Team Compositions (Basic)

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TEAM COMPOSITIONS (BASIC)

What is a team comp?

A team composition is a group of units with various traits and abilities. Since each unit has their own traits and functions, it is up to you to put together a strong team!

Most team comps consist of tanks, DPS and utility units.

Tanks are units that withstand the most damage and buy time for your DPS units to do damage. It is important to make sure you have strong tanks if you have squishy carries in the back.

DPS units are units that deal most of the damage. Ranged DPS units are often very reliant on having a good frontline, while DPS melee units rely either on burst (if they’re assassins) or healing (if they’re fighter type) items.

Utility units are units that complement the main tanks and carries. They oftentimes are there to unlock higher tier synergies or offer your team sustain/crowd control.

How to build a team comp?

If you’ve played League of Legends or Valorant, you know that you not only need damage dealers, but also a surrounding cast that offers tank/utility. If you queue with 5 ADCs in Summoners Rift or 5 Duelists in Valorant, you’re in for a rough game. It’s the same for TFT!

When building a team composition, you have to think to yourself: who are the main carries of the comp and what type of units complement them?

Oftentimes there’s a primary damage dealer, frontline, secondary damage dealers and utility units that offer traits or support.

For example, in the example above, Kalista is the main carry of the Kalista Bastion comp, and because she is a unit that scales throughout the fight with Guinsoo’s Rageblade, she requires a very beefy frontline to buy her time to ramp up. That is why we complement her with a lot of tanky Bastions, as their only purpose is to stall. Later on in the game, when we can find 5 costs, we add Diana and Camille as high quality secondary sources of stall/damage!

Likewise, in the Varus Pyro comp, since your carries are both Varus and Smolder, 4 Blaster is a nice breakpoint where you’re buffing both carries without sacrificing too much frontline. Nasus is the main tank of this comp and with 3 items and Shapeshifter, you hope he holds on so your team can burst the enemy down! Shyvana, Akali, Shen, Hwei and Ezreal all serve to buff up the main units in terms of synergy.

These are just a few examples of good comps and the logic behind them. Try to apply this thought process when creating new team comps or trying out meta ones!

To simplify things, you can copy and paste some team comps you find in my tier list, but it’s important to understand why certain team comps are strong and how everything fits together.

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CHALLENGER

Challenger players are the cream of the crop in terms of TFT skill, but there are still things to work on. From my experience with myself and other Challenger players, these are the things that generally need to be worked on to gain even more LP!

Vod reviewing better/other Challenger players

Really knowing complex stats (metatft/tactics.tools)

Having a study group of similar skillset

Maintaining mental

Dropping ego when playing comps

GRANDMASTER

GM+ is where a lot of fine tuning becomes necessary in order to reach Challenger. Generally there are less significant mistakes being made but there are small mistakes scattered throughout. Here are the guides I’d recommend to check out for these players!

Quicker decision making

Planning out transition to save time

Maintaining mental

Itemization (accounting for utility or leaving potential open, letting your items dictate your direction)

Stage 4 Management

DIAMOND/MASTER

Diamond is where I’d say TFT starts becoming truly competitive. Most players of this elo have decent understanding of the fundamentals of the game but often are not as proficient in terms of items, leveling and backup team compositions.

While you CAN break into Masters only one-tricking a certain comp (especially if the meta heavily favors a comp), it’s not ideal for long-term growth. You want to start adapting to the meta, flexing between strong comps and learning which augments/situations enable suboptimal comps. A big issue here is players will play an A-/B tier comp without the augments that enable it! Additionally, playing Stage 4 correctly starts becoming far more important as under-greeding or over-greeding can cost you tons of HP and LP in the long run! Here are the mistakes I’ve noticed most frequently:

Strongest board

Itemization (accounting for utility or leaving potential open, letting your items dictate your direction)

Having a game plan

Having Plan B (and even C!)

Stage 4 management

Augment Selection (Advanced)

Meta comp identification

MASTERS:

Getting Masters, like in any other game, is considered one of the top percentile ranks you can achieve! Congrats on hitting this rank, but if you have aspirations of breaking into GM/Challenger, there’s still work to do. Here’s where fine tuning starts to come into play.

The main issues I see with this elo are:

Playing too many non meta comps without REALLY good augments, “cooking” too much if you will. To get to the top level the majority of your games have to be S/A tier comps. B tier comps and below are often only enabled by specific augments or highroll.

Undergreeding/overgreeding Stage 4 (know when playing for 1st/2nd or for 4th-7th)

Not knowing how to play lose streak when you don’t have a strong opener

Comp discipline + Meta identification

Having a game plan (non ideal comps and what situations to play them)

Itemization (accounting for utility or leaving potential open, letting your items dictate your direction)

Scouting purposefully

Planning out transition to save time

PLATINUM/EMERALD

Platinum/Emerald is generally where concepts are being more fine tuned, but the general understanding of the game is still relatively raw. Whether you’ve gotten here through one-tricking or playing flexibly, there’s still much to improve if you want to break into the competitive ranks! What I recommend to most players in this category is prioritizing how to play strongest board, having a game plan based on the meta and being flexible with items/econ/leveling. As always, good augment selection is a must!

Strongest board

Having a game plan

Itemization (basic)

Economy management (basic)

Augment selection (basic)

Meta comp identification

IRON/BRONZE

For players in this category, I would recommend just getting more volume in, get familiar with the units and the synergies and then progress to learning the base fundamentals like econ interests, frontline and backline itemization and assembling a team comp that meshes well! One-tricking, which is only playing a singular team composition, is a great way to get more experience with how TFT works without the burden of memorizing everything all at once.

I’d also highly suggest getting acquainted with the different augments in the game and how they synergize and perform in terms of stats.

Economy management (basic)

Itemization (basic)

Augment selection (basic)