Counter Guide

How to Beat Amumu

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Amumu presses one button and the fight is over. The trick is that he has to be standing in the middle of you to press it.

He's a jungler with one enormous moment and very little else, so he's unusually easy to plan against and unusually punishing when nobody bothers. He isn't a duelist or a farmer, and he doesn't do much on his own. What he does is arrive in the middle of a group and take everyone's next few seconds away, and then his team does the actual killing. Beating him means making that arrival either impossible or worthless, and both of those are decisions made before the fight starts.

Matchup Snapshot Amumu, the Sad Mummy

Where You Meet Him The jungle

Damage Type Magic, and he makes everyone else's hurt more

Why He Is Frustrating Nobody in your team gets to act

Mobility One hook, and then walking

Biggest Threat Curse of the Sad Mummy [R]

Hardest Counter Lillia

What a Counter Needs

Something that blocks or eats one spell
Early jungle pressure, because he's weak before six
The discipline not to stand in a group

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Amumu on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Amumu

Lillia1,081 games52.2%
Shaco1,448 games51.9%
Cho'Gath1,368 games51.9%
Volibear628 games51.8%
Shyvana2,106 games51.1%

Picks Amumu Beats

Rengar612 games44.9%
Qiyana733 games45.0%
Trundle597 games45.2%
Kha'Zix830 games45.9%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the jungle against Amumu. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 48,995 Amumu games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Amumu Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

The ultimate ends fights. Curse of the Sad Mummy [R] landing on three or more people is usually the whole fight, and there's no amount of good play afterward that recovers it.
He makes his team's damage worse to be hit by. The curse he applies means his mages are doing more than their items say they should (easy to forget when working out whether a fight is winnable).
He's tanky for very little gold. He doesn't need a lead to do his job, so shutting him down early is much less useful than it is against most junglers.
He clears quickly and shows up often. The pressure is constant rather than clever, and a lane that keeps getting visited by somebody who doesn't need to be ahead is a hard lane to play.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

The opener is a skillshot. It's his only way of covering distance (and it can be dodged, blocked or eaten by a minion), and without it the arrival takes long enough to react to.
He's very weak in the