Sylas Counters | Best Counter Champions Picks and Strategy to Beat Sylas

Nothing in the game stings quite like losing a fight to your own ultimate, which is the entire reason he feels so much worse to face than a normal melee mage.

Hijack is what makes him infuriating. It is also the part of him you can plan around in champion select, and once you do, he is a melee mage with one dash and a lot of cooldowns.

Check out our top Sylas counters below for more information on how to beat him!

Counter Guide

How to Beat Sylas

Matchup Guide · Patch 26.14 · 3 Counter Picks

Nothing in the game stings quite like losing a fight to your own ultimate, which is the entire reason he feels so much worse to face than a normal melee mage.

Hijack has no counterplay once it is cast. You cannot dodge it, cleanse it, or itemise against it. Resenting that is completely reasonable. The counterplay happens earlier, in champion select and in the seconds before he commits, and that is where every answer below operates.

Matchup Snapshot Sylas, the Unshackled

Where You Meet HimMid, sometimes Jungle

Damage TypeMagic

Why He Is FrustratingBeats you with your own ultimate

MobilityAbscond / Abduct [E]

Biggest ThreatHijack [R]

Hardest CounterCassiopeia

What a Counter Needs

An ultimate that is weak in his hands, decided in champion select
Grievous wounds or burst, because Kingslayer heals him out of trouble
A way to stop or punish his single dash

Sylas Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

Hijack [R] steals an enemy ultimate and casts a copy of it with his own stats, on a cooldown that drops to 30 seconds at rank 3, which means he gets several per teamfight.
Kingslayer [W] heals him more the lower his health is, up to a maximum at or below a threshold, so the burst that should finish him is what saves him instead.
Abscond / Abduct [E] is a dash followed by a recast that pulls him to the first enemy hit and knocks them up, which is both his engage and his escape on one button.
Chain Lash [Q] slows and then explodes where the chains cross, giving him wave clear and poke from 775 units without stepping forward.
Petricite Burst adds bonus magic damage and attack speed to his attacks after every cast, which is why his all-in hurts far more than his ability tooltips suggest.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

He is a melee mage with exactly one dash. Abscond is his only repositioning tool, and if it is on cooldown he has no way in and no way out.
Grounding turns off his entire kit's mobility. A grounded Sylas cannot Abscond and cannot Abduct, which leaves him standing in melee range with nothing.
Kingslayer is healing, not damage reduction, so grievous wounds cuts the thing keeping him alive rather than just delaying it.
Hijack is only as good as what he steals. Against a team of channeled zones and self-buffs, his ultimate is a mediocre copy of somebody else's cooldown.
His damage is entirely magic. There is nothing physical to punish a heavy magic resist build, and Chain Lash is easy to sidestep in a lane.

Countering Sylas

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Sylas comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Ground him. Any grounding effect removes both halves of Abscond / Abduct, which is the whole of his mobility, and leaves him in melee range of whoever grounded him.
Bring grievous wounds. Kingslayer is what turns a lost all-in into a won one, and cutting the healing changes the math on every trade he takes.
Pick an ultimate that is bad in his hands. Toggled zones, channels, and self-buffs are all far weaker for Sylas than a targeted engage or a burst nuke would be.
Punish the spent dash. Once Abscond is down for 9 to 13 seconds, he cannot leave, and he has nothing that stops you from walking at him.

If you are already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Sylas Matchup

Watch what he does with your ultimate rather than what he does with his. His Hijack cooldown at rank 3 is 30 seconds, which is usually shorter than yours, so the copy is available more often than the original.

Buy Executioner's Calling or its upgrade early. Kingslayer's healing scales with how low he is, which means every trade you almost win is a trade grievous wounds actually wins.

Do not stand where the Chain Lash arcs cross. The explosion in the middle is most of the ability's damage, and the two arcs on their own are easy to walk out of.

Force him to use Abscond to reach the wave. He is a melee champion in a lane where most opponents are not, so a shoved wave means every cast he makes is one he cannot save for the fight.

Best Sylas Counters

These three answer him from three angles: his mobility, his burst, and his commitment. All three also give him an ultimate he does not particularly want.

Cassiopeia Turns Off His Dashes

Miasma is the single hardest mechanical answer to Sylas in the game. It leaves toxic clouds that poison, slow, and ground everything inside them, and a grounded Sylas cannot cast either half of Abscond / Abduct. That is his only mobility, so a Cassiopeia who drops Miasma correctly has removed his engage and his escape with one button.

Twin Fang then does the rest. It fires every three quarters of a second, deals bonus damage to poisoned targets, and heals Cassiopeia each time, which out-trades Kingslayer's missing-health healing outright. Petrifying Gaze stuns anything facing her from 825 units, and Serpentine Grace means her movement speed items work better than his do.

Anivia Survives the All-In

Sylas needs one committed all-in to work, and Rebirth means Anivia does not die to it. She reverts to an egg at full health when she takes fatal damage, which turns his combo into a wasted set of cooldowns while she is still on the map. Crystallize then walls off the path he took to get there, from 1000 units away.

Flash Frost chills from 1075 units and stuns at the end of its flight, and Frostbite deals heavily increased damage to a chilled target on a 4 second cooldown, which is a burst pattern he cannot heal through. The bonus is what he steals: Glacial Storm is a toggled zone that needs channel time and mana to matter, and it is one of the weakest ultimates in the game to Hijack.

Malzahar Punishes the Commit

Void Shift gives Malzahar massive damage reduction and crowd control immunity whenever he has not recently been hit, which means the Abduct knock-up that opens a Sylas all-in does not land and the Chain Lash that follows barely registers. He has to burn the shift before the fight starts, and that costs him the surprise.

Nether Grasp is then a suppression, which Sylas has no way to break and no dash out of, and it drops a damaging zone around him for its duration. Malefic Visions and Void Swarm shove the wave without Malzahar stepping forward, so a melee mage who needs to walk into range for every cast spends the whole lane on the back foot.

Itemizing Against Sylas

Sylas deals only magic damage and stays alive by healing, so the build is magic resist plus one grievous wounds component bought earlier than usual:

Executioner's Calling is the cheapest item in this list and the most important one, because Kingslayer heals most when he is lowest and grievous wounds cuts exactly that. Mercury's Treads shortens the Abduct knock-up, Banshee's Veil eats the Chain Lash or the Abduct before a fight starts, and Force of Nature pairs magic resist with the movement speed that keeps a melee mage from ever reaching you.