Breakstar here, with the first of my Underplayed series. The idea is pretty simple: with over one hundred champions in League of Legends, we see a large numbers that fade out of visibility, being played very little in competitive play and/or in the solo queue ladder. When this happens, one cannot help but wonder the reason behind this disappearance, and furthermore, whether the reason is good enough to justify this character's disappearance.

Today, we visit the champion Annie.

According to the data aggregation utility LOLKING, Annie is picked or banned in approximately 3 percent of games (in the past month). This is unusually low, begging the question of why. Why is Annie so rarely played?

The short answer is that Annie is a very, very specialized champion. A little too specialized. The range of her spells is very short, her utility is very low (only a shield and a stun to supplement her damage), and she completely lacks innate escapes or long-range wave clear to keep her safe in dangerous lanes or against dangerous junglers.

Furthermore, she has no real way to close the gap in order to land her short-ranged spells, a problem that ties Annie irrevocably to the summoner spell Flash. The net result is that Annie is a burst mage whose entire goal in life is to flash onto a vulnerable target and annihilate them in the duration of her passive's 1.75 second stun.

However, in fairness, Annie's burst is exceptionally high. Her base damages are solid, and the simple fact that she has three spells whose primary function is damage means that she is an absolute terror to any target who doesn't build defenses against her. With Deathfire Grasp and sufficient Magic Penetration, there are few targets that can survive Annie's full combo.

However, Annie's Area of Effect abilities are fairly small, and with the length of her cooldowns, she has a very significant falloff in usefulness after her initial burst. This means that if she isn't able to completely change the course of the fight with her Ultimate and W abilities, she is unlikely to contribute much afterward. In Season 2, the way Magic Penetration worked guaranteed that there would be targets tough enough that Annie would not be able to punch through their defenses. In combination with her lack of utility and the overall risk associated with playing her, she fell out of favor in early Season 2.

But this isn't Season 2. This is Season 3. And Annie may just see the light of day again. Because Annie, like Veigar, Leblanc, and other burst mages have little incentive to build statistics other than damage, the Magic Penetration changes favor them more than more utility-focused mages such as Zyra and Twisted Fate. In combination with the new Deathfire Grasp, and hints that Riot has dropped that other improvements for burst mages are on their way, we may just see Annie in the limelight again.