A common strategy in champion select is to ban the prominent junglers of the current meta. This prevents the enemy team from gaining a power pick, but while Sejuanni and Gragas warm the bench other junglers have to step up and take their place. This often leads to summoners selecting weaker junglers without considering what their team really needs. For instance, a team without a tank will get another squishy assassin or a composition that begs for early ganks will get a farm style champion.

To address this problem summoners should consider adding unconventional junglers to their champion pools. These champions, while generally weak early, can become powerful after their first couple clears and fill roles that may not be easily addressed by more common junglers. Your team may not realize that the jungle Ezreal will become the damage threat they need, but you will.

This guide will help show you how to properly select an unconventional jungler, set up your runes and masteries, and survive the dangerous early game. Veigar the Tiny Master of Evil will be used as an example throughout this article to show the thought process behind each step.

Champion Select

Most games start in draft where both teams will be trying to counter each other, while simultaneously establishing a strong team composition. This is where the versatility of an unconventional pick can come into play. After seeing a few champions for both sides you can determine what the goals of each composition will likely be and whether or not your pick would be appropriate. For example, we’ll look into whether or not a jungle Veigar pick is smart for the situations below.

For this first situation we can see our team has an AP heavy teamfight composition and the enemy team has an AD heavy composition. It is immediately clear that our team needs a tank and more Attack Damage to ensure success in our teamfights. Also, the enemy team has not yet selected a clear jungler and has the potential to pick a strong 1 v 1 champion, like Vi or Lee Sin. These champions could ruin our early clear and snowball an advantage off of Veigar’s weak early game. Instead of picking Veigar we should consider an AD tank or fighter to contribute to teamfights and provide a bit more damage.

In the second situation both teams have formed decent teamfight compositions, but our team has no AP threats. Without any magic damage the enemy team could focus on building Armor and negate most of our damage. Also, we see the enemy has chosen Ahri, a good target for Veigar burst, and Master Yi, a farm style jungler. We can safely pick jungle Veigar here because he fits the role our team needs and is against a team that will keep to their side of the map early on.

Preparing for the Battle

Unconventional junglers carry the risk that without the right runes and masteries they are destined to fail. Like any other jungle champion, an unconventional pick likely needs attack speed, cooldown reduction, and damage (AP or AD) to improve their clear, as well as tank stats to sustain. Jungle specific masteries, like Tough Skin and Bladed Armor, can also help with surviving early clear are generally considered a must have. A combination of both clear and sustain will create the most success in the early game, but you should test different setups in a custom game to find what works best for you.

In the case of jungle Veigar using these runes and masteries has shown promise, although they are likely not perfect.

This setup grants 10% cooldown reduction and a lot of extra AP to help clear faster. Along with this, it provides 9 armor and the Tough Skin mastery to survive the early damage. With this setup a jungle Veigar can survive his early clear, but other options may create similar results. Try using the Bladed Armor mastery or Spell Vamp runes to create more unique pages for this situation.

Planning Your Jungle Route

To plan your jungle route you should consider the advantages of your champion and what you need to have on your first Recall. Generally speaking you want to finish your first clear with level 3 and at least 520 gold. With this you can get your important abilities, an improved jungle item, and some health potions. Getting to this point is difficult though, unless you consider your champion’s capabilities and your smite cooldown.

For a champion like Veigar your jungle route should consider the fact that you cannot clear both blue and red buff easily and that you will need mana regeneration to keep casting spells. Additionally, without a second smite, clearing three camps will more likely result in death. To address these issues you can develop a jungle route similar to the one below.

Here we start at Gromp, for a leash from the bottom lane and the buff. Since our early clear will be so slow the Gromp buff will provide a lot of damage for clearing. Then we move to take the Blue Sentinel for the mana regeneration buff it will provide. This will keep us casting spells as often as possible, speeding up our clear. With smite still on cooldown we move to the river to acquire scuttle crab. Although the crab doesn’t give us enough experience for level 3 it does provide a large amount of gold and takes up time while waiting for smite to come off cooldown. The final camp after scuttle is wolves, which gives level 3 and enough gold to get some health potions with our jungle item. This isn’t the only method to clear the early jungle, but meets the goals we need it to.

The only other problem that may appear is an enemy jungle invade. The enemy jungler is likely looking to put you behind early because it is your weakest point. To avoid this trouble try to keep vision on your jungle’s entrances and the lanes to predict where they will go to stop you. Adjust your jungle route appropriately, or simply Recall if the harass is too much. It’s better to back off and pick up some extra pots than die and give the enemy an advantage to snowball.

Conclusion

Bearing all this information in mind sometimes an unconventional jungler is not practical, but for those select situations it is important to keep a pocket pick available. It expands your champion pool and adds to the number of roles you could fill as a jungler. Whether it’s Veigar, Ezreal, or Lulu, an unconventional jungler might be the pick to throw your enemy off their game and complete your team composition.