In my last article, I detailed the best mastery choices for most mid lane champions, but the new options lend themselves to many, many exceptions. Whereas in the 2015 season you could much more easily (of course, non-optimally) get away with a mastery page called "Mage" and choose it for just about every AP laner, you hinder yourself more to do that now. Luckily, Riot did us a big favor by limiting each tier to just two choices and filling up masteries to 5/5 with just one click. There is no excuse not to redo your build every champ select with your pick and the enemies' picks in mind. Pro players were always doing this!

In this guide, I'm going to go over a few champions that reap the most benefit from deviating from the "standard" builds I laid out last time.

Annie

If you take a look at the mastery pages of Annie's biggest fan, a challenger player by the name of "Annie Bot", you will see that you have a great many build options as this champion. However, none of them are 18/12/0, which is by far the most commonly used. Here are the two builds I recommend instead:

18/0/12

Utility Annie

No other champion can deal assassin-level burst to an entire team as instantly and with as little counterplay as Annie can. That's what makes her so fun to play and so devastating when she gets ahead. Her glaring weakness? Range, of course. 625 units, the range of most of her spells (Tibbers is a bit longer), is well within the zone of danger of essentially every other ranged champion. For comparison, Ahri's charm travels 975 units. Annie can't just walk up to an enemy that already knows she's there – she'll get CC'd and obliterated before she ever makes it. That's why Flash is so important on Annie, potentially more important than any other champion in the game. The 400 units of Flash expand Annie's range to over 1000, a very workable distance.

The difference between an Annie with Flash and an Annie without Flash is everything, so the 15% CDR on summoner spells from Insight is much more beneficial than Dangerous Game. That's a 45 second window where Flash is available rather than not.

12/18/0

Damage Annie

The major weakness of this build is that you don't get Insight, but your Flashes are more impactful. Ferocity overall provides more damage than Cunning, but Thunderlord's Decree is a better keystone mastery than Deathfire Touch. Deathfire Touch relies on you landing abilities regularly in order to trigger the damage effect, but it's difficult to harass as Annie with your very short range. Your damage usually comes out all at once, and if you only ever fire one salvo of abilities, Thunderlord's Decree does more damage. It can be the difference between a true 100-0 and giving the enemy time to respond, so it's a great choice for Annie.

This build foregoes Insight in order to get the better parts of Ferocity and Cunning, putting a burden on the player to make especially good choices when it comes to Flash+Tibbers. I would recommend the other build to most players, but you might like this one if you have faith in yourself. At the time of writing this article, this is the build with the highest win percentage according to champion.gg.

Morgana

Once again, the most common mastery build is 18/12/0. This absolutely suffices, but it is not the best choice for mid Morgana.

12/18/0

For different reasons, Morgana also benefits from the Thunderlord's Decree build. Instead of range being the limiting factor which prevents Deathfire Touch from being the best choice, as with Annie, it is cooldowns in Morgana's case. The cooldowns of Dark Binding and Tormented Soil are 11 and 10 seconds respectively, unchanging with rank. Morgana can reliably proc Thunderlord's every time she lands a Q (Q + 2 ticks of her pool) and from considerable range (over 1000 units). With such a high cooldown on a very avoidable skillshot, it's rarely possible to land a Dark Binding more than every 30 seconds (the cooldown of the Thunderlord's Decree effect), so the choice here is clear.

Swain

If you've played Swain recently, chances are you went with your standard 18/12/0 build (it's currently the most frequently used build on virtually every AP mid champ). You are going to facepalm when you see this obviously better build.

18/0/12

The swing in champion strength that took place at the beginning of the preseason (scary Dr. Mundo, Trundle, etc.) was largely due to the increased power of health regeneration in the Resolve tree, and you don't have to go too deep to find some of it. This means Swain can put his 18 points in Ferocity, picking up Deathfire Touch which works quite well on him, and still drop enough points into Resolve for Runic Armor and Perseverance. Downing a well-farmed Swain was already a challenging task without Ignite available, and now his health regeneration is accentuated by an 8% boost from Runic Armor and a 200% boost to his base health regeneration when below 25% health. You'll need to learn to last hit without Savagery, because this is too good to pass up.

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There are more AP mid champions that thrive outside the standard 18/12/0 build, but these were the three I felt were in most dire need of being addressed. Next time, I'll go over choices for AD mid laners.

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