NA LCS: Most One-Sided Champion Matchups

In the NA LCS, counterpicking enemy champions is a common and viable strategy during picks and bans. Teams must weigh and consider the order in which they pick champions, as early picks provide teams with opportunities to secure hotly contested power picks but leave open the possibility for the enemy team to counter. Red side teams last-picking their mid lane is fairly commonplace, as it guarantees them the opportunity to pick a champion that counters or has a favorable matchup against the blue side mid lane.

Many of the common one-sided matchups are known throughout the LCS community, and the casters do a good job mentioning and explaining some of the one-sided matchups when they arise. The casters tend to mention the matchups within roles, but they do mentioned well-known cross-role counters like Support Morgana countering Jungle Vi for instance. Yet some of the other cross-role matchups tend to fly under the radar. I calculated the champion matchups in all 70 NA LCS games this split and created a table with the most one-sided matchups. The table below shows the matchups sorted by win-loss +/-. A champion having a large +/- against another champion doesn’t necessarily mean that it counters that champion, but it seems worth taking note of lopsided matchups and large trends.

Notes:

• The sample size isn’t that big for many of the matchups, but some of the matchups with 8+ games offer some interesting insight.
• There are a lot of key jungle matchups in the top 10 in the list – JarvanIV in particular has two very positive matchups and two very negative matchups. Picking Jungle JarvanIV prior to the enemy picking its jungler (with at least Vi open) seems like a poor strategy. One of the most common matchups in the jungle (Vi vs JarvanIV) is very lopsided toward Vi.
• Even with the prevalence of 2v1s this split, Irelia and Maokai have proven to be good champions to pick against Gnar (who has seen a recent decline in play).
• Some well-known counterpicks like Support Morgana against Support Thresh (5-0) show up in the table.
• Janna has been a popular support pick this split, but has 4 very negative matchups in the top 20 in the list.
• There are a lot of potential takeaways from the results, feel free to let me know if you find anything interesting.

Thanks for reading. Please send me a message if you’d like a copy of the data.

@Kathix_Stats