Elegance
In fact, Elegance has always been a strong race in the latter half of Teamfight Tactics Season 6, possessing powerful carries and extremely strong support units. However, what’s interesting is that these strong units can reach their full potential at just 3 Elegance units, allowing players to mix in various powerful champions depending on their team composition. Perhaps for this reason, most strong team compositions utilizing Elegance only require 3 champions.
However, this may change in patch 12.9 as Riot has heavily buffed both the attack and defense capabilities of Elegance at 5 units. The additional health and significant skill damage will help tanks and magical carry units (Syndra) deal much better damage. Additionally, this buff will make it more common to choose cores that provide the Elegance Trait compared to the current state.
Mage
This can be seen as the most puzzling decision by Riot Games, as Mages have consistently been a very strong trait since the beginning of Season 6, especially in the late game. With the introduction of Senna, a champion that deals both damage and healing effectively, the attack capability of Mages has significantly increased, although no one can surpass Janna in defense. When combining Mages with powerful units like Galio and Alistar, your team can become incredibly hard to take down.
And in the upcoming patch 12.9, Riot will even further buff Mages as the magic resistance they provide at 3 and 4 units is significantly increased. This move is essentially saying that team compositions centered around magic damage will struggle to hold up in the upcoming meta, even when players can acquire a lot of magic resistance. To further bolster the power of Mages, Riot has also reduced the energy cost for Senna and significantly increased her healing rate.
Technology
After a version that saw heavy nerfs, Technology is likely to make a comeback in the meta in patch 12.9. This is due to the significant buff to the damage per hit of this race starting from 4 units. Additionally, to solidify the power of this race, Riot has continued to buff Jarvan IV’s ability to increase attack speed for allies. This will make Technology one of the strongest races in the early game.
However, in the late game, Technology will have to compete with many other team compositions and will find it difficult to dominate as before. The fact that Sivir continues to receive nerfs may also negatively impact the late game strength of this composition. Therefore, the advice is to only use a 4 Technology composition in the early and mid-game to preserve health as effectively as possible. Afterwards, start transitioning to a composition like Assault – Recycling with Irelia being buffed back.