Team "Strategy"?

Hello, I have a question.
When I watch the competitive play I can't help myself but ask "what is the "main" idea behind the team"most of the time I find myself labeling a team after the draft is over with functions such as "this teams draft will be great with pushing" or "This team will want to create early aggression and win the game by earning enough advantage threw the early-mid game".

But my question is "why?" I often wonder what makes the best teams at the world, the best. obviously the fact that they have good players as individuals doesn't hurt, but what goes threw the Captains mind when he's drafting for his team? how does he knows what "Strategy" to go with? after all, these are the top tier teams in the world.

Thank you in advance for sharing your opinion on the matter.

I'm no pro drafter, but I'll take a stab at this.

You basically have to be thinking about how you want the game to pan out through all stages.

You need to make sure your lanes are good enough, and your heroes aren't flat beaten in their lanes. So you need to look at what the other team is drafting, and guess where they'll be sending their heroes.

You need a good mid-game presence, and you need to be certain that you either beat them in the mid-game, or you have a better-scaling team and the ability to turtle while they are stronger.

You need to have a plan, and a backup plan.


Ganks.
Teamfight.
Split-push.

I always think of those three as a soft rock-paper-scissors relationship. A ganking lineup will beat a split-push lineup, a teamfight lineup will beat a ganking lineup, and a split-push lineup will beat a teamfight lineup. (obviously this isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but it's a good guideline)

Because of that, I would always want my team to have at least two options from that list be viable game-plans.

You need to make a desicion on which of those you want to be focused on at some point, either before the draft, or you can make your first few picks ones that don't focus you, and then decide what you want to do in responce to what they do.

^ This

Basically what Illiander said, though I usually put "Get the most farm on a hard carry" (which means using a strategy that focus on turtling) instead of the "Ganks" option. But still, since this strategy is no longer effective, I think his suggestion is better.

Also, you have to look at the strong Heroes and roles in the current meta to have better explanation: at the moment you have Crystal Maiden, Lich and Venomancer as good supports because of their recent buffs and their ability to babysit; since they also have pretty good ultimates that focus on teamfights you should already have some lane advantage and decent teamfighting. Then there are a lot of carries like Lifestealer, Gyrocopter and Weaver that are usually very good at farming, very difficult to kill and, sometimes, even strong in teamfights. Other Heroes like Visage, Nature's Prophet, Elder Titan and Batrider are "safe" options to complete your lineup because of their reliability and W/L ratio.

After you build up the "skeleton" of your team, whether you have good teamfight, a lot of room for your carry to farm or just a couple of overall good Heroes, you can choose to focus more on split-pushing (or counterpushing) rather than teamfighting or ganking. To do this, most of the time you want to watch the enemy draft and predict what they're gonna do following the "Turtling (or Ganking)-Teamfighting-Split Pushing" rule, but good picks and ideas usually come with experience. Just watch a few competitive games with a good co-commentator (or even just the main one) or play CM mode with a five-men stack to get used to it; learning to be a good drafter in Dota is quite fun, in my opinion.


EDIT: a very common strategy that almost every competitive team do nowadays is picking versatile Heroes in the first picking phase, along with those "always good" Heroes: having Elder Titan, Crystal Maiden and Timbersaw for the first three picks can really open your lanes since, even though CM is always a support, Timber can go mid or solo the hard lane while ET can solo, mid or even support. With this lineup you already have pretty good ganking, some counterpush and decent teamfighting too, so that's another point in your favor.

I agree with what's already been said. Focus your early draft on maintaining flexibility without really giving away your "planned strat". Say you're going for a solo offlane/jungle/mid and dual lane type build with someone like NP,enigma, Enchantress,etc in jungle, if you draft that too early in your lineup an enemy team could easily pick a solid ganker like nyx or pudge (assuming they play them well) and make that jungling very difficult for you. As well as making yourself or your supports waste more gold on warding/dewarding to keep your jungle safe enough to farm. Same would go for picking a really late game hero like Spectre or something. Heroes that excel at certain style of play solely tend to be easily counter picked when drafting. Also as mentioned before, have some sort of back up strat in mind if the game needs a different approach.

I really enjoy the drafting phase, it can be quite intense. The above advice is really good, particularly the paper/scissors/rock analogy.
There are a few things I, as an inexeperienced drafter, am always looking out for when I draft:
The biggest thing is visualising. Visualise team fights, chases, ganks, pushes and defending towers. So often I've played in teams where there just isnt enough sustained damage output in the midgame for example, or no real way to counter initiate against something as simple as an ss dropping wards on your tower.
Initiation, crowd control and damage are the 3 mains things Im looking for, and then I try to visualise how the lanes will look. Each hero that gets picked on the opposing team I will be trying think which lane it will most likely be in relative to their other heros picked.

Damage mitigation can be done through picks and bans both. Say the enemy bans a bane, u might ban/pick a naix. They pick a tide, u might grab a naga. The trick is not to rush into grabbing big counter picks at the expense of your own team lineup. Picking up an omni to repel your Enig and ulti their PA might work, but might a better result be achieved by grabbing a Magnus to empower your AM and RP their team instead?

Generally speaking, making sure you build your team as robust as possible is more important than counter picking, but most roles in a team can be filled by more than one hero to the point where there is invariably a hero who can fill a role you need filled that will counter the other team's lineup in a better way than others. Knowing which hero can simultaneously fit into your lineup and also counter the other team is a big plus.