Top lane is one long duel with no help coming. That makes it the single easiest lane to ruin somebody's game in with a pick they weren't expecting.
Nobody gets counter-picked harder than a top laner, and nobody has less recourse when it happens. That's what these ten are for. None of them is what the enemy locked their bruiser to fight, and most of them turn a lane the enemy thought they'd won at champion select into twenty minutes of being unable to walk forward.
Troll Top Lane Picks
10 Off-Meta Top Laners That Actually Work
Top lane is one long duel with no help coming. That makes it the single easiest lane to ruin somebody's game in with a pick they weren't expecting.
Nobody gets counter-picked harder than a top laner, and nobody has less recourse when it happens. That's what these ten are for. None of them is what the enemy locked their bruiser to fight, and most of them turn a lane the enemy thought they'd won at champion select into twenty minutes of being unable to walk forward.
Counting down from the ones that are barely off-meta at all, to the pick that has been getting people flamed and winning lanes for over a decade.
#10: Quinn, the Marksman Who Belongs There
Quinn tops a lot of bruisers for the least complicated reason on this list: she outranges them and she's faster than they are. A melee champion who can't reach her can't farm, and a melee champion who walks up to try gets knocked backward for it.
Where she really earns the pick is after laning. Nobody roams faster. A Quinn who wins her lane doesn't sit in it (she shows up in three other places before the enemy top laner has finished recalling). What she doesn't have is a team fight, so she needs the game to be decided by pressure rather than by one fight at an objective.
#9: Karma, Who Just Won't Take Damage
Karma top is a poke lane that also refuses to lose the trade back. She pushes the wave from range and shields off the retaliation (the shield comes with movement speed, so the enemy can't punish her for stepping up). That combination is miserable for any melee champion whose plan was to walk up and hit her.
She's also useful in a way most off-meta top picks aren't. A Karma who wins lane is still a full enchanter later (the pick doesn't strand your team with a top laner who can only duel). The weakness is straightforward: she can't kill a tank, so a smart opponent builds health and outlasts the lane.
#8: Malzahar, and the Answer to Every Melee Carry
Malzahar top exists for one job, and it's the job top lane most needs doing. Against a melee carry whose whole plan is to get on top of somebody and stay there, he has a point-and-click suppression that ends that plan for the length of it (plus a shield that turns off the crowd control they'd use to start the fight).
He clears waves without ever being in range of being hit. The lane is safe even when it isn't won. He's a bad pick into a ranged laner and a bad pick into a poke champion, so he's a counter-pick. As one, he's brutal.
#7: Cassiopeia, Who Takes Away Their Movement
Grounding is the single most underrated effect in a solo lane. Almost every top laner's escape, engage and all-in is a dash, and Cassiopeia can put down a zone that turns all of them off. A bruiser who can't dash onto her is just a slower champion walking into damage.
She scales like a real mid laner too, so the pick doesn't stop paying off after laning. The cost: she's slow and immobile herself. A jungler who commits to the lane will kill her, and she has no answer at all to being collapsed on. Take her when the enemy top laner's kit is mostly movement.
#6: Zac, the Lane You Can't Actually Win
Zac heals off his own abilities, so a top lane against him rarely goes anywhere. You can win every trade and he'll be back to full before the wave resets (the lane turns into a farming exercise for both players). For a lot of teams, that's exactly what they wanted from top lane.
The second half is the reason to actually pick him. He's one of the best engage champions in the game (he can start a fight from most of a screen away), so a Zac who farmed quietly for fifteen minutes is still the person who decides the first big objective fight. He's weak into ranged poke and he's very obvious when he engages, but the floor is high.
#5: Anivia, Who Builds a Wall in the Only Lane With One Exit
Top lane is a corridor. It has a river entrance at one end, a tower at the other and a narrow tri-brush in between. That makes it the best place on the map to be a champion who can create a wall wherever she likes. A gank that has to path through a chokepoint isn't a gank if the chokepoint closes.
Her egg does the rest. A top laner who survives the all-in she was supposed to die to (and then kills the person who committed to it) wins more lanes than her win rate reputation suggests. She's slow to clear early and she's punished hard by early pressure, so the first four minutes carry most of the risk.
#4: Soraka, Who Simply Does Not Die
Soraka top is the pick that makes people close the client, and it works on pure attrition. She heals more than a top laner without ignite can take off her (and pokes from range while she does it). The lane settles into a stalemate the enemy laner can't break, however far ahead they get.
The strategic value is that a stalemate top lane is a win for whichever team wanted the game to go long, and she brings a map-wide heal to every fight afterwards. Ignite ruins the plan and a hard engage ruins it faster, so this is a counter-pick into sustain-dependent bruisers rather than something you first-pick.
#3: Ziggs, Who Takes the Tower Instead of the Kill
Ziggs top skips the duel entirely. He can't fight a bruiser and doesn't try. What he does is shove the wave from a range nobody can contest, and then knock the tower down himself the moment the enemy laner steps away or dies to a gank.
An early top tower is worth more than the kills a normal top lane would have produced (it opens the whole side of the map and frees your jungler to play elsewhere). He's helpless if anyone reaches him, so he needs the lane to stay a long-range argument. If it does, he converts a lane advantage into map pressure faster than any bruiser.
#2: Karthus, Who Is Still in the Fight He Wasn't At
Karthus top is a two-part pick. In lane he's a wave clear machine who's very hard to trade with. Dying to a gank costs him much less than it costs anyone else (he keeps casting on the way out).
The real reason to pick him is what happens at every objective on the other side of the map. A top laner who can contribute meaningful damage to a dragon fight he's nowhere near is solving the oldest problem in the role: top lane is far away from everything that matters. He needs the game to go long enough for that to add up, and a team that can reach him will make his life miserable, but few picks change the enemy's decision-making this much.
#1: Vayne, the Original Troll Pick That Was Always Real
Vayne top has been getting people flamed in champion select for well over a decade, and it keeps coming back because the fundamentals never changed. Top lane is full of tanks and bruisers who win by having a lot of health, and Vayne's damage scales with exactly that. The bigger the enemy top laner builds, the better her matchup gets.
Add the tumble, the invisibility on her ultimate and a knockback that stuns anyone she pins to the corridor's walls, and you get a champion who wins the one on one against most of the things top lane is supposed to contain. She's also the highest-risk pick here by a distance: she's fragile, she needs items, and a jungler who camps her early ends the game. That's the trade, and it's why it still reads as a troll pick to everyone who hasn't lost to one.
More troll picks by role
Conclusions
Every pick here beats the same thing: a melee champion who needs to be next to you. Half of them do it with range, a couple do it by refusing to die, and the rest do it by taking away the movement that gets a bruiser onto you in the first place. Top lane looks like the role with the least room for creativity and it's actually the one where a single unexpected pick decides the most, because there's nobody else in the lane to bail either player out.
The catch is the same one every time: almost none of these can fight a jungler. A normal top laner losing a two versus one loses a wave. Most of the champions on this list lose the game. Pick accordingly, ward the entrance, and know that the lane you win in the first three minutes is the one you get to keep.
We ran the same idea through the other two roles nobody expects it in: ten off-meta supports that actually work and ten off-meta junglers that actually work. For the bot lane version, there's our list of 42 troll bot lane duos and which ones actually win.
Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.
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