LoR Standard Gauntlet Guide (How to Choose Your Decks and Bans)

Legends of Runeterra Standard Gauntlet Guide

Hey all, Kuvira with a guide on LoR’s Standard Gauntlet format. The Standard Gauntlet has received a recent update that includes a new pick and ban phase, letting both opponents ban one of three potential deck choices for the other.

It offers a lot more strategy than the ladder and it follows these rules:

1. No champions can be duplicated between decks.
2. Every deck must have a different region combination.
3. You can have a maximum of one champion-less deck.

You must win seven matches in a row for the first run to get the Prime Glory (which can help you qualify for the Last Chance Gauntlet).

You drop by losing two consecutive matches between rounds 1 through 5 or by losing one match at round 6.

General Strategy:

Apart from the region combination and champions limitations, this format leaves a lot of room for innovation.

You can generally pick three good ladder decks or decks that you are comfortable with and use them to get your win. Ideally, you want your decks to have common strengths and weaknesses.

A common strength means that your three decks are favored against a specific deck or archetype, this is basically called “targeting”.

For example, if your decks are all favored or very favored against aggro decks, your lineup is “targeting aggro decks”.

You want to use the ban to remove non-aggro decks to be able to play all your decks against one or two favored matchups.

Since they must win with the two remaining decks after the ban, they will have to win with their aggro deck. Since we’re favored into the aggro matchups, you shouldn’t struggle with getting a win.

Having a common weakness means that you can use the ban option to remove the deck that represents the biggest threat.

For example, if you are playing three aggro decks, banning the deck that has the most amount of cheap removal is the best strategy. If you are playing a control lineup, you should ban aggro or midrange decks that can race you down.

Ban phase:

As I explained above, the general ban strategy is straightforward when you bring decks with common favored and unfavored matchups. Let’s say you chose three aggro decks: Spiders, Discard Aggro, and MF/GP.

All these three decks are weak to wide board removal cards like Avalanche and Withering Wail. Banning the deck that has either of these cards is the best possible choice since that’s the lineup’s weakness.

That leaves you with good matchups for all your decks,  such as slow midrange decks like Ashe Nox, Shen Fiora, Dragons, and control decks like Trundle Asol.

Protect your weakest deck

Sometimes you can face lineups that target one of your decks, or a lineup that has multiple unfavored matchups for you. Protecting your weakest deck means that you should be using the ban to remove one of the multiple unfavored matchups for the deck that is most unfavored against their lineup.

To make it more simple: if two of your decks have one unfavored matchup, one favored matchup, and the third deck has two unfavored matchups, you should always ban one of the two unfavored matchups for your weakest deck which is deck 3 in this example.

If your decks don’t necessarily have the same favored and unfavored matchups, protecting your weakest deck is always the strategy to prioritize.

For the pick phase, picking the deck that is most favored against the two decks left is the way to go.

Pick and Ban Phase Examples

For these examples, I’m using a lineup containing three classic solid ladder decks: Shen Fiora, Ashe Nox, and Trundle Warmothers.

I used this lineup to get the Prime Glory on stream, so Twitch VODs are available if you need more details about this lineup.

Analyzing your matchups:

• Fiora Shen:
  • Vs Scouts = favored
  • Vs Ashe Nox = unfavored
  • Vs Leona Lux = tie
• Trundle Warmothers:
  • Vs Scouts = unfavored
  • Vs Ashe Nox = favored
    Vs leona lux = favored
• Ashe Nox:
  • Vs Scouts = favored
  • Vs Ashe Nox= tie
  • Vs Leona Lux= favored

We can clearly see that Fiora Shen is our weakest deck against their lineup with one unfavored and one tied matchup. Banning the unfavored matchup protects this deck from getting targeted.

Picking your deck:

Using the matchups you analyzed before, picking the right deck is generally a pretty simple task.

We can see that Trundle Warmothers is favored vs Leona Lux BUT unfavored vs Scouts and that Ashe Nox is favored vs Scouts AND Leona Lux making it the best pick.

Analyzing your matchups:

• Fiora Shen:
  • Vs Discard Aggro = unfavored
  • Vs Trundle Warmothers = favored
  • Vs Fearsome = favored
• Ashe Nox:
  • Vs Discard Aggro = unfavored
  • Vs Trundle Warmothers = tied
  • Vs Fearsome = favored
• Trundle Warmothers:
  • Vs Discard Aggro = favored
  • Vs Trundle Warmothers = tied
  • Vs Fearsome = favored

The ban, in this case, is pretty obvious, as Discard aggro is the only deck we’re unfavored against. Banning it will lead to favored or tied matchups only.

Picking your deck:

Again, using the matchups you analyzed before We can see that we’re now in a much better position, having only favored and tied matchups. Ashe Nox has one tied and one favored matchup and Fiora Shen has 2 favored matchups. Fiora Shen is the right pick here.

Picking and banning are as important as playing the decks correctly. Practicing these kinds of matchup tables is a crucial skill to have for upcoming tournaments. Overall, If you have trouble making a lineup, using three tier 1 or two decks can’t go wrong.

Closing Thoughts

Remember that simply bringing the decks won’t always be enough. You need to understand the fundamentals of how they work by understanding mulligans, how to handle different matchups, and how to play around your win conditions.

By using these suggestions, you’ll definitely increase your odds of making a competitive run during your gauntlet. Good luck!

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask Kuvira during his streams. 

Catch Kuvira on Twitch!