Yasuo Counters | Best Counters for Yasuo

A good Yasuo is unstoppable and a bad one loses the game on his own, which is why players are equally terrified of facing him and of having him on their team.

Countering Yasuo is all about picking a champion that stops him from snowballing. Some picks beat his early all-in outright, and some only shut him down later. Patch 26.14 has him at S+ tier, so the matchup still matters.

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

Counter Guide

How to Beat Yasuo

Matchup Guide · Patch 26.14 · 3 Counter Picks

A good Yasuo is unstoppable and a bad one loses the game on his own, which is why players are equally terrified of facing him and of having him on their team.

Countering Yasuo is all about picking a champion that stops him from snowballing. Some picks beat his early all-in outright, and some only shut him down later once the game has opened up. Patch 26.14 has him sitting at S+ tier with a roughly even win rate, which is exactly the profile of a champion who wins hard in the right hands and loses hard in the wrong ones.

Matchup Snapshot Yasuo, the Unforgiven

Where You Meet HimMid Lane

Damage TypePhysical

Ban PriorityCommon blind-pick ban

MobilitySweeping Blade [E]

Biggest ThreatLast Breath [R]

Hardest CounterVladimir

What a Counter Needs

A way to survive or dodge Last Breath outright
Crowd control that is not a projectile, so Wind Wall cannot stop it
Enough range to punish him while he has no minions to dash through

Yasuo Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

Wind Wall [W] blocks all enemy projectiles for 4 seconds, which turns off entire champions rather than just mitigating them.
Sweeping Blade [E] has a 0.5 second cooldown at rank 1 and drops to 0.1, so with a wave to work through he is effectively untouchable.
Steel Tempest [Q] builds to a whirlwind knock-up on two stacks, and it counts as a basic attack, so it scales with everything he builds.
Way of the Wanderer gives him doubled critical strike chance and a shield that builds just from moving, so he is far tankier in a skirmish than his health bar implies.
Last Breath [R] holds every airborne enemy in the air and grants him armor penetration, so one knock-up from an ally turns into a full team fight reset.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

He is melee with a small health pool. Every trade he wants requires him to walk into your range first.
Last Breath needs an airborne target. No knock-up means no ultimate, which is why his teammates matter as much as he does.
Without minions he is slow. Sweeping Blade needs a target to dash through, and an empty lane strands him.
Wind Wall only blocks projectiles. Point-and-click abilities, auras, and targeted crowd control all go straight through it.
Wind Wall is a 25 second cooldown at rank 1. Bait it out and he has four full seconds of nothing to hide behind, twenty of them.

Countering Yasuo

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

Bring crowd control he cannot wall. Anything point-and-click or targeted ignores Wind Wall completely, which is the single most important property in this matchup.
Have an answer to Last Breath. Untargetability, invulnerability, or a cleanse all turn his best moment into a wasted ultimate.
Punish him in an empty lane. Shove the wave and he loses the dash chain that makes him dangerous.
Do not stack knock-ups near him. Your own team's crowd control is what turns a manageable Yasuo into an unmanageable one.

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

Playing a Bad Yasuo Matchup

Push the wave rather than freezing it. Yasuo's mobility comes entirely from having minions to dash through, and a shoved lane takes that away while forcing him to farm under tower.

Bait Wind Wall before you commit anything important. It is 25 seconds at rank 1, and almost every champion that struggles here loses because they threw their key ability into it.

Watch your own team's knock-ups. Telling your jungler to hold a knock-up until after Yasuo has used his ultimate is often worth more than anything you do in lane.

Buy armor earlier than you want to. His damage is physical and his critical strike chance is doubled, so flat armor scales unusually well against him.

Best Yasuo Counters

These three cover the three real answers to Yasuo: dodge the ultimate, land crowd control he cannot block, and poke him from a range he cannot reach.

Vladimir Dodges the Ultimate

Vladimir is Yasuo's worst matchup in the current patch, and Sanguine Pool is most of the reason. It makes him untargetable for 2 seconds, which is a direct answer to Last Breath and to the knock-up that sets it up. Yasuo's entire win condition in the fight simply does not connect.

The rest of the matchup follows from that. Transfusion is a point-and-click heal and damage that Wind Wall cannot block, so Vladimir can trade in lane without ever throwing a projectile into it. Crimson Pact turns his ability power into health as he builds, which means he gets steadily harder for a champion with a small health pool to burst down.

Malzahar Ignores Wind Wall

Malzahar is the answer for anyone who wants the matchup to be simple. Nether Grasp is a channelled suppression that is point-and-click, so Wind Wall does nothing about it. Yasuo cannot block it, cannot dash out of it, and cannot Wind Wall his way to safety once it lands.

Void Shift is the other half. When he has not recently taken damage he has massive damage reduction and full crowd control immunity, which means Yasuo's opening burst gets blunted and his knock-up does not even land properly. Malefic Visions also clears waves for free, denying Yasuo the minions he needs to dash through in the first place.

Lissandra Out-ranges and Locks Him

Lissandra has held up as a Yasuo counter for years and still posts one of the best win rates into him. Ice Shard pokes him from 725 units and slows, and Ring of Frost roots everything around her, which punishes the moment he closes the gap rather than trying to stop him from closing it.

Frozen Tomb is the real reason though. Cast on Yasuo it is a point-and-click stun that Wind Wall cannot touch, and cast on herself it makes her untargetable and invulnerable while healing, which is a complete answer to Last Breath. She gets to choose which half of the problem she solves depending on how the fight starts.

Itemizing Against Yasuo

Yasuo deals physical damage with doubled critical strike chance, which makes flat armor and critical strike mitigation unusually efficient against him:

Randuin's Omen is the priority here, since it reduces the damage of critical strikes directly and slows him when he attacks you. Frozen Heart cuts his attack speed and Plated Steelcaps reduces the basic attack damage that Steel Tempest counts as.