The League's newest champion, Ivern, boasts a new and unique playstyle emphasized by an original passive and a utility-focused kit. Those aspects alone already make him a rather tedious champion to learn because you're putting emphasis more so on global map play instead of skirmishes and micro trades. Playing Ivern requires a massive mentality shift towards playing for the team so that you can help provide your teammates with the tools they need to close out the victories for you (so build tanky). This allows his team to get away with picking more lane-dominant picks and riskier carries as he will help enable them to achieve their own goals for carrying the team. As such, Ivern, by nature is a champ that will be harder to earn wins with by himself since team communication and cooperation is imperative to his success. On top of it all, he is also a fun, zany and lovable character that is quite hard to dislike - his favourite colour is spring.

When talking about Ivern and elaborating on what he excels in, we're going to break down his kit and look at his abilities one by one. Like any champion, whether it be an assassin or a tank, knowledge of all your abilities is important so you can plan for certain situations ahead of time while being able to come in clutch in sudden, unexpected situations. But if we're going to talk about playing out certain situations ahead of time then his passive, Friend of the Forest, is the perfect place to start. You see, we are talking about an ability that quite literally does not require the player to kite jungle camps. At just a cost of both health and mana, Ivern summons a grove around the camps by right clicking on the monsters. The grove takes some time to mature, and then Ivern can consume (set free) the entire camp. It is important to note, however, that the time it takes for the grove to fully mature takes what feels like quite a while, but this in turn gives you the ability to prepare multiple groves while waiting for your current grove to mature. But be careful, priming multiple camps early can hurt quite a bit and open you up to being counter-jungled! Due to the nature of Ivern's clears, it makes it much easier for the player to keep tabs on how all of his lanes are doing.

However, for obvious reasons, stay on the lookout for any potential counter-junglers and fighters wandering onto your side of the map for a 1v1. As stressed earlier, Ivern is not a champion that excels in his dueling capabilities. You will want to stay clear of the aggressive early game junglers that want to try to kill you. The ways to minimize or prevent these invades are the same as with any champ - warding, map awareness, and perhaps some cooperation/communication with your laners. As well, a massive benefit to this passive is that it makes your first clear possibilities much more dynamic. This gives his team a lot more flexibility when it comes to composition and level 1s. This in turn makes it that much harder for the enemy team to make predictions on your jungle pathing based on your champion and team composition. Lastly, at levels five and above, this passive comes with the bonus of being able to not just take blue and red buffs for yourself, but also grant the buff to your ally at the same time. This can really help set up your lanes with tools they need to gain momentum in a lane, whether you are giving double buffs to your mid Jayce, or blue to your mid laner and red buff to your ADC or top laner, depending on which side of the map you are on. This setup also allows you to be a little deceptive with your buff donations. Traditionally, when a jungler gives blue buff to their laner, it usually reveals that that jungler is on a certain side of the map, which can help the other team either contest that side of the map, or set up a play elsewhere. With Ivern, that problem is eliminated as you are able to just leave the little buff it drops for your laners to pick up at their convenience. No more awkward situations where you are tanking too much damage from a camp while waiting for your laner to finish shoving the wave.

So, you've used your passive to flawlessly clear your jungle camps. You've gained some levels and you're ready to gank a lane. Now would be a perfect time to talk about Ivern's 'Q' Ability - Rootcaller. This ability just fires a single linear skillshot in a target direction, and deals damage to the first enemy struck as well as briefly rooting them. However, this ability also comes with a secondary (and optional effect) of you and allied champions being able to dash to an enemy that is rooted by this abillity (Ivern has to reactivate Q, while teammates must click on the enemy). This is especially effective for opening up ganks on laners that may not have any natural gap closers in their kits, such as Darius or Yorick, and is also good for following up if it's a gank that requires your laner to bait the enemy to commit to a trade/fight first. But it does not just stop at the lane phase - this means that your fighters, tanks, and teamfight mages such as Kennen have the ability to gap close to the enemy team at all stages of the game. This makes Rootcaller a very effective initiation tool should a team decide to capitalize on it. It's perfect for making picks or initiating a teamfight, depending on what situation Ivern and his team find themselves in. It also does not have to be for a teamfight either, as poke comps can take full advantage of just the simple root that it provides, meaning teammates have a window of opportunity on a stationary target. Here are just a couple of screenshots to demonstrate its effective range as it is pretty fair (But keep in mind it's one of the slower projectiles in the game).

A solid but still avoidable range of 1075!

