Faker's Champion Pool: Why His Picks Are So Consistently Dominant

Lee Sang-hyeok, known universally as Faker, is the mid laner for T1 and the most decorated player in professional League of Legends history. He has won the World Championship four times, in 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2023, a record unmatched by any player at any position. His longevity spans three distinct eras of the game: the early assassin-dominant seasons, the control mage period, and the current utility-focused meta, and his champion pool has adapted to each without ever surrendering his core competitive identity.

Studying Faker's champion pool is valuable not merely as trivia but as a framework for thinking about what makes a mid lane champion consistently viable across patches. His picks tend to share specific characteristics: deep mechanical expression that rewards practice, strong presence in teamfights without requiring a specific team composition to function, and flexibility in build paths that allows adaptation to patch changes. Champions with these traits remain relevant across many metas while one-dimensional picks fade in and out of the tier list.

It is worth noting that Faker's champion pool at the highest level of professional play and his champion pool in solo queue ranked games are somewhat different, though overlapping. In pro play, team communication and coordinated setup allow his Azir and Orianna to deliver their maximum teamfight value. In solo queue, he has historically favoured champions with stronger individual carry potential, including LeBlanc and Zed, which require less coordination from teammates to create advantages independently.

Orianna has appeared in Faker's champion pool at every major tournament in his career and remains his most-played champion in significant playoff and World Championship matches. The Lady of Clockwork is the quintessential high-skill-expression mage: her Command: Shockwave ultimate requires precise ball placement under or near multiple enemies, rewarding players who spend thousands of games developing game-sense about where opponents will stand during critical fight moments. There is an enormous difference between an average Orianna and a Faker-level Orianna.

Her core kit provides everything a professional team needs from a mid laner: Command: Attack delivers consistent AP damage and minor movement speed to allies, Command: Dissonance creates a slow field and speed boost in the same area for both offensive and defensive applications, and Command: Protect delivers a shield to an ally along with the ball itself, setting up flanking angles for the ultimate. This versatility means Orianna mid can serve as a secondary engage, a peel tool, a damage dealer, or an initiator depending on team needs and the fight scenario.

Item-wise, Faker's Orianna typically builds Luden's Tempest or Crown of the Shattered Queen as the mythic, followed by Shadowflame and Rabadon's Deathcap, with Zhonya's Hourglass as a standard flex pick. The build philosophy matches the champion: reliable damage scaling with defensive tools that allow aggressive positioning for ultimate setups. Orianna played at Faker's level is essentially a win condition that opponents must draft specifically to neutralise, which in itself shapes enemy champion select decisions.

Azir is frequently cited as the champion with the highest mechanical ceiling in the entire game, and it is no coincidence that Faker is one of its most proficient practitioners. The Emperor of the Sands manages multiple sand soldier units simultaneously, each dealing independent auto-attack damage, creating a distributed damage pattern that rewards players who can maintain optimal soldier positioning while simultaneously casting Arise soldiers, managing cooldowns, and watching for fight developments that require the Emperor's Divide ultimate.

The Emperor's Divide (R) fires a wall of soldiers forward, knocking back all enemies it contacts and creating a temporary impassable barrier that splits the battlefield. Faker has used this ability in some of the most iconic plays in League of Legends history, most notably the "Faker Outplay" against SKT versus KT in which he used Azir's soldier dash and ultimate combination to escape a seemingly certain death. This moment exemplified the philosophy of playing champions whose mechanical depth generates clutch escapes that simpler picks cannot replicate.

Azir's current item builds centre on Liandry's Anguish or Luden's Tempest as the mythic, followed by Shadowflame and Rabadon's Deathcap in standard damage-forward configurations. Nashor's Tooth is occasionally seen in builds that emphasise extended soldier auto-attack damage over burst. The champion requires intensive mechanical practice and is not recommended for players learning mid lane, but for those willing to invest hundreds of games in mastering soldier placement and Emperor's Divide wall setups, Azir offers a genuine pathway to emulating Faker's impact on professional matches.

Faker's LeBlanc play defined the early seasons of his career and established a template for assassin mid lane performance that other players still reference. LeBlanc is a deceptive AP assassin whose Sigil of Malice (Q) applies a mark that detonates for bonus damage on the next ability, Distortion (W) dashes to a position and can return her to the original point, Ethereal Chains (E) binds a target if the chain remains attached for 1.5 seconds, and Mimic (R) creates a powerful copy of her last ability with amplified damage.

The depth of LeBlanc's expression comes from Mimic's interaction with her movement abilities: Mimic-W creates a fake dash that enemies must react to, and the combination of real W and Mimic-W can cover enormous distances in both offensive and retreat scenarios. Faker famously exploited LeBlanc's deception kit to create situations where opponents could not reliably distinguish his actual position from the clone, executing escapes and kills that appeared impossible given the information visible on screen.

LeBlanc builds Luden's Tempest for extra burst on the first ability of each engagement, followed by Shadowflame, Rabadon's Deathcap, and Void Staff in sequences depending on opponent resistances. Her laning phase is aggressive: the Q-mark-W-Q detonation burst combo at level 3 deals enormous damage and forces early recalls or kills. While LeBlanc has fallen in and out of the meta several times due to balance adjustments, Faker's mastery of her has meant she remains in his practiced pool as a comfort pick for games where one-shot assassin patterns are optimal.

