How to shuffle the deck on snowballing: More dead-end items.

I've been thinking about the problem of snowballing in league, and was thinking back to items that used to be in the game that were dead ends. I'm talking about the old Hexdrinker, Chalice of Harmony, and the current Rageblade. It seems to me that if the item pool included more items that either do not upgrade to legendary items or upgrade to inferior legendary items, these additions can "shuffle the deck" so to speak; that is to say, add more elements of decision-making to a player who is ahead, and add another strategic layer to the decision-making of players who are behind. Consider this:

Under the current model, a player who is behind is playing game of catch-up, possibly for the rest of the game. Their itemization may change somewhat, but the goal build is still usually the same, and the pieces of the build along the way are also the same. There's no big decision that the behind player can make to try to make up the gap, nor to try to hang on and go for a longer-game itemization than his opponent.

Now consider if there were two different types of each item. One type is the current model: the path to the ideal final build for each character. The other type trades some late-game potential to gain some ground in the short term. In this model, the player who is ahead needs to make a choice: Do I go for the ideal final build and give the behind player an opportunity to catch up by going for the short-term items, or do I go for the short-term items to maintain my lead and risk that the game will go on long enough for my lead to disappear while my opponent goes for his ideal build? The player who is behind needs to decide whether or not to give up some late game potential to catch up right now, or if he should just hold on and hope for the game to go late, keeping to his normal ideal build.

This change may require a slight rebalancing of item selling profits (I'm not privy to the complex math Riot is likely considering) to prevent players from buying the early items, keeping the lead, and then just selling them later.

This may be easier to understand with an example. Ergo, here I present one. We'll use Blade of the Ruined King as an example because it's so iconic at the moment, and we'll create a hypothetical "catch up" item version of it to compare it to.

As we all know, BotRK's total cost is: 2x Longsword (720), +Vamp Scepter (440), +Bilgewater (240), 2x Dagger (900), BotRK (900): 3200

The hypothetical item should have a similar set of benefits, but cost less over-all and have a less-powerful final form. For lulz, let's call it "Blade of the Ruined Prince." Let's give it this build formula: 1x Longsword (360), +Vamp Scepter (440), +1x Dagger (450), BotRP (800): 2050

Now for stats, it should do things similar to BotRK, being more powerful per GP spent, but less powerful over-all. For example, BotRK gives +25 AD. Perhaps our item gives +20. Both should give +10% lifesteal, since smaller amounts of lifesteal would be silly when Vamp gives 8% already. BotRK gives 40% attack speed. Perhaps our item gives 25%. Maybe the active is an "on next hit" melee buff instead of a ranged ability.

So yeah, you get the idea. I think League needs more itemization choices anyway and, now that there are recommended builds for the newbies or players who don't really feel like thinking about it, it won't be as much of a noob trap to have more items in the first place.