Strongest Champions in LoL Lore: 10 Picks Who Could End Runeterra

Ten champions ranked by what they can actually do in the story, counted down to the one who builds stars for fun.

Nothing here has anything to do with the tier list.

Strongest Champions in LoL Lore

10 Picks Who Could End Runeterra

Runeterra Lore

Ten champions ranked by what they can actually do in the story, counted down to the one who builds stars for fun.

Nothing here has anything to do with the tier list.

League's balance team has to pretend everybody is roughly a person. The writers have never once agreed to that, so the roster contains gods, ascended kings, cosmic tourists and at least one thing that ends universes for a living. Counting down by how much of the world each one could take apart if the story let them.

#10: Ryze

Ryze is here because of what he's carrying rather than what he is. He's a mortal mage who spends every century chasing down the World Runes (the pieces of magic that made the world and can just as easily unmake it).

He can't safely use most of them, and that's the tragedy of the character: the strongest thing in Runeterra is in his backpack, and picking it up would cost him the continent he's trying to save.

#9: Nasus

Nasus is one of the Ascended (in Shurima, that's an ordinary person who walked into the sun ritual and came out a demigod who doesn't age and doesn't lose). He's spent the several thousand years since being the reasonable one.

Restraint is his entire character. He could level cities. He chooses libraries instead, which is more admirable and considerably less useful in a ranking like this.

#8: Xerath

Xerath took the same ritual without permission and came out as pure magic in a cracked stone shell. No body, no aging, and no particular attachment to anybody who's still alive.

He's above Nasus for one reason: he wants to use it. Every plan he's ever had ends with an empire on fire, and the only thing that's ever slowed him down is being buried by people who knew exactly how bad letting him out would be.

#7: Aatrox

Aatrox is a darkin (that's what happened when the Ascended went to war with each other and lost whatever was left of themselves). Sealing him took a coordinated effort and it still only worked for a few centuries at a time.

His goal is what sets him apart. He wants to end Runeterra, on the grounds that a world that made him shouldn't be allowed to continue. Ambition counts for a lot on a list like this.

#6: Kayle

Kayle is half Aspect, so half of her is one of the celestial powers that occasionally borrows a mortal and rewrites what they are. She passed judgment on the town that turned on her family and burned it to the ground.

The celestial half of the roster starts around here, and Kayle's problem has never been power. It's that she keeps using it on people rather than on anything her own size.

#5: Bel'Veth

Bel'Veth is the Void deciding it would like to be in charge of things, and the Void's normal method is to remove a place from existence and leave nothing behind that remembers it. She's the first version of it with opinions and a plan.

She's new to the job, and the world is still in one piece. Everything below her wants to rule Runeterra or destroy it. She wants to replace it with a version she designed, which is a much stranger and much worse outcome.

#4: Kindred

Kindred isn't powerful in the way the rest of this list is powerful. Kindred is death, as a working part of the world, and everything that lives eventually gets a visit whether it wants one or not.

So the fourth spot is somehow generous and an insult at once. You can't fight it, you can't outrun it, and the only champions who've genuinely escaped it are the ones who cheated so thoroughly that they stopped being alive in the first place.

#3: Bard

Bard is the one nobody takes seriously until they read about him, and then he's terrifying. He's a cosmic caretaker who wanders the universe collecting the small objects that would otherwise unravel it, and he treats the whole thing as light work.

The scary part is the indifference. Empires, wars and champions are beneath his notice entirely. He'll stop in the middle of the end of the world to pick up something shiny, and he's still doing more to keep reality together than anybody else on this page.

#2: Zoe

Zoe is the Aspect of Twilight, and the job is bigger than it sounds. She's the messenger who announces cosmic change, she moves through space as easily as walking, and she does all of it with the attention span of a bored child.

That's the horror of her. Everybody else here has a plan you could interfere with. She's a being of that scale with no plan at all, so nothing she does can be predicted, negotiated with or prepared for. Runeterra survives her by not being interesting enough that day.

#1: Aurelion Sol

Aurelion Sol makes stars. It's the actual thing he was doing before he got involved with anybody in this story. Every other champion here operates on a world. He operates on the sky above it.

The reason he's stuck on a leash is the funniest and most on-brand detail in League's lore: he got flattered into a bargain by the Targonians, and the crown he wears keeps him working for people he considers insects. He's first anyway, because the leash is the only thing holding.

Take it off and the ranking stops being interesting. There's no fight, no war and no story, just a very annoyed dragon and a great deal of empty space where Runeterra used to be.

Conclusions

The gap between how a champion plays and what they are in the story is the strangest thing about League, and this list is where it's widest. Half of these are ordinary picks in a normal game. On paper they're gods, and the game politely never mentions it.

Rankings like this are also unfixable arguments, which is why they're fun. The order above weighs what a champion could do if nothing stopped them, and reasonable people put Bard first, or Kindred, or refuse to rank anything that isn't standing on Runeterra at all.

For the ones whose power came from dying rather than from the heavens, there's our undead champions list, and the ones built purely to unsettle you are in our creepiest champions rankings.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.