Meme Champions in LoL: 10 Picks the Community Will Never Let Go

Some champions are balanced. These ones are jokes the community has been telling for over a decade, and it turns out that's a much harder thing to kill.

Riot can nerf a win rate. Riot cannot nerf a running gag. There's a small group of champions whose reputation stopped having anything to do with how good they are years ago, and every one of them is still doing fine.

Meme Champions in LoL

10 Picks the Community Will Never Let Go

Champion Roster

Some champions are balanced. These ones are jokes the community has been telling for over a decade, and it turns out that's a much harder thing to kill.

Riot can nerf a win rate. Riot cannot nerf a running gag. There's a small group of champions whose reputation stopped having anything to do with how good they are years ago, and every one of them is still doing fine.

This isn't a list of bad picks or troll picks. It's a list of champions who carry a joke around with them into every game, whether the person playing them signed up for it or not. If you want the wider vocabulary these jokes came out of, we wrote a time capsule of League memes a while back.

#10: Shaco

Nobody has ever said "our jungler is Shaco" in a neutral tone of voice.

The joke isn't that he's weak. It's that a Shaco game has exactly two outcomes and no middle, and everyone in the lobby knows which one they're getting by eight minutes. He either invades, ruins someone's entire early game and never stops, or he does something inexplicable in a bush at level two and is never heard from again. Four allies spend the whole game finding out which.

#9: Gragas

A fat man throws a barrel of beer at you and you die. That's the whole champion, and it has never needed a second layer.

What keeps him here rather than in the novelty bin is that he's genuinely, persistently good, which makes the joke better rather than worse. He's been a professional-level pick on and off for most of the game's life while looking like a mascot for a regional brewery.

#8: Amumu

The saddest champion in the game has spent fifteen years being posted whenever anyone anywhere feels bad about anything.

He's the League equivalent of a reaction image. His lore is genuinely miserable, his voice lines are genuinely miserable, and the community responded by making him the universal shorthand for being lonely on the internet. Meanwhile he presses one button and wins a teamfight.

#7: Heimerdinger

The turrets are the joke. The turrets have always been the joke.

Playing against him is a slow realization that you're not fighting a champion at all, you're fighting a small piece of infrastructure that regenerates. Nobody respects it, everybody loses to it at least once, and the person on the other end is having the time of their life doing almost nothing. He's also one of the few champions whose animated show appearance made him more beloved, not less.

#6: Tahm Kench

He eats people. He eats his own teammates. There was never any chance this stayed serious.

Half the jokes are about him saving someone from certain death, and the other half are about him carrying a screaming marksman directly into the enemy fountain, which is a thing that has happened to all of us. That's a genuinely unusual design: an ability whose comedy and whose power come from the exact same moment.

#5: Garen

Spin. That's it. That's the champion, and shouting DEMACIA while you do it is not optional.

Garen is the game's designated beginner, its designated simpleton and its designated punchline, and he has been all three since 2010 without ever once being bad enough to actually stop working. Every player who has ever complained that League is too complicated has, at some point, spun into somebody and won a lane with it.

#4: Urgot

For years the joke was that he was the ugliest thing Riot had ever shipped and nobody played him on purpose.

Then he got rebuilt into a legitimately terrifying top laner, and the joke didn't go anywhere. It just got a punchline. The community had spent so long telling everyone that Urgot was a mistake that when he turned into a real champion, the funniest thing available was to keep saying it. His crab skin is called Giant Enemy Crabgot. Riot is in on this.

#3: Yuumi

A cat attaches to a person and the person plays the game.

No champion in the game's history has generated more jokes per minute of playtime. She got called a keyboard rest, an AFK simulator and a second monitor, and Riot eventually reworked her partly because the running gag had become an actual balance argument that was hard to answer. She's still here, she's still a cat, and she's still what everyone reaches for when they want to accuse somebody of not playing the game.

#2: Singed

The Singed player is not losing. The Singed player has never been losing. You simply don't understand what's happening.

This is the rare case where the meme is a genuine playstyle rather than a joke about one. Proxy Singed really does walk past you, farm behind your turret, ignore every fight and win the game on a map nobody else is looking at, and the serene refusal to acknowledge his own scoreline is the entire bit. Chasing him is the single most reliably funny mistake in League, and everybody makes it, every time.

#1: Teemo

Satan. The devil. The little rat. Pick one, everyone knows who you mean.

Teemo is the only champion whose meme has outgrown the game entirely. People who have never installed League know that the mushroom mouse is the villain, because for fifteen years every League player they've ever met has told them so, unprompted. Riot has leaned into it with a skin line, the wiki jokes about it, and there is a permanent low-level agreement across the entire community that stepping on a shroom is a personal attack.

What makes him the top of this list rather than just a popular joke is that the reputation is completely disconnected from his strength. He drifts in and out of viability like anyone else and nobody notices, because his standing was never about that. He's a mascot for being annoying, and no patch has ever touched it.

The pattern underneath

Every champion on this list has the same thing in common, and it isn't power. It's that each one does something that reads instantly, out loud, to somebody who isn't playing them. A cat riding a marksman, a man ignoring the game to farm behind your turret, a fish eating your teammate. You can explain any of these in one sentence to a person who has never seen League, and they'll get it.

That's why the jokes survive reworks, nerfs and entire seasons. A meme isn't attached to a win rate, it's attached to a picture. If you want more of this sort of thing, the site's most-read list is still the collection of bot lane duos that shouldn't work, and there's a companion list of the champions that never go out of style for the ones who've stayed relevant instead of funny.

Who's missing? There's a strong argument for a couple of names left off here, and no version of this list has ever been agreed on by two people.

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