Undead Champions in LoL: 10 Picks Who Never Stayed Dead

Ten champions who died and kept playing anyway, counted down by how little dying slowed them down.

Runeterra has a body disposal problem, and most of it walks around Summoner's Rift.

Undead Champions in LoL

10 Picks Who Never Stayed Dead

Shadow Isles

Ten champions who died and kept playing anyway, counted down by how little dying slowed them down.

Runeterra has a body disposal problem, and most of it walks around Summoner's Rift.

Plenty of games have an undead faction. League has a whole region of them, plus a few strays who died somewhere else and came back on their own schedule. Counting down by how completely death failed to stop them.

#10: Yorick

Yorick opens the list on a technicality, because he's the one who's still alive. He's the last living man on an island of the dead, which is a worse job than being dead on it, and he spends every game reminding you of that.

He fights by making the graves work for him, so nothing that dies near him stays out of the fight for long. Being the only person with a pulse hasn't made him any less of a problem.

#9: Gwen

Gwen is the only genuinely cheerful thing the Shadow Isles has ever produced, which is exactly what makes her unsettling. She's a doll, she was never alive in the first place, and the mist that raises corpses raised her instead.

She's ninth because she doesn't cheat death so much as skip the question entirely. The rest of this list came back. She simply started, and the same magic did it.

#8: Senna

Senna's version is the grimmest one here and it's easy to miss, because she's on the good side of most games and she doesn't look the part. She was taken, kept inside a lantern, and got out again, which is a longer stay in the afterlife than anybody else on this list managed.

She came back changed rather than restored, and she still carries the thing that took her. Everybody else here fights for the mist. She's the one who walked out of it.

#7: Pyke

Pyke drowned in a whale's gut and came back for the specific purpose of settling a list of names. That's a much smaller ambition than raising an army, and it's why he's the most human thing on this page despite obviously not being one any more.

It also shows up in how he plays. Nothing he does is about holding ground or winning a war. It's about getting to one person, finishing it, and moving to the next name.

#6: Kalista

Kalista died betrayed and came back as the thing you swear an oath to when you want somebody else dead badly enough. She doesn't get to refuse the contract and she doesn't get to stop, which is a fairly bleak arrangement for everybody involved.

What makes her fit here perfectly is that revenge is the only thing keeping her upright. Take that away and there's no champion left, which is not something you can say about anybody with a heartbeat.

#5: Hecarim

Hecarim is what happens when a cavalry commander and his horse and his entire unit die at once and none of them notice. He's still charging, centuries later, at whatever's in front of him.

He's this high because he's the purest version of the idea on the list. There's no plan, no revenge and no bargain. There's a mounted charge that started a very long time ago and has never been asked to stop.

#4: Sion

Sion is the one where somebody made a decision. He died as a Noxian war hound, and Noxus decided a corpse that big was too useful to bury, so they stitched him back together and pointed him at the next war.

The game commits to the joke completely. Glory in Death [Passive] means killing him is a suggestion he considers for a few seconds while continuing to swing, which is the single most on-theme mechanic in League.

#3: Karthus

Karthus is the only champion here who chose this. He looked at dying, decided it was the interesting part, and arranged to become permanent so he could keep studying it. Everybody else on the list was killed. He volunteered.

That attitude defines him, right down to the fact that his best moment happens after his own death. He's the one member of this group who'd tell you the corpse is an upgrade and mean it.

#2: Mordekaiser

Mordekaiser has been killed several times by people who were very thorough about it, and it has never once taken. He built a realm out of the dead, got locked out of the world, and came back anyway, which is a pattern at this point rather than an accident.

He also does the most literal version of it in a game. Beating him doesn't end the encounter, it starts a private one somewhere else, and there's nothing more undead than a champion who follows you past the point where the fight was supposed to be over.

#1: Viego

Viego is first because he isn't just undead, he's the reason the rest of them are. A grieving king tried to bring one person back, and the spell went through the whole kingdom instead. Everything the Shadow Isles is now happened because he couldn't accept one death.

His kit is the thesis. Sovereign's Domination [R] lets him step into the body of whoever just died and keep fighting as them, which means killing anything near him hands him a new one. You don't beat Viego by winning the fight. You beat him by winning it without anybody dying, and that isn't a fight.

He's also the only one still chasing the original goal. Every other champion here has settled into being dead. He's a thousand years into a plan to undo it, and the entire Shadow Isles is the collateral damage from attempt number one.

Conclusions

What's striking about the Shadow Isles is how many different ways League found to say the same thing. One of them chose it, one was drafted into it, one never stopped charging, one is still trying to reverse it, and one was never alive to begin with. That's a lot of range out of a single idea.

It's also the reason this group keeps getting skins every October. A faction built entirely out of unfinished business is the most reliable source of horror the game has, and Riot has been drawing from it for over a decade.

If you want the ones who are frightening without being dead, they're in our creepiest champions list, and every other ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.