Whether being piloted by smurfs or just good players, hypercarry Champions can be extremely frustrating to deal with in Solo Queue. This guide will explain how to play three anti-carry junglers to shut down common Solo Queue carries.
In League of Legends these days, everything is about the pop-off Champions, the montage moments, and the mechanically intensive plays. However, this style of play is not for everyone, and is not always the best way to climb. Sometimes the best way to win games is to shut down enemies who want to get flashy. Or, sometimes the enemy is playing a team comp that wants to protect one person who will be doing all the damage. This is where anti-carries come in. They are able to deny enemy Champions the ability to hard-carry games. This game style relies on shutting down enemy engages and not allowing players to pop off on Champions. Here are three Champions to try in the jungle this patch to help you carry games by shutting down the enemy carry.
Counters: Champions with dashes, like Bel’Veth, Lee Sin, Graves, Wukong. Assassins, like Zed, Fiddlesticks, and Talon.
Poppy is often considered the stock standard anti-carry. Her ability to stop dashes alone makes her very valuable into mechanically intensive champions. All around, her kit gives her many tools to stop flashy plays in their tracks and shut down champions that rely on quick, dashy movement.
The reason Poppy is an anti-carry is primarily her W – Steadfast Presence. This ability’s passive gives you a flat 10% increase in your armor and magic resistance, doubled to 20% when you are below 40% of your maximum health. However, it is the active that makes this ability so powerful. When activated, you gain 40% bonus movement speed and project and aura around yourself. Any enemy champion who attempts to dash within this aura will have their dash stopped, and they will be grounded and slowed for 2 seconds. Grounded, of course, means that the enemy will be unable to take any movement action other than walking until the duration of the debuff wears off.
In Season 12, it seems like every new champion has a dash. With movement creep gradually making the game much more fast-paced, Poppy serves as the perfect counter to that playstyle. This ability lets you stop even the most fed champion in their tracks and render them essentially useless for the next 2 seconds. Imagine there is a fed enemy Riven. Usually, Riven can just dash into your team, knock everyone airborne before you can peel her away, then kill you all with her ultimate. However, with Poppy, you can press W and Riven will be unable to dash towards or away from your team or she will be stuck grounded. This offers precious time to either peel Riven off your team or just kill her. This ability is also useful in engages as well. The movement speed it gives you allows you to engage on an enemy champion. If the enemy’s only means of escape is a dash, like say Caitlyn’s E, they will not be able to use it.
Poppy’s E – Heroic Charge and R – Keeper’s Verdict are extremely good anti-carry tools as well. E allows you to tackle an enemy champion, interrupting channels, and if they collide with a wall they are stunned. The stun works great against champions which tend to pop over walls like Talon or Kayn, but don’t be afraid to use it to interrupt a channel, or even just to buy space for your team. If Fiddlesticks uses his W – Bountiful Harvest to heal, for example, your E can stop it immediately and he will be a sitting duck.
Your R acts like a micro-stun in the same way if you tap it. If you tap your R and hit an opponent with it, they are briefly knocked up. This is great for interrupting abilities and buying yourself some extra time to gain cooldowns back. However, if you hold down R before casting the ability you can knock players back towards their fountain. Enemies hit by the charged attack will be knocked airborne and flown back a long distance towards their fountain, depending on the time spent charging. This is useful if you are getting engaged on in a bad fight where your team needs time to rotate. If there is a Dragon up and your teammates are just getting out of base, you can try and ultimate their team away to buy a few seconds for your team to arrive at the fight. Alternatively, if there is going to be an objective fight, you can try and ultimate the jungler away so that he cannot smite the objective. From there, since you have the only Smite, you should be able to easily secure the objective. Note that this ability is fairly hard to hit against experienced players, so use it carefully! Using this ability by just tapping it is much more consistent.
Counters – Bruisers and tanks like Volibear, Rammus, Shyvana, Sejuani.
This author must admit he has always been a fan of Trundle in the jungle. Trundle has been the quintessential counter to tanks and other bruisers in the jungle for quite some time. He is considered the traditional counter to a Sejuani jungle. He can not only take away tank and bruiser’s key strength, their survivability, but he also gains it himself. With Volibear topping the win rates this patch, it’s always a good time to pick up Trundle.
Trundle’s key ability for dealing with fed tanks and bruisers is his R – Subjugate. This ability steals 40% of the enemy’s current Armor and Magic resistance, as well as stealing up to 35% of the enemy’s max health over 4 seconds. Half of these stat drains are done immediately, while the other half is done over 4 seconds. This ability is an absolute nightmare for champions who rely on their extremely high defensive stats like Rammus. Imagine that Rammus activates his Aftershock, uses his W ability to triple his armor, and has 3 Armor items already. Then, Trundle steals 40% of his armor for the next four seconds. Rammus will now literally have almost 0 armor when Defensive Ball Curl runs out, meaning he will just be one-shot by any competent carry. Or imagine a Darius is going to try and drain tank your entire team. Trundle can press R on him and, suddenly, he dies a lot quicker than he used to.
Trundle’s E – Pillar of Ice and Q – Chomp also are great tools to help deal with carries. E is useful in that it briefly knocks enemies airborne if you hit them with the center of it. This interrupts abilities like Samira’s Ultimate or Miss Fortune’s Ultimate, taking away most of their damage. It is also useful for catching out squishy targets as the area around the pillar also slows enemies.
Trundle’s Q – Chomp is useful because it both slows the enemy as well as steals attack damage from them. If you are playing against an enemy ADC who already typically has lower attack damage like Ashe, you can make their auto attacks do around 50 damage per attack if you hit them with it. It is also helpful against enemies who don’t necessarily build attack damage items, but still auto attack a lot like Volibear. The damage they lose from your Q adds up and can end up making a difference in a fight.
Counters – Immobile Hypercarries like Jinx, Aphelios, Kog’Maw, Viktor, and Syndra.
I can hear Clayton “CaptainFlowers” Raines jumping for joy whenever someone mentions the Crystal Vanguard. This is a champion that if you want to play, you will never have to worry about them being banned! Skarner is one of the most forgotten champions in the game, but he is actually extremely powerful in the right situations and when played correctly!
I’m not going to mince words here. While Skarner is a very strong champion in his own right and his abilities are very interesting, the only one that really matters in this context is his ultimate, Impale. This ability is unbelievably powerful when dealing with one very strong or very fed champion. This ability roots, then suppresses one champion, allowing Skarner to drag them along with him for 1.75 seconds. This makes you a nightmare for champions with no dashes like Kog’Maw. By the time you see Skarner coming towards you, it is probably too late.
This is what makes Skarner so strong against semi-funnel comps or protect-the-president style compositions. All Skarner needs to do is get onto the main carry and drag them back into his team, and the fight is practically over. Skarner forces the enemy team to peel perfectly just to keep him away, because if Skarner can land his ultimate on the enemy, they are almost certainly dead in any coordinated team.
Skarner implements what is often referred to as the “QSS tax.” This is referring to the fact that if the enemy team has a Skarner, you are almost forced to buy a Quicksilver Sash for 1300g. This ability allows you to negate the Suppression of Skarner’s Ultimate. In this way, you are taxing the enemy’s wallets by forcing them to buy this item which is very gold inefficient. If the prime enemy carry is a mage, it is even worse because QSS does not build into any mage items, meaning you are essentially wasting an entire item slot by buying it. For these reasons, Skarner is a very strong anti-carry champion.
Conclusion
There you have three champions to try out in your next games whenever you see the enemy is drafting strong hyper-carries. With these champions, you can win games by shutting down the enemy and allowing your own team to thrive!
