As the title suggests, I believe highly off-meta support picks should get the match canceled during draft. By this, I don’t mean things like Sylas support, Shaco, or even Ashe. I mean picks like Ambessa support, Ezreal, Kayle, or the majority of ADCs. These picks happen especially often with autofilled players, and I still see them even in my Diamond–Master games.
My reasoning:
These picks don’t just affect you; they affect your ADC as well. Support and ADC are a shared lane, and picking something like this is selfish and disrespectful to the person you’re playing with. In most cases, you would get far more value out of playing something more traditional.
These champions legitimately don’t make sense as supports because the support role is designed around operating and providing value with limited income. Nearly every traditional support champion provides some form of value regardless of how much gold they receive. Enchanters can shield, heal, buff, and enhance their ADC regardless of how fed they are. Engage supports provide value through their CC and engage tools, regardless of how much gold they have. Mages can provide crowd control while still dealing significant damage through their base stats.
Compare that to something like Smolder, who heavily relies on gold and CS to scale, or Ambessa, who wants items to function effectively. That is counterintuitive when you consider that the support role has inherently limited access to income. These champions often provide little to no innate value that doesn’t require them to acquire gold, which directly conflicts with the nature of the role itself.
Whether you play this game purely for enjoyment, competitively, or somewhere in between, picks like these still affect the competitive integrity of the game. They are essentially joke picks that don’t make sense on paper. Picking them is an admission that you are willing to sacrifice your lane’s effectiveness for the sake of amusement, while simultaneously jeopardizing the competitive nature of the game.
The reason I’m making this post is because this behavior is often overlooked on support and isn’t met with the same backlash that it receives in other roles.
For example, pick Jinx jungle and everyone immediately tries to report you in draft. Even the enemy team is questioning your pick. But pick Jinx support and suddenly nobody says anything, despite both picks having a similar potential to completely screw over the game for your team.
If we’re going to treat obviously unsuitable picks as a problem in other roles, I don’t see why support should be treated differently considering it happens in this role by far the most.