MarkZ on the potential drawbacks of Fearless Draft: "In Game 5, I want to see Faker on Ahri[...]LeBlanc. I don't care if he's already played them".

"Maybe in Split 3, because it's best of threes, we could roll it out again."

The inaugural Split of the LTA will soon be upon, and with it, one of the most exciting new additions to the format will hit the North American scene: Fearless Draft.

With Fearless Draft, no champion can be picked more than once in a single series. This means players will need to dig deep into their champion pools to come away with the victory. And the longer a series goes, the deeper they'll have to dig. While Fearless Draft has been confirmed for Split 1 of the LTA 2025 season, it has not been announced for any of the following splits of the year. Not yet, at least.

Strafe got the chance to sit down with Mark Zimmerman (MarkZ), commissioner of the LTA, for an exclusive interview. Among the topics of discussion, MarkZ opened up about the possibility of introducing Fearless Draft for future splits, the limitations of the format, as well as future plans for the LTA.

MarkZ has been commissioner of the LCS since late 2023, and will now be looking out for the entirety of the LTA. (Credit: Robert Paul/Riot Games)

*The following interview has been edited slightly for clarity and length.

[Strafe] Fearless Draft is being introduced for Split 1 of the LTA. Are there any plans for introducing it into Split 2 as well, or even further down the line? Are you open to that possibility?

"Yeah, I think we'll heavily monitor split one to see exactly how much it's affecting. I think it's a great time to use it because the international event first hand is also in fearless mode. So, you're kind of preparing your teams for that moment.

Split 2 is Best-of-1. So you can't really do Fearless Draft in there. We could always throw it on playoffs, but considering currently MSI and Worlds are not going to be on Fearless currently, I believe, we're not going to try and force Tier-1 to probably do that if it's not going to be mirrored on the international level of competition.

We might consider it. We always keep an open mind. So if Split 1 is absolutely loved by everyone, it's clearly the right product decision on a fan engagement level to have Fearless all the time when you can have it. Then maybe in Split 3, because it's best of threes, we could roll it out again. But it's currently not the plan. And I think we're going to just see how much fans resonate with it.

I've been tracking it long before it hit Tier-1 and Tier-2 when it was in the LDL and then when the NACL did it. And I think it is a really cool feature, but so far I've not seen the resonance to make me think that it's going to really blow people's minds in the immediate term.

I think it's a really cool thing to see more champions. But at the end of the day, you're still watching your favorite team, players, these sorts of things. And so I think there's a healthy balance between traditional drafting and fearless drafting. That's my personal opinion."

[Strafe] There's been endless talk about the benefits of Fearless Draft. But what are some of the drawbacks or reservations that you have before committing to introducing it for the rest of the year straight away?

"Yeah so, benefits: obviously, getting to see more champions, getting wider champion pools, making pro players have to reach further down and experiment a little bit more is stuff that's really, really cool, both for fans to see champions that don't traditionally get played and also on the player development level, which is why you kind of saw it in tier two. I think some of the things that we would want to keep for other moments of play, though, is I think it's really cool personally when you see a champion become a problem in a series.

And how does a team adapt? And how are you going to handle this new problem that's been presented? I always think back to that ROX Tigers versus SKT, I think it was, when they had the Miss Fortune - Zyra battle. And it was like the Miss Fortune came out as a counter. It worked the first game. They tried to play into it again. They lost. They had to ban it. It was like this really tense thing to be like, what are you going to do about this problem in the draft?

And I also think for Game 5s, when people can get onto their signature champions, which can be a difficulty with Fearless unless you're going to do some reset in Game 5. There's some variations of Fearless Draft that you can actually work through to get through more of these problems. Or, I shouldn't say problems, but I think there's benefits. You get to see more champions. The downside is that you're going to be forcing pro players off their best champions. And I think narratively, there's cool things that you can have in the other scenario.

Spread across the season, though, I think it is very understandable why you'd be like, let's get more diversity in there. And I think there's benefits to both. And that's why I'm definitely not against Fearless.

But I think when you get to those really, really high stakes moments, like at Worlds, since everything is on the line in game five, I want to see Faker on Ahri. I want to see Faker on LeBlanc. I don't care if he's played them already that series. Personally, that's what I want to see."

At Worlds, fans sign up to watch the very best players compete on their very best champions. (Credit: Yicun Liu/Riot Games)

[Strafe] You've often spoken of 'innovation' as being one of the pillars of the LCS, and now the LTA. As we get more and more standardization across major leagues in 2025, how do you plan to keep innovation a big part of the LTA this year? 

"We are absolutely still going to use innovation as one of the two key pillars. Innovation and fan-first were kind of the terms that we used last year.

And for the first time in four years, we had actually a rebound in LCS viewership. And I think that set us down the right path to continue going for the LTA as a whole across all the regions. So, innovation is absolutely something we're still going to keep doing.

People, when you innovate, they start taking your best ideas and using them too. So there's a lot more people on live patch this year, for instance. We started Twitch subs in playoffs. Twitch subs are now being rolled out globally. And so it's a challenge that I think we really like in the Americas. We do something that works well.

And the things that don't work well, people just ignore. We drop those and the things that work well get adopted by everyone else. And so it puts a pressure on you to keep driving things forward. And that's what we're going to keep doing.

So this year, we've experimented with formats quite a bit, not just with the fearless, but in split three, which we're not talking too heavily about it yet because we'll get there when we get there. But I think it's a really, really interesting format that if it goes well, I could, again, see people going, "oh, that's a clever way to get through a long stage of play." That's not just round robin because we traditionally have done these round robin Best-of -1s or Best-of-3s. And this is a slightly different approach.

We are working on a fantasy LTA product. We're always doing these sorts of things to find things that the communities are interested in, things that they're already kind of talking about and how we can potentially elevate them or create a better experience or come out of a totally left field. They had no idea that this was even an option and we were able to make it happen. So we're going to keep driving on things like that."

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Image source: Stefan Wisnoski/Riot Games

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