Front to back or flank: the two real composition archetypes
Most archetype lists put poke, dive, pick, protect the carry and split push on the same level. These are objects of a different nature. The only axis that really structures a composition is front to back versus flank — the others fall under it.
Poke, dive, protect the carry: where they fall
Those three are teamfight archetypes, not ways of winning the game. They spread out along the real axis.
| Axis | What it groups |
|---|---|
| Front to back | Poke, protect the carry |
| Flank | Dive, pick, splitpush |
This grouping is not cosmetic: it explains why some compositions work together and others do not.
Front to back
What you look for: coupling range, DPS and control — all three are necessary.
This triptych produces three effects at once:
- Killing the enemy frontline, thanks to range and sustained damage.
- Protecting yourself, by keeping your structure during the fight.
- Guarding against flanks, through control.
The third point is the one most often forgotten. Control is not only there to lock down a target: it is what prevents the opponent from going around the structure.
Flank
What you look for: separating the enemy frontline from its backline.
The means is a kill threat on the backline. But a threat is only worth something if it can be executed: it must act as soon as the enemy backline stops respecting it.
Movement speed works both ways here:
| Where it sits | Effect |
|---|---|
| On the attacker | It increases the threat |
| In the targeted backline | It decreases the threat — the target slips away |
You do not choose flank out of taste
This is the point archetype lists systematically miss.
You play flank when you cannot match the enemy DPS given their frontline. Two situations lead there:
- The frontline is not resistant enough to hold the exchange.
- The backline does not have enough damage to take down the enemy frontline.
In other words, the flank answers a balance of power: it is a consequence of what the draft has produced.
Flank, splitpush and pick often chain together
They are almost always presented as three distinct options. They are only one.
- The champion needs to go around to be effective.
- To create that position, they will splitpush.
- It is that splitpush which generates the picks during enemy rotations.
Understanding this chain changes how you read a draft: seeing a flank profile means anticipating the splitpush and the picks that can follow.
But it is not a law. The chain has two limits:
| Limit | What happens |
|---|---|
| The order reverses | You can simply push the wave and then arrive as a flank — the angle is then a consequence of the push, not its cause |
| The chain stops | You can leave the splitpusher alone without ever helping them, and play as a block of four for the siege or the objective, without ever making a pick |
These two cases correspond to the two ways of splitpushing: pushing the wave without following it, which forces the enemy to answer it and leaves time as well as a flank angle; or following it, which creates pressure that demands reinforcement.
What breaks a fighting composition
The teamfight is the art of archetype coherence. Four incoherences keep coming back.
| Incoherence | What happens |
|---|---|
| Heavy DPS without tank or control | Vulnerable to skill shots and assassins — the DPS cannot hit anything |
| Tanks without damage | You never kill the enemy DPS |
| DPS concentrated on one or two players | Faced with easy burst or being outnumbered on that target |
| Lack of range | Coupled with a lack of mobility, or with too much zone control |
An incoherence always has to be put in perspective, against what the opponent has on the other side.
When the threat can never be executed
A flank threat assumes you can execute it. Against an unreachable backline — too mobile, too protected — the threat becomes useless in a teamfight without good engage.
The answer is not to keep a threat that will never land, but to change ground: the splitpush lets you go around, either to disorganize the enemy peel or to take good duels.
A coherent composition can still lose
The teamfight is the vaguest of the three win conditions. Its requirements are diagnosed less clearly than those of the siege or the splitpush, and that is what makes its evaluation misleading.
A composition that is perfectly coherent on paper can be entirely invalidated by something else:
| What invalidates it | How |
|---|---|
| A flank game | It prevents free movement, so the composition never gets set up |
| A splitpush | It creates numerical superiorities elsewhere, and the grouped fight does not happen |
That is why a composition is never evaluated alone. The question is not "is it coherent?" but "is it coherent against the one opposite?".
FAQ
Are poke and protect the carry the same thing?
No, but they belong to the same archetype: front to back. Both keep the team's structure during the fight, with different means.
Can you play front to back and flank at the same time?
The teamfight is a matter of coherence. Mixing the two often ends up with neither the structure of the first nor the threat of the second, but that is judged against the enemy composition.
Is the splitpush a teamfight archetype?
It falls under flank, of which it is a consequence: a champion who needs to go around splitpushes to create that position.
How do I know if my composition is front to back or flank?
Look at what the draft allows you: if your frontline holds and your backline takes down the one opposite, you are front to back. Otherwise, you have to go around.
Going further
- Win conditions — how a composition wins the game, and what each one demands.
- Evaluate a composition — the evaluation method applied step by step.
- How a draft works from start to finish — the full step by step.
- The draft glossary — all the vocabulary, by family.
- Champion profiles in draft — what each champion brings to a composition.
- All our draft guides — the cluster's pillar page.
Test what you have just read. Replay a draft and look at which archetype each composition belongs to on uDrafter — it is free and no account is needed.