How to play Frostmancy Ezreal in the bot lane

Over the past seven days, the League of Legends community has been roiled by the Frostmancy strategy that was revealed on the LCS stage last Saturday. If you’ve been hiding under a rock, the premise is this: Players have figured out that by combining the Kleptomancy rune and Spellthief’s Edge line of items, they can generate insane amounts of gold. It’s called Frostmancy because you usually upgrade the Spellthief’s into a Frostfang. All you have to do is resist the urge to last hit minions and put all your poke into enemy champions instead.

This was a game-breaking development that led to a ton of complaints. So Riot Games nerfed it into the ground by requiring users of Spellthief’s and Frostfang to be near allies. And teams figured out you could ban the most ridiculous users of the strat, like top lane Karma. But there’s one thing they all missed: The duo lane. That’s right, Frostmancy Ezreal is the newest bot lane shenanigan.

In our piece about the Spellthief’s nerf, we specifically called out that this strategy could work in the bot lane. Just look to this morning’s LCK match between Griffin and kt Rolster. Griffin bot laner Park “Viper” Do-hyeon is one of the best ADCs in the world. So if he’s locking in Ezreal and buying Spellthief’s Edge at level one, you know that it’s good. Of course, Griffin have a tendency to troll from time to time, but this wasn’t Viper trolling.

Frostmancy Ezreal is actually busted—he even has the right skin for it. Here’s how he works.

Twenty-two CS at 10 minutes

Griffin’s bot lane for game one against kt was Ezreal-Galio, with the Galio buying a Relic Shield. The support pick is important: In order for the bot laner to take Spellthief’s, he needs someone to take the farm. In this case, the Relic Shield support not only can last hit the minions, but he can give both users gold and healing while doing so.

Galio is an unconventional pick for this lane, but others like Tahm Kench, Braum, and Alistar all work in similar ways. Basically, both walk up to the lane but the support steals the minions while the Ezreal looks to pelt the enemy with spells and basic attacks.

Using this strat, Viper only had 22 CS at 10 minutes, with the majority of that coming from his support’s Relic Shield stacks, which count as CS for both players. He completed the support quest in just under 11 minutes of game time, which gave him wards but also the ability to farm minions without disabling Frostfang’s gold generation.

At that point, Viper was fully online. But as good as his strategy was, it is not the only way to play Frostmancy Ezreal. In fact, it might not even be the best. Griffin won that game because their solo lanes smashed kt’s, not because the Ezreal was unstoppable.

For another way to play Frostmancy Ezreal, we turn to the original Korean ADC superstar.

The Deft strat

For another example of Frostmancy Ezreal, we can look at KINGZONE bot laner Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu’s performance against SKT earlier in the week. Deft innovated on the Frostmancy strategy with some interesting timing—he waited until 10 minutes and 44 seconds into the game to buy the item. That’s a meaningful delay and seemed to have pushed back his power spike. Isn’t the goal of Frostmancy to generate additional income and get to bigger items sooner?

But Deft had a special plan in store. Since he went Sheen first, he actually packed an early game punch. And he bought Frostfang along with Tear on his second back—the additional mana generation from Tear allowed him to sling more spells than a level one Ezreal and stack the Frostfang faster.

When he bought the item, Deft had 103 CS and was ahead by seven creeps. He completed the quest at 17 minutes and 52 seconds, at which point he had 143 CS and was only down by 36 to the opposing Kai’Sa. But with the additional gold he gained from the item and his runes, he was able to complete his Iceborn Gauntlet on his next back. Combined with the Manamune that he finished earlier, he was significantly ahead of his lane opponent in power.

And in contrast to Viper’s game, Deft was actually a key component to his team’s late-game damage profile. He and the mid lane Azir had SKT running all over the map, only they were running over wards because of KINGZONE’s combined four support items. What’s the matter with you, Moon “Cuzz” Woo-chan? You don’t think support items work on Aatrox in the jungle?

Will it work in 9.3?

The last thing to consider before you take Frostmancy Ezreal into solo queue is that the LCK games this week are still on Patch 9.2. So they’re not having to deal with the new crit items that shipped in 9.3.

Frostfang definitely lowers and delays Ezreal’s damage output in relation to other ADCs. And you have to be very committed to the strategy as a duo lane for it to work. It probably doesn’t make sense to take this into solo queue without a partner.

From a team perspective, the strategy also requires everyone else to stay safe and provide pressure while you scale up. That’s a tough ask in solo queue. And it’s only really effective if your team can use the vision provided by Frostfang in the late game to set up plays around objectives and sieges.

For all those reasons, this may be a strategy that’s best left to the pros. Without further tweaks to things like minion bounties, we’ll probably see a lot more of this, especially in the vision-loving LCK.