If you ask some Teamfight Tactics players how to reach the Platinum tier, they might give you the easy, annoying answer of “get good” and act like that’s that. Sure, but how do you get better at playing the game? We’ve made our way up to Platinum, and we’re happy to share the tips that helped us push to that rarified air. Hopefully, you can use these tips to climb your own way up the ranks.
Finding your core builds
One of the best things you can do for yourself is look up a few meta charts and experiment with the builds on there. Even if it doesn’t make sense, you will find a few that you “vibe” with better than others. Figuring out a handful of builds that you can comfortably replicate over and over again will give you an edge on other players. Of course, you can always use other builds, but when things get kinda stressful, it’s good to have comfort builds to lean on.
For example, during Set 5.5, we became very comfortable with Redeemed builds with a Vel’Koz carry, Forgotten builds with Miss Fortune or Vayne carries, or Nightbringer/Ironclad builds with a Yasuo carry. In early Set 6, we leaned on Chemtech Twinshots, Mutant Protectors, and Arcanists. These kinds of comfort builds can help you have easy, memorized prompts in your head to follow when trying to pull together builds on the fly. The perfect build often isn’t just handed to you, so you have to know how to get there on your own.
Shoot for fourth
If your goal is to rank up, get it out of your head that you need to win every game. Trying to make the perfect, meta-build each time isn’t going to help you get to Plat. Instead, it’ll get you in a painful cycle of two first/second place wins and then a follow-up of eighth place that makes it like you never won at all. Your goal should be getting in the top four, so play like it. Build things that are uncontested. Create early-game builds to throw late-game players off their game. It’s not as glamourous, but you’ll be playing smarter, not harder.
Game tempo
There are a lot of people that will try to tell you money is the most important resource in the game, and that is very much not true. We have watched people in even Plat-ranked games with over fifty gold die with that much money because they were too stubborn about holding onto it.
The most important resource in the game is your own skill of tapping into its tempo. Gold, units, leveling, health, those are resources you use to manipulate your situation. But knowing when you have to change your own circumstances is one of the best game-changing skills you can hone. So yes, in general having all those resources working in a positive direction is great. But in some cases, being at zero money is definitely more worthwhile than fifty.
Another example: if you’re mid-level 6 saving your gold, but you start seeing your competition all pop up to level 7 or worse, 8, it’s worth it to sacrifice twenty gold to get to level 7. Then, you can compete with them rather than risk taking twenty damage over the next three rounds.
Anti-meta
Trust me, meta charts are your friends. While it’s not the best idea to fight for the top build every game, knowing what’s working for other people is vital. It helps you learn which items are really powerful, which units make a big impact, and how to possibly put all of them together.
Another one of the best things you can do is deliberately pick builds that counter the top current top builds. These builds might be “ranked” lower, but if everyone is making teams full of magic damage, magic resist builds are going to be a little more useful than you expect.
Our favorite thing to do is ruin the late-game meta(when four/five cost units are the best carries in the game). You build strong one-cost, three-star units early and demolish the competition early. This throws the people hoarding money and building skeleton crews for a loop and ruins their health pool. While it’s rare to get first place with this kind of build, it very commonly gets you in the top four because it ruined the gameplay of other players.
Learn up
And, unavoidably, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get knowledgeable about the game. Research about positioning, economizing, itemizations, rerolling, etc. It’s the boring, obvious answer and it’s not super fun, but you can do it in a variety of ways. You can watch high-level TFT streamers, you can play a lot of games and take notes on how your opponents build, or you can crack open Google and look things up. But more knowledge and more practice will always help.
