Drafting Knockout
No respawns. Every death is a round-sized mistake.
The objective
Teams of three fight; eliminated players stay down for the rest of the round; win two rounds to take the match. A closing poison ring forces the fight, so you can't hide a lead forever — but you can absolutely lose a round in the first ten seconds by giving up a free pick.
Knockout is the purest positioning mode in ranked. The team that trades health for nothing loses the round before the ring ever closes.
How to draft it
01Range is king
Safe damage rules Knockout. Brawlers who chip from long range force the enemy to choose between eating poke and overextending — both fatal in a no-respawn mode. On open maps, the draft can turn into a straight sniper duel, and showing up without one is how you lose rounds without ever getting to play them.
02Don't pick feeders
Every pick needs an answer to the question: how does this brawler avoid dying first? Short-range brawlers with no gap-closer or escape are liabilities into triple range. If you want an aggressive pick, it needs either the mobility to choose its fights or teammates who create the space for it. One early death turns every remaining fight into a 2v3.
03Plan for the collapse
When the ring closes, the fight is mandatory and burst wins it. Supers held for the endgame — area denial, multi-hit damage, a well-timed assassination — decide close rounds. Draft at least one brawler who gets stronger when everyone is forced into the same small circle, and play the early round with the endgame in mind: full health at the collapse is a draft-independent superpower.
Who to ban
On open maps, ban the dominant long-range brawlers — the ones that win the poke war outright. On bush-heavy maps, flip it: ban the ambush assassins and close-range monsters who turn every bush into a death sentence. Knockout bans are the most map-dependent in the game; banning an open-map sniper on a bush map is a wasted ban.
The ban phase runs from Diamond upward — below that, drafts go straight to picks. Bans are also the most patch-sensitive call in the draft: for today’s data-backed ban suggestions on a specific map, use the draft board.
The Knockout maps
The pool splits sharply between open, sightline-dominated maps where marksmen rule, and bush-heavy maps where hearing footsteps matters more than aim. Mixed maps usually have one dangerous flank and one safe poke lane — the flank pick decides those. Round length also favors burst over sustained damage everywhere: you don't need to out-damage three enemies, just delete one.
- A Ballad About Minced Cutlets
- Belles Rock
- Call Of The Water
- Chivalry
- Crab Claws
- Deep End
- Double Decker
- Flaring Phoenix
- Flowing Springs
- Four Levels
- Goldarm Gulch
- H For...
- Healthy Middle Ground
- Konnakol
- New Horizons
- New Perspective
- Opening Move
- Out In The Open
- Party For You
- Pinned Down
- Please Remain Standing
- Streets With No Name
- Think Ahead
All 23 competitive Knockout maps — Ranked rotates a handful of these each season, and the draft board’s map picker tracks the live rotation, with per-map win rates, synergies, and counters for each.