In the present season, League’s meta has evolved to allow Junglers to decisively influence matches right from the get-go. With the right set of plays and decision-making, Junglers can definitely win games outright through their own playmaking.

Thanks to the rework of late on catch-up experience, a head-to-head lead in the Jungle has become crucial to snowball matches in your team’s favor. Furthermore, the removal of Tracker's Knife has increasingly shifted the Jungle's meta state towards carry-oriented playstyles.

As a jungler, it’s your responsibility as the primary influencer on the map to help amass significant leads for your team or at least keep the match at equal footing. To that end, you want to find out all the ways to level up your individual play to improve your odds in-game.

Today, we’re going to dive deep into the workings of an overlooked strategy you can take advantage of to reliably put yourself ahead of the curve: Invading.

What is Invading?

Let’s first define what we mean by invading. Simply put, invading is proceeding to the opposing jungle with the intention of putting down vision, hunting down the rival jungler, and stealing camps.

Contrary to widely-held belief, invading isn’t just for your typical early-aggressive picks such as Lee Sin, Shaco, and the infamous Nunu. Aside from getting kills, invading can involve gathering crucial information to potentially avoid coming ganks and deter the opposing jungler from invading and counter-jungling himself.

Invading is dubbed as a high-risk, high-reward strategy -- which is definitely true with everything considered. When armed with the right knowledge and foresight however, invading can turn into a low-risk, high-reward tactic instead. All it takes is to educate yourself on the trends and habits that junglers take on in order to get inside their mind and invade accordingly.

Before the game starts, prepare yourself for the match you are about to have at hand. Think about everything there is to think about before the game. Preparation and setup are the keys to succeeding at invades.

Motivation to invade

When considering whether to invade, first take note of your win conditions. Determine the optimal playstyle for your champion of choice then consider how you’re going to play in-game. If you believe invading is aligned with the goal of how you should play the game you’re in, then by all means go forward. Ask yourself, "Will invading give us a game-winning edge? Are the rewards worth the risks that come with invading? Or am I better off just ganking and farming instead?"

Each and every jungler has a ‘rhythm’ and style of play that changes game by game. Thus, the kind of a jungler you’re playing determines the pace you are going to put in play heading into the matchup. Are you playing a scaling-oriented jungler? Are you playing an aggressive jungler? Are you playing a farm-heavy jungler? Is denying the enemy jungler your main objective in the earlier stages of the game?

As a rule of thumb, junglers who are strongest early into the game are the ones who benefit the most from successful invades. Given that early-game, gank-oriented junglers tend to scale off as the game continues, these junglers have to make every second of the first few minutes of the game count. With the sufficient setup, these junglers excel at early-game skirmishes and invades because of their innate ability to outduel and outmatch fellow junglers at lower levels. Therefore, these junglers basically have an advantage when it comes to invading at the earlier stages of the game because if they can’t snowball, they get run over by the competition.

On the flip side of the coin, a scaling and farming jungler has little to no reason to risk invading earlier on. Your job is to safely scale up and take fights when you’ve sufficiently farmed up to your power spikes -- because at the mid-game to late-game stage, you start to overpower and outmatch the opposing junglers.

However, this guideline doesn’t necessarily limit your choices as a jungler. When the opportunity presents itself, you can definitely go ahead and invade successfully -- no matter which type of jungler you are.

Jungler was spotted on the bottom side of the map? Invade and steal his camps top side. Jungler failed a gank? Put down vision inside his jungle and try to counter-jungle if you can. Your laners have a bit of downtime from their lanes? Try to invade the enemy’s jungle together and zone the jungler away from his camps. By being adaptable, you allow yourself to play into familiar and unfamiliar situations alike to gain significant leads. You just have to have the eye to scout potential invades and know the prerequisites to pulling off successful invades safely.

Rules of Invading

Adaptability in invading and jungling requires you to have a sufficient stock of game knowledge to actively and correctly react to a myriad of situations. That said, there are a few key concepts and fundamentals you have to master in order to successfully pull off invades consistently.

Jungle Matchup

The risk that comes with invading primarily falls on your jungler-to-jungler matchups since you are the ones going to be interacting for the majority of the early game. Typically speaking, it’s ill-advised to invade when your jungler of choice is inferior earlier on compared to the opposing jungler. Early-game duelists such as Xin Zhao, Elise, and Jarvan IV will always out-1v1 the typical tank-scalers in Zac and Sejuani when properly executed. That is why you must remember your current jungle matchup and see if invading the opposing jungle is feasible enough to begin with.

If you’re the weaker early-duelist in the jungle matchup, ask for your team’s assistance to help cover up your bases and ward up your jungle entrances or your opponent’s jungle camps to avoid getting invaded yourself.

