Change is good. Sometimes, though, the absence of change is even better.

League of Legends is an inherently dynamic game. Several new champions come out each year. Entire classes of champion are reworked, with items altered accordingly. Neutral objectives like dragons and towers are adjusted or completely remade. In between all of these potentially landscape-altering events, less drastic balance patches are released biweekly.

In professional play, the implications are far-reaching. A changing game can, in some ways, make for a more exciting viewer experience. Champions cycle in and out of the meta, ideally bringing some freshness with them. New strategies emerge, adding further novelty for the fans and analysts.

The downside is that teams are constantly in reaction mode, trying to hit a moving target with their preparations. Coaching staff and players invest a great deal of time into adjusting to patch changes, to see whether the latest nerfs and buffs should shift their draft and play style priorities. Fundamental skills like communication always carry over, but there is limited opportunity to refine strategies tied to specific team compositions or scenarios.

The shifting sands of the LoL game balance landscape are a basic fact of the game’s nature. But occasionally we are given the opportunity to freeze the forward motion of the meta game, lock the professional scene into a single patch, and eagerly watch what emerges.

One patch to rule them all

Regional playoffs and international tournaments are always played on one consistent patch. In the recent summer playoffs and regional qualifiers, that patch was 6.15, with the International Wildcard Qualifiers making the jump to 6.16. At the World Championships, patch 6.18 will take over.

While 6.15 itself brought a pretty sizeable change, modifying towers to lock teams into standard 1-1-2 lane setups, not much has changed since then. There have been the usual tweaks to a variety of champions and items — minus 5 AD here, plus 10 damage per skill point there — but nothing fundamental has been altered.

This is great for two main reasons. First, the relative stability of patches 6.15 through 6.18 is a welcome relief compared to the insanity we were dealing with just one year ago, when patch 5.16 landed.

Worlds 2015 was the era of the “Juggernauts.” Massive reworks came in for Mordekaiser, Skarner, Darius, and others, along with some new items to complement them.

It was chaos.

With virtually no competitive games being played in the Juggernauts meta, the state of balance for the Worlds group stage was a total crapshoot. As it turned out, Mordekaiser and Gangplank were immensely over-tuned, and both had to be banned by the red side team nearly every single game. LoL had been turned upside-down. While things eventually settled down somewhat, and the final results of the tournament ultimately came down to performance, the suboptimal timing of the Juggernauts fiasco left a bad taste in many people’s mouths.

The 2016 World Championships have deked anything on that level of insanity, and thank god for that.

Second, since we are entering Worlds 2016 with a reasonably established idea of the current meta, we will have that much more opportunity to watch one of the rarest, subtlest and yet most fascinating expressions of game mastery that exists in pro LoL: the evolution of a one-patch meta.

During the season, most of the adjustment and innovation that we see comes down to figuring out which champions are the most powerful at a given time. Some players or coaches excel at finding the “hidden OPs,” or “overpowered” champions that aren’t seeing much play. That power may come from a lack of difficult matchups among the champions who are currently popular, or the ability to directly counteract a champion who has so far been difficult to deal with, or maybe a power spike that fits perfectly into a certain style.

The problem is that by the time these hidden OPs have begun to emerge in any stable way, the next balance patch has often already landed. Instead of spending time truly exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging cadre of champion options, the coaches and players are dragged into the beginning of another cycle of speculation and experimentation as they search for the next patch’s hidden OPs.

In effect, champions rarely rise and fall in the meta naturally or organically, through a process of innovation and counter-innovation by the players and teams themselves. Instead, champions mostly cycle through the meta by virtue of direct balance changes.

Naturally, this is an oversimplification. Champions do sometimes become popular without being buffed, or unpopular without being nerfed. It is possible for teams to find ways to handle the new OPs without spending bans and waiting for the nerfs to arrive, but it is relatively rare. An example from this year was the arrival of Anivia as a counterpick to Vladimir. For a while, teams who understood the proper use of Anivia had a great tool for shutting down a champion who, until then, had seemed virtually impossible to deal with. Some teams failed to use the Anivia counter properly, but it was effective in the right hands. Ultimately, though, Vladimir remained popular and Anivia faded away, not because of external influences, but because of the evolution of how teams executed on both sides of the matchup.

This type of evolution, this internal rather than external balancing of the game, is truly fascinating. And one-patch metas like the World Championships are where we get to witness it in the purest form LoL is able to produce.

A whole new Worlds

You may wonder why I’m disproportionately excited about Worlds being on a single patch when the playoffs and regional qualifiers were on a single patch, as well. The difference is that playoffs and regional qualifiers are somewhat distorted by “series metas.” In the playoffs, every game is part of a best-of-five. Pick and ban strategies are heavily influenced by scouting the opposing team going in, then very quickly reacting to specific things that happen from game to game.

In a tournament setting, though, the group stages are more open and fluid. There are no series metas, at least until the bracket stage: teams may prepare for one another, but not with the same focus or intensity as if they were playing a full series. Because of this, the pick and ban phases are more oriented towards a general consensus of OPs and counters. Each team learns from its opponents from day to day and week to week, and there’s time in between to make more meaningful adjustments than are possible within a single series.

We saw an example of this evolution at the 2016 Mid-Season Invitational, as the ranged support meta kicked in over the course of the group stage and shifted the entire dynamic of the event. The intermingling of different regional styles, combined with the stability of the environment, allowed adaptation to take place. MSI, though, was a relatively small, short event compared to the World Championships. With a two-week group stage and 16 teams, we’re likely to see even more innovation and counter-innovation taking place.

Great expectations

Over the past several weeks, we’ve already seen some natural evolutions. The rise of Kennen as a counterpick to Gnar was a long time coming, for example. A lone Skarner game from Kang “Ambition” Chan-yong in the Korean regionals was partly just an outlier, but may also be a sign of coming diversity due to a shake-up to the jungle meta after nerfs to Gragas and Rek’Sai.

These and other innovations will be put to the test when the group stage of the World Championship kicks off on Sept. 29. There will be a brief feeling-out period as teams adjust to the differences between their scrim metas, which are being shaped being closed doors as we speak, and the on-stage variations that emerge when the games actually start to count. Within a few days, the cross-pollination will begin.

At Worlds, unlike at any other point in the LoL calendar, there is enough time, and enough intensity, for teams to innovate from day to day and week to week. Teams are not confined by the time limits of series metas, and not thrown off balance by the next looming patch. On top of the other factors, the crossover between regions forces even more agility, since there are always some differences in how each league approaches the game and where they see their opportunities.

The net result is that Worlds brings about a creativity and evolution that is unique from any other part of the year.

May the best adaptors win.

Tim "Magic" Sevenhuysen runs OraclesElixir.com, the premier source for League of Legends esports statistics. You can find him on Twitter, unless he’s busy giving one of his three sons a shoulder ride.