5 Tips to Improve at TFT

This week’s TFT guide will focus on five ways you can level up your gameplay and climb the TFT ladder. Teamfight Tactics is an incredibly intricate game with plenty of moving pieces that can be hard to keep track of. This article will help with five tips you can use to deepen your understanding of the game, focusing focus on techniques that can help bolster your early game.

Slam Items

You have a handful of component items at the start of each game. One of the easiest ways to increase your Top 4 rate is to craft items early. Consider this situation: You and your opponent are both Level Four with a frontline of two Brawlers and two Sharpshooters as your backline. Your opponent is still holding on to their components, but you slammed an Infinity Edge on your Tristina. Most of the time, you’ll win this fight despite having similar boards. This is a simplistic example, but it demonstrates the value of slamming items. It will help you win streak to keep your HP high and your gold plentiful or kill a few extra units before you lose.

There is a potential weakness to slamming items early. If you do it without a plan, you can find yourself at the end of stage 4 with a jumble of items that don’t work anything together. You should by slamming items with a plan of where your comp will end up, or at least make items that work well together. Infinity Edge and Last Whisper work very well together, but if you slam a Runnan’s Hurricane and a Blue Buff, you’ll have a hard time finding a carry that uses those items.

One way to make sure you don’t end up with conflicting items is by slamming flexible items. Guardian Angel and Hand of Justice are items that virtually any comp can use. On a similar note, an early Sunfire Cape basically guarantees a win streak until 3-5. Identify items that will work well together late, give you a massive early advantage, or work with virtually any comp and use them to get an early power spike.

Hit Interest Levels

A strong economy is vital to having a good game and getting a Top 4. Maintaining a win streak or a lose streak is one way to gather a bunch of gold, but interest levels are just as important. You earn one extra gold for every ten you have, with the most interest you can earn being 5 extra gold once you have 50. Using interest gold to build a strong economy, especially early, helps you play a strong board later because you’ll have the gold to roll and purchase upgraded units.

One obstacle to hitting interest levels is holding useless units on your bench. If it’s not a unit you need in the foreseeable future, you should sell it to make interest. For example, if you’re playing Keeper-Kennen, there’s no reason to hold Irelia or Brand on your bench. As a rule of thumb, sell units that will give you interest gold but aren’t pairs.

Another way to ensure you hit your interest levels is to avoid rolling below twenty gold. There are some situations where this is warranted, but you generally want to keep a minimum of ten gold in your bank. It makes it far easier to rebuild your gold stores after you’ve leveled and rolled down. To read more about rolling, you can read last week’s TFT guide.

Play Your Strongest Board

Playing your strongest board sounds obvious. It has great benefits – your strongest board will keep your life total high and help you win streak to build a powerful economy. The real question is, what does your strongest board look like? Does it mean buying units to fill out your trait list, or should you just play all your upgraded units? The answer to this varies from game to game. The best way to figure out your strongest board is to think about frontline and backline. A great comp that illustrates the frontline-backline dynamic is Fabled, a spin off-of the classic Vanguard-Mystic comp.

The frontline and backline are clearly defined, with specific roles. The frontline keeps the opponent’s units away from your backline. The Vanguards are tanky units with large amounts of armor and tank items that allow them to take large amounts of damage but have relatively low attack power, so they don’t deal much damage. The backline units are far squishier – they don’t have as much health and armor, so they need the frontline to keep them safe. These are units that support the frontline with buffs and damage. Janna and Yuumi help the Vanguards stay alive by providing shields, while their Mystic trait provides extra Magic resistance. Neeko is the carry, supporting all the other units by dealing large amounts of damage to destroy the enemy team.

Fabled is the cleanest example of frontline and backline. How much your comp needs will vary from game to game. The Spirit-Sharpshooter comp Agon has been one-tricking through the Fates Qualifier has little to no frontline, while 8 Brawlers is just frontline. Make sure that your backline is properly defended while having enough damage that your frontline doesn’t just tank damage without dealing it back.

Scout Often

Scouting is underused and quite important. It’s rather unique that TFT gives you so much information on what your opponents are doing. The only part of you opponent’s game you can’t see are the units in their shop. You have access to all the information about their bench, their board, their positioning, and their items. Scouting has many benefits.

One of these benefits is allowing you to make a good game plan. This helps with some of the previous tips we’ve discussed. Slamming items? Well, if you scout and see that a lot of your opponents are using Vanguards as their frontline, then you can slam Last Whisper to help shred their armor or play a unit like Yone for the same purpose. If three or four of your opponents are focusing on comps that deal magic damage like Fabled or Mages, your strongest board will include the Mystic trait. Scouting also allows you to figure out what the best end game is. If you see that half the lobby will transition into Kayle late game, you don’t want to be playing Kayle yourself.

Finally, scouting is important because there are items and units that you need to position around. Zephyr is an item that lifts one unit off the board for a few seconds, removing them from combat. A well-placed Zephyr that stuns your carry can make the difference between winning and losing. By scouting to see where your opponents have their unit that’s holding the Zephyr, you can make sure it doesn’t hit your most important units – or if you’re using the Zephyr, you can hit their carries. An example of a unit you want to position around is Lee Sin. If you’re playing Brawlers with a 3-star Shivana as your carry, a well-placed Lee Sin will kick it and your win condition off the board. Scouting is one of the most important techniques you can use to gain an edge over your opponents.

Watch Streamers

This is the final tip: Watch streamers. There are a lot of streamers who are, on average, a much higher rank than you are. You can learn lots of techniques by watching and analyzing their games. It can show you how to transition, the best items to go for on the opening carousel, the strongest comps in a given meta…the list goes on and on. Learning from better players will help you get better yourself. Some streamers I’d recommend are Soju, GV8, Keane, and DQA. They’re all highly skilled Challenger players, and Soju and Keane regularly post videos on their YouTube channels to give you a backlog of videos to watch even if the players aren’t live.

That’s all for this week! Thank you for coming out and reading my TFT guide with five tips to improve your game. Hopefully, one or more of these tips will help you in your next game! Until next, happy rolling!