Comparisons:

Darius E - 550
Talon W - 900
LeBlanc E - 950
Irelia R - 1000
Ivern Q - 1075
Lee Sin Q - 1100
Ezreal Q - 1150
Lux Q - 1175
Twisted Fate Q -1450
Nidalee Q - 1500

Ivern's next ability has definitely got to be his most unique ability in his kit excluding his passive. Ivern is currently the only champion that is capable of spawning bushes. While this may seem fairly useless in most fighting situations, it certainly throws a massive curveball into the vision game. When we talk about how this ability is useful, it's important that we have our full understanding of bushes and how they function. We know that unless there is a ward in them, they hide all units inside of it, and also denies vision on its opposite side. So on top of not being able to look inside, players cannot see past them either without the use of wards. This means that Ivern has some pretty flexible control over the fog of war, which is very useful for controlling neutral objectives as well as sieging. Your opponents will quickly find it difficult to defend their tower when Ivern and friends are able to pop in and out of vision whenever they please, making landing any poke extra tedious. Also, Ivern's team can feel fairly comfortable as their area of safe space from the enemy team is much closer than it normally would be otherwise, suffocating the enemy's effective vision to apply even more pressure to the turret, not to mention forcing your enemy to use extra caution when contesting Baron/Dragon when your team has already begun taking (or baiting) it. Below are just a number of effective bushes that can be used in-game.

Cutting off vision in chokepoints will make your enemy a little more anxious knowing they're about to facecheck an area they otherwise wouldn't have to. This screencap is also important because if your bushes are lined up like this, you might accidentally be giving your opponent a sneakier way of infiltrating your jungle - which is bad.

Effectively being able to use bushes or walls to choke vision for the enemy team is one of your primary goals of using this ability, and is what we can probably expect to see a lot from Ivern in competitive or high-elo play.

A basic example of creating your own fog-of-war defense on a siege.

Bush lineups can be the first step in creating some very effective baits.

Enemy just warded over the wall while you were doing baron. No sweepers? No problem!

As for Ivern's 'E', Triggerseed, it's a fairly straight-forward ability so it's not worth getting too in-depth with. It simply shields either Ivern or a teammate for a couple of seconds and then detonates, dealing area of effect damage as well as slowing those in its radius. Even though it is a more simple ability, it is still important to use, either providing a good follow-up for your frontline after an initiation, or helping peel for your backline and giving them some soft crowd control to kite with. As far is the macro-game is concerned though, this ability does not really help in setting anything up, it's more so for follow-up and fights, so it does not add much to his macro strategy.

Lastly for Ivern's abilities we have his ultimate - Daisy! Daisy is a sentinel friend of Ivern's who is an effectively in-game pet, like Mordekaiser's ghosts or Annie's Tibbers. Unlike other pets, Daisy has the ability to knock-up enemies in a line using her own three-hit auto attack passive (3 auto attacks with a mini-Braum ultimate on her third consecutive attack on the same target). Daisy also has increased movement speed for the first five seconds after being spawned, prioritizes enemies hit by Ivern's Q, and can use the dash if commanded to. However due to the nature of AI pets, Daisy can be kited and her three-hit knock-up can be rather unreliable as a result. However, she is still good at providing an extra body and healthbar for your team to use, disrupting enemy teams during teamfights and frontlining when sieging enemy towers. It is certainly not the most exciting of abilities for an ultimate, however Ivern's strengths primarily revolve around his map movements, so Daisy is just sort of there to lend a hand every now and then when needed. In that sense, she is similar to Triggerseed. While Daisy does not help you set up, you can expect to use her after the fact.

Now that we have taken a look at his abilities, it makes plenty of sense to bring it all together and talk about his pros and cons as a champion. Starting off with his downsides, again, Ivern is not much of a fighter. He can help in the initiation of a teamfight, but even afterwards he isn't as impactful as other teamfighters in terms of damage and clutch mid-fight bushes will be hard and very dependent on where the teamfight is held. His utility-centric playstyle means that winning a game is hard if you just do not have the team coordination. This also means that he can get jumped on quite easily by an aggressive fighter. He does have the tools he needs to disengage for a little bit however, between his slow, root, and maybe Daisy, but regardless if you're isolated and say Udyr or Talon jumps on you, things can be quite spooky. There are many things that Ivern can do by himself, but winning a game is not one of them. This, however, is compensated for by just how impeccable he is at playing the map. There will be very few champions for a long time whom are able to play the map and control objectives as well as he can. Between his initiation potential, objective control, fog-of-war manipulation and teammate enabling, Ivern certainly brings a lot to the table and gives teams a lot of different compositions and early games to work with. He is a quite fun to champ to play on top of it all too, so next time you find yourself jungling or are playing with friend, perhaps Ivern is a solid choice to try out!

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