Ryze has been reworked more times than almost any other champion in League of Legends history, yet Faker has maintained proficiency on him through every iteration. The Rune Mage is a unique AP champion whose damage scales with both ability power and maximum mana simultaneously, creating a scaling curve that peaks at extreme levels of gold investment and makes him one of the strongest late-game carries in the entire game. His complexity lies in his passive flux management and the rotational combo patterns his abilities enable.

Realm Warp (R) is Ryze's ultimate and arguably the most strategically significant ability in professional League of Legends: it creates a wormhole that can transport Ryze and nearby allies to a target location on the map, functioning as a five-person teleport in the late game. Professional teams built entire strategic systems around Ryze ultimates, flanking objectives from impossible angles or evacuating split-pushing allies from converging enemies. The strategic depth of Realm Warp elevates Ryze from a champion into a map-transformation tool.

Standard Ryze itemisation involves Tear of the Goddess immediately into Archangel's Staff later for massive mana scaling, with Luden's Tempest or Everfrost as the mythic slot for additional AP and mana. The mana-AP dual scaling means Ryze builds are wider than most champions and highly sensitive to gold efficiency. Faker's Ryze play demonstrates the extreme patience and precise ability-rotation tracking the champion demands: each spell cast refreshes other abilities through the passive flux system, creating combo chains that optimal play executes through muscular memory rather than conscious calculation.

Syndra represents the control mage archetype in Faker's pool: a champion who dominates laning through superior poke range and zone control, then transitions into a teamfight carry through her ultimate, Unleashed Power, which throws all available Dark Spheres simultaneously at a single target for massive burst damage. Faker's Syndra play demonstrates the importance of sphere management: keeping maximum spheres available before a kill window to maximise Unleashed Power damage, while using spheres for zone control and the E scatter stun in lane.

Cassiopeia occupies a different niche, serving as one of the strongest sustained damage mages in the game through Noxious Blast and Twin Fang spam. Her Miasma (W) denies Flash and dashes in a target area, a unique anti-mobility crowd control that counters assassins who rely on gap-closers to reach and eliminate Cassiopeia before she can output full Twin Fang damage. Petrifying Gaze (R) stuns champions facing her and slows those looking away, making the positioning orientation of opponents mechanically relevant in a way unique to Cassiopeia in the mid lane.

Both champions reflect the same Faker selection principle: picks that scale with mechanical mastery rather than pure champion power. Syndra's sphere management, Cassiopeia's Twin Fang weave under Miasma, and the anti-flash Miasma placement are skills that distinguish competent players from elite ones. Faker's career longevity, spanning over a decade at the apex of competition, is in part attributable to his consistent selection of champions that reward practice with diminishing-returns depth rather than champions that plateau quickly after a few hundred games.

The most transferable lesson from studying Faker's champion pool is the value of depth over breadth. Rather than spreading practice across fifteen champions to have an answer to every meta shift, Faker invests deeply in a smaller set of champions with high skill ceilings. The mechanical and game-sense returns from a five-hundred-game champion are substantially higher than from five one-hundred-game champions, particularly on complex picks like Azir, Orianna, and Cassiopeia where nuanced mechanical knowledge cannot be acquired quickly.

A second lesson is the preference for picks with reliable teamfight contributions regardless of personal gold amount. Orianna's Command: Shockwave and Syndra's Unleashed Power remain significant even when Faker is not the primary carry that game. Champions whose teamfight tools function independently of individual gold lead provide insurance against bad games and uncoordinated team compositions, which are extremely common in solo queue environments compared to professional settings where teammates are reliable.

The final lesson is flexibility within the champion pool rather than commitment to a single playstyle. Faker plays aggressive assassins like LeBlanc when the meta and matchup demand it, and passive scaling picks like Ryze when the game calls for late-game teamfight power. Developing two or three champions at high mastery across different playstyle categories (burst assassin, control mage, scaling carry) mirrors Faker's own approach and provides options against the variety of champion compositions you will encounter across a solo queue ranked climb.

When selecting your mid lane champion pool, prioritise champions whose high-skill-expression mechanics interest you personally. Mechanical enjoyment drives practice, and the gap between one hundred and five hundred games on a champion is where meaningful mastery develops. If Orianna's ball management appeals, invest there. If LeBlanc's deception mechanics are enjoyable, play enough games to internalise the real-versus-clone mind games. Genuine interest in the champion's depth sustains the practice volume that mastery requires.

Pair a mechanical carry with a reliable teamfight anchor in your champion pool. For example, Syndra (burst-carry style) pairs with Orianna (teamfight utility) to cover both damage-focused compositions and utility-oriented team needs. Adding a mobility-focused pick like Ahri or Ekko as a third option covers matchups where roam pressure or escape tools are specifically valuable. This three-champion structure provides answers to most meta configurations without requiring breadth across every tier list category.

Review your recent champion performance data regularly. Platforms that aggregate performance statistics can show you which champions in your pool have higher win rates at your current skill level versus which ones are dragging average performance down. This feedback loop mirrors the analytical approach that professional players like Faker apply when evaluating champion viability before major tournaments. Combining genuine mechanical investment with analytical self-reflection on performance data is the clearest amateur path toward the champion pool discipline that defines Faker's extraordinary career.