Riot should hire pros for their balance team

My suggestion is simple: I believe that the overall quality of patches could be greatly improved if Riot hired pro players (or former pros) for their balance team.

I converted to League of Legends after playing Magic: The Gathering for several years. In a trading card game, the penalties for creating an unbalanced product are very severe, as you can't un-print cards. The only option is to ban cards completely (that people have potentially spent as much as $50-100 on, and often bought multiples). However, in the most commonly played format (Standard), only two cards have been banned since 2007. There are a lot of reasons why they do such a good job (overall) in creating balanced sets, but one of the main ones is that they hire game developers straight from the top levels of the pro scene. By hiring highly talented developers who will intuitively find the optimal way to play the game (more often than not), the development team is able to quickly determine where the set needs re-balancing.

I don't think that Riot's development team should consist only of former pros. There are a lot of concerns besides achieving perfect balance--for example, creating champions who are fun or open up unique play or counterplay. But I believe that hiring as few as two developers who can play League of Legends at a professional level would allow Riot to gauge the impact of their patch decisions much more accurately and to achieve their design goals more quickly. (It'd be great to have ten, honestly, but that's probably not financially defensible, at least for full-time employees.)

Response to first few comments: The idea is that once hired by Riot, pros would no longer be eligible for competitive play. (This is what they do in Magic as well.) Also, I think that the offer of a job on the Riot development team might be very attractive for former pros who can no longer quite cut it at the top level.