Also, you must consider a jungler’s clear health when wanting to invade. The lower a jungler gets in his first clear, the better your chances of successfully contesting his camps and even maybe grabbing a kill -- just make sure you’re healthy enough to invade with in the first place.

Picture you’re a Zac who just hit level 2. You’ve cleared your Blue and Gromp and now you’re possibly looking to invade. Your odds of outdueling a Level 2, Red-empowered Xin Zhao solo is exceedingly low -- it is a high-risk, low-reward situation and you would only waste your time possibly getting taken down and setting yourself even further behind than you’re supposed to be. If your junglers are on equal footing however, the risk entirely lies on how you prepare for and execute your invade. If you take the enemy jungler by surprise, you can easily turn the tides of the duel in your favor by catching him when he’s vulnerable clearing his camps.

As an invade-heavy Lee Sin main myself, I’ve had my fair share of successful invades that have helped me snowball my games out of control.

Lane Priority

Lane priority is decided by whoever is able to gain control of the lane and aggressively shove it in their favor -- basically whoever has the winning lane that can sufficiently waveclear. Why does this matter?

As you move into the enemy’s jungle territory, you risk getting collapsed on by the enemy lanes. However, if you are crossing jungle territory with a shoved lane nearby, your laner can effectively back you up first in any case a skirmish breaks out since the enemy laner will be busy stocking up on CS under tower. Worst case scenario, your laner backs you up with your invade while the enemy laner responds which creates a stalemate wherein all parties back off. This however, still goes in your favor since the enemy laner basically loses crucial gold and experience from the missed farm to the tower. Best case scenario, you and your laner collapse on the enemy jungle, take him down, steal his camps, and secure vision for your team.

What you can do on the map is somewhat bottlenecked by the strength and disposition of your lanes. With a cooperative team guarding your back, you can safely proceed with your invades and achieve significant gains with minimal risk. Take note, however, that getting collapsed on happens less often in lower elos compared to Plat and Diamond where laners have better map awareness and are cooperative enough to help out their jungler. Therefore, in lower elos, you can consistently pull off riskier invades and get away with it most of the time.

Tracking the Enemy Jungler

To proceed with your invades, you must know where the enemy jungler is located to plan out what you intend to do. After all, you can’t kill a jungler that’s not there and steal camps that have already been taken. For this to work, you would need either proper vision set-up and/or foresight of the enemy jungler’s pathing.

Proper vision set-up is straightforward. You basically ward camps in advance to when you think the enemy jungler will pass by to take that camp. For example, you ward his Red brush to check if he starts Red side or Blue side. You could also ward his Wolves by 1:30 to check if he passes by it in the next minute or so, thereby limiting the number of possibilities of where he could go off to next. With that information, you can reliably predict where the enemy jungler will path and sneak into his unguarded sides of the jungle and steal his camps away or sneak up on him outright and take him down.

Foresight of the enemy jungler’s pathing is another, more complicated concept. To know their pathing, you must think like the enemy jungler. If you were the jungler, what would be your win condition? Which lane is he looking to gank? Is he prioritizing farming, ganking, or invading? Which camp does he start? What’s his optimal clear path? Predict his moves and time his camp clears to expect where he’s going to be. Know if he’s an auto-attack based or ability-based jungler, as knowing which is which will help you know which camps he starts and where he will path accordingly. For example, a mana-hungry Evelynn will likely start Blue for the majority of her starts and proceed to clear Wolves or Raptors then Red.

For the rare situations, high-AoE junglers, such as Kayn and Zac, can even start Raptors to start off their clear. Then, there are even junglers who like to steal camps immediately as fast as the first camp such as Nunu, Ivern, or even Lee Sin. Look out and ward for potential camps to be invaded to help discourage invading junglers to continue with their cheese strategy.

Predicting an enemy jungler’s pathing comes with experience and a little bit of theorycrafting. Using the Practice Tool, try to time the optimal clear timings for junglers you often see in the meta. Generally, the majority of junglers are able to clear their buff-camp-buff by 2:30. By reliably tracking where the enemy jungler is, you and your team can decisively respond whether to push on with your invade attempts or put in necessary adjustments to your game plan.

Tradeoffs of Invading

Invading isn’t simply about the rewards. Poorly-executed invades can irreversibly damage your team’s chances of winning the game. If you spend valuable time invading, you lose out on time that can be used to gain leads through traditional means such as power-farming and heavy-ganking. Whether your invade pays off or not, invades can definitely cause a snowball effect onto your team.

In Conclusion

For all the games that you play, adapt to whatever compositions and situations that come up in-game. Remember, how you play can change the fate of the match within itself. If you somehow get caught in a suboptimal position in an invade earlier on in the game, you basically cost yourself the position to effectively influence the match’s outcome.

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