Ten skins that still hold up years after release, counted down by how much they actually changed the champion.
A good skin is a recolor. A great one makes you play somebody you'd otherwise never touch.
Best LoL Skins of All Time
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Ten skins that still hold up years after release, counted down by how much they actually changed the champion.
A good skin is a recolor. A great one makes you play somebody you'd otherwise never touch.
League has more skins than any one player will ever own, and most of them are fine. A handful are genuinely great, and what separates them isn't the price tag, it's whether the champion feels different to play afterward. Here are ten that cleared that bar and still clear it.
#10: Gun Goddess Miss Fortune
Gun Goddess opens the list because it's the most shameless skin Riot has ever shipped and it commits completely. Four separate forms, each with its own weapon and color scheme, all reachable mid-game. It's ridiculous in a way that a more tasteful skin wouldn't be, and that's the point: nobody buys it to blend in.
#9: High Noon Thresh
High Noon Thresh takes a lantern-swinging horror and turns him into something out of a western, and the reason it works is the sound. His hook rings out instead of rattling, which changes how the whole champion reads in a fight. It's a small thing that most skins get wrong and this one gets exactly right.
#8: Blood Moon Aatrox
The Blood Moon line is the most consistent theme in the game and Aatrox is where it lands hardest, because the mask does something his base design has always struggled with: it makes him frightening without making him loud. Red and black, no wasted detail, and a champion who already reads as a threat now reads as one from further away.
#7: Arcade Riven
Arcade Riven is the skin that convinced people a joke theme could be a good skin rather than a novelty. It's pixels and coin-op noises attached to the most mechanically demanding champion in the game, and the contrast is the whole gag. Somebody comboing you into the floor while their sword makes a sound effect from 1987 is a genuinely funny way to lose a lane.
#6: PROJECT: Yasuo
PROJECT is the theme most likely to be somebody's favorite, and Yasuo is the version people actually remember. The redesign is restrained where it needs to be and loud in exactly one place, the blade, which is the part of him you spend the whole game watching. It also aged better than most of the line, which is a real achievement for a look built on a very specific idea of what the future was going to be.
#5: Pulsefire Ezreal
Pulsefire earns its place on history rather than looks. It was the first skin that evolved during the match, and every skin on this list that changes as you level owes it something. Playing it now is a slightly odd experience, because the thing that made it extraordinary has become a feature other skins have too. That's what happens to genuinely new ideas, and it isn't a mark against it.
#4: Mecha Kingdoms Garen
Mecha Kingdoms Garen is the loudest entry here and it's fourth because the loudness is earned. A champion whose entire identity is spinning in a straight line gets turned into an actual mech, and the animation sells it: the transformation isn't decoration, it's the moment you realize the thing running at you is not going to be talked out of it. Nothing subtle about it, and nothing about Garen was ever subtle.
#3: Star Guardian Jinx
Star Guardian Jinx is the skin that built a theme into something people care about beyond the game. Taking the most unhinged champion on the roster and dressing her as a magical girl shouldn't work, and it works so well that the version of Jinx it created is the one a lot of players think of first. The pink and blue palette is now shorthand for an entire corner of League, which almost no other skin can claim.
#2: K/DA Akali
K/DA Akali is second because it stopped being a skin. The music, the animation, the group it belonged to: all of it turned a mid-tier assassin into the face of the biggest thing Riot has ever done outside the game itself. Whatever you think of that, the skin underneath holds up on its own, and it's still the version of Akali people picture when somebody says her name.
#1: Elementalist Lux
Elementalist Lux takes first because nothing since has been as ambitious. Ten forms, each with its own colors, sounds and spell effects, chosen during the game by the player rather than handed to them. It's not one skin, it's ten, and the choice of which one you become is a small decision you get to make every single match.
What keeps it at the top years later is that it never stopped being generous. Most premium skins give you one idea and then repeat it for the rest of the game. This one gives you a reason to look forward to the moment you pick, and it's the only skin in League where two people playing the same champion can look completely unrelated.
Conclusions
The thing every skin on this list has in common is that it does something the base champion can't. New sounds, a form you choose, an animation that changes what the champion means when it appears on your screen. The ones that don't do that are perfectly nice and nobody remembers them a year later.
Which is worth knowing before your next sale. The question isn't whether a skin looks good in the preview, it's whether you'll still notice it in your fortieth game on that champion. If the answer's no, it was a recolor with a name.
Every skin on this list has a page in our 3D skin viewer, where you can rotate the model, play its animations and look at any chromas and alternate forms before you spend anything on it.
The champions who stay worth owning skins for no matter how the game changes are in our champions that never go out of style list, and the ones with the deepest player bases are in our most eternally popular champions rankings.
Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.
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