LCK’s big changes for 2025: Fearless draft, new LCK Cup

The League of Legends Champions Korea, or the LCK, will introduce massive reworks to the competitive league for next year. This includes implementing Fearless Draft in the new LCK Cup and crowning only one champion instead of two.

The following changes below were posted on the official LCK Global X account.

The biggest addition to the LCK timeline in 2025 is the LCK Cup. This is a small tournament scheduled for January to February 2025 and will determine the LCK representative for the first international tournament in March.

It will begin with a group stage where the top two teams from the previous season will each pick one team to be in their group. The chosen teams will continue this until two groups of five teams are achieved.

This LCK Cup, along with the first international tournament, will feature Fearless Draft. In short, Fearless Draft means that any champions picked in previous games of the series can no longer be picked in future games in that series. This means that 50 champions are banned by the fifth game of a best-of-five.

Instead of having two separate seasons, like LCK Spring and LCK Summer, there will only be one big LCK Regular Season in 2025 and beyond. It will take place after the first international tournament until before Worlds.

There will be five rounds in this new Regular Season. Rounds 1 and 2 will follow a similar, double round-robin format as before. After round 2, the top 6 teams qualify for the LCK Road to MSI.

The regular season will resume after MSI with rounds 3, 4, and 5. The region will be divided into two groups of five, the Legend and Rise group, based on their standing from rounds 1 and 2. The top five will go to Legend, and the bottom five on Rise.

The rest of the regular season will see teams within these groups compete against each other, but never against teams from the other group.

The top four Legend teams will receive varying amounts of byes in the playoffs. The last Legend team, along with the top 3 Rise teams, will head to play-ins. The bottom two Rise teams do not advance.

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