Controlling your minions is not only important in competitive games but also in your everyday matches. Having a strategy in mind and applying it to the battlefield may often give you an advantage over your opponent and result in an increase of winning probability for you. You do not have to be some kind of mastermind that knows every single trick or detail about waves and minions but some basics certainly offer a lot of value for just very little work.

The first step is to be aware of what you are doing. This might sound stupid but being aware of when you attack minions and when you only last hit is the most important aspect of wave control. You need to be aware of your actions and of what you want to achieve, otherwise you can have infinite wisdom about what you should do without any effect. Try to think some steps ahead, do you really want to push-in that Irelia and give her that free farm under her tower, even though you are way ahead? Do you rather want to freeze the lane and zone her off the creeps? If so, where in the lane should that happen? Do you want to force jungle pressure on you or to avoid it? Think about the macro perspective and your lane in context to the map. It might be valuable for you to freeze the lane in a position where you are open for enemy ganks. By doing that and warding up you can waste the enemy’s time or even trap and kill him. If you do not want the enemy jungler top, you might want to freeze the lane slightly closer to your own tower, and if you want to take the enemy tower or to base, or roam, you need to push the lane out completely. Think a few steps ahead, draw out a plan and act accordingly because only by being aware of what you are doing you can practice strategy and wave control.

Notice how Trundle Bot pushed the wave. This is an opportunity for you to freeze it right before your own tower.

Now that you have your goal you need to know how to achieve it. Pushing out the lane is simple: just use all you have to kill the minions as fast as possible. Other techniques require a more careful approach and a certain amount of knowledge and intuition. To freeze a lane you can draw aggro of a new arriving wave of minions and then walk into a bush when they attacked you, doing so leads to the whole wave attacking only one of your creeps, automatically pushing the wave in your direction. You can also freeze a wave that was intentionally or accidentally pushed by your enemy. Going back to the ‘Irelia example’ we can imagine Irelia wanting to take as many creeps as possible because she is behind. What we do is falling back a little, allowing her to farm some minions, pushing the lane because she wants to farm as much as possible before getting zoned or pushed in again, resulting in the wave pushing towards us. As soon as the waves pushed towards our tower we tank it for a while – which we can because Irelia is behind – and then keep it in position by making sure that there are always about 3-4 caster minions more on the enemy side. Wave manipulating for lane dominance is what Flame is about – the legendary Korean top laner who is famous for being 100 creeps ahead over his opponent in plenty of competitive games. Knowing how to manipulate the waves is very important and can give you huge advantages.

The freeze could be closer to your own tower - and Trundle, because he is a bot, happened to randomly attack me - but I think you can see the bigger idea behind the picture. The lane is already frozen in place for about 1 minute at this point and is going to remain frozen for even longer. This is easier on top lane because you can use the bushes to zone, in mid lane this might not work without your jungler applying pressure on the enemy. Also, if you see your enemy doing this to your ally as a jungler, go help him and push the lane into the tower with him to break the freeze. Having 1-2 potions is very useful when freezing a lane to heal the potential minion/champion damage that comes with it.

Pushing a lane can allow you to freely harass the enemy laner and effectively prevent him from farming. Zoning is dangerous and doesn’t always work out, especially if you are not really ahead and/or the enemy jungler is strong and present enough to gank and kill you. Bot lane is famous for always pushing in, with good reasoning. Pushing in prevents the enemy duo from engaging and makes it more difficult for them to farm because of their tower. Of course you need to ward up and of course the enemy jungler can gank pretty easily when you push but by pushing in you make it very difficult for your enemies to follow up on a gank, being aggressive is a great defence. Remember to be aware of the enemy jungler’s position on the map. When he is close be careful and do not try to poke the enemies under their tower. When he is far away, harass them until they cry. As long as your enemies are under their tower any ranged champion can poke quite easily resulting in lane dominance after only a few waves. As soon as your enemies are low enough you can call you mid laner or jungler over to dive and clean them off the map.

A big wave was pushing down my bot lane. I decided to don't farm it completely but to leave behind some creeps. My minions are slightly stronger than the enemy's so I decided to keep the numbers almost even - though I left one more caster minion on my side and one more melee on the enemy's. Also, this is happening right before my inner turret, which means that my minions have the advantage of sooner reinforcements.

Almost as important as wave manipulation for lane control is the concept of slow pushing a lane for map dominance. Outside the Laning Phase most people will go to a side lane and farm it out as fast as possible before returning to their team resulting in basically nothing than a Mexican stand-off in mid lane. By only farming the caster minions in an even lane – same number of minions on both sides – you can slow push a lane towards the enemy base. Your waves will be slowly getting faster and faster before reaching the enemy tower. This can be used to your team’s advantage. You can now siege mid lane knowing that top/bot lane is going to push. By keeping the enemy mid and warding the respective side of the jungle you can now set up a rotation. Just before your huge wave hits the tower your whole team rotates to said side lane after pushing in mid. By doing this, you can get inner turrets without having to dive them. Remember that Riot implemented a snowball mechanic that strengthens your own minions when your team is ahead in levels by average. Due to this it is harder to predict how minions are going to interact in a slow push, especially at the moment as we are still unused to the concept.

As you can see the slow push worked out nicely. It takes a lot of intuition and experience to set up a slow push in an environment with that many different factors. For start try to understand why a wave slowly pushes. Look at minion waves and how they behave. As soon as you understood when a wave is going to slow push after an "even" start (1 wave per side in the middle of the lane only manipulated by taking out some enemy caster creeps) you can try to adapt the amount of enemy minions you want to kill depending on the position and depending on whether your team is ahead in average levels.

A last picture just to show you the strength of a slow push. This is the same wave of minions just before hitting the enemy inner tower (another wave of reinforcements is going to arrive a little after thy reached it). This wave capable of taking about a third to two thirds, hugely depending on aggro, of the enemy tower's HP by itself. Imagine it being reinforced with your whole team after a rotation! A well placed slow push can be game deciding. Also, imagine this wave enhanced with Baron - use your Baron Buff on such waves and inhibitor turrets are going to fall easily.

Wave manipulation is a concept for everyone, not only for professionals. Controlling your minions can and will leave you in an advantageous position over your enemy and increase you rank very effectively. Try being aware of your actions and their effects and you will soon develop a certain intuition for wave control.