane and doesn't convert. The work is in objective control and mid-game decisions, not in laning.

This second cut matters because it separates two teams that look the same in Step 1. A team that loses long games might be bad late. Or it might be ahead at 15 every time and letting the game drag on because nobody calls the next objective.

Step 3: Find who wins leads and who throws them

A team identity is often the sum of a few players' habits. So go one level down and look per role.

Check each role's gold diff @15 over the same games. Usually one of three patterns shows up:

• Two or three lanes are ahead most games. Your early game is real and comes from those lanes. The question becomes whether the rest of the team plays around them.
• One lane carries the early game alone. Your "early game team" is really one player. If that player has a bad week, so does the whole plan.
• Everyone is roughly even at 15. Your games are decided later, in fights and around objectives.

Then look at the games you lost while ahead. Open a few of them and find the moment the lead disappeared. Was it a fight taken without vision, a Baron call at the wrong time, a side lane caught out? You don't need to blame anyone. You need to see whether the same situation repeats. If you don't have a routine for this, this guide on reviewing your games gives you a simple one.

Step 4: Check the compositions you actually draft

Your draft is the last piece. A team can win its early game because it drafts for it, or despite drafting for something else.

Sort your games by the kind of composition you picked. Keep it simple: compositions built to fight early and snowball, compositions built to scale and teamfight later, and the ones in between. Then look at your record and your gold diff @15 in each group.

What you are looking for:

• You win with early compositions and lose with scaling ones. Your identity is early. Your scaling drafts may ask for patience and teamfighting your team doesn't have yet.
• You win with scaling compositions and lose with early ones. You're more comfortable later. Your early drafts may ask for coordinated ganks and dives you don't execute yet.
• Your record looks the same in both. Draft isn't what decides your games. Look back at Step 3: the answer is probably in specific players or in conversion.

Be careful with one thing: a scaling composition that is behind at 15 isn't failing. It's often doing exactly what it was picked for. Judge those games on how far behind you were and whether you held on, not on the raw number.

What to do with the answer

Once you know your profile, you have three moves. Most teams need a bit of all three.

Draft for it

If your numbers say you win early, draft compositions that want to end the game before it gets complicated. If they say you win late, draft for safe lanes and strong teamfights. Don't throw away your other drafts completely, but make your identity the default and the exception a choice. When you prepare a match, start from what you know you play well, then adjust to the opponent.

Play to it

An early game team needs to push its advantage while it lasts: take objectives on lead, keep pressure on the map, and avoid giving the opponent free time to scale. A late game team needs patience: trade objectives instead of contesting everything, keep waves under control, and avoid fights it doesn't need. Agree on this before the game, so that nobody plays a different game from the other four.

Fix the weak half

Knowing your strength doesn't mean ignoring your weakness. Opponents will draft against you, and you won't always get your preferred game.

• If you're an early game team that loses long games, work on mid-game structure: who goes where after the first towers fall, how you set up vision before objectives, who makes the calls.
• If you're a late game team that bleeds early, work on losing less, not on winning lane. Fewer deaths before 15, better jungle tracking, safer wave management.
• If you're the team that leads and throws, work on conversion: one clear call after each won fight, and a habit of turning kills into objectives.

Pick one focus at a time and turn it into something you can measure every week. If you don't have a weekly rhythm yet, this weekly review format is a good place to start.

Re-check every few weeks

Your identity isn't fixed. New players, new champions, a new patch or simply practice can move it. A team that works on its mid game for a month may find that long games are no longer a problem. Run the same four cuts again every few weeks and check whether the picture has changed. The goal isn't to label your team once. It's to know, at any point, where your games are won and lost.

If you'd rather not sort your games by hand, the Victory View App does it for you. Its stats can be filtered by game duration and by composition, its Laning stats show diffs @15 per role, and every Monday its weekly insights give your team up to three areas to work on, such as the early game or conversion, with a follow-up from one week to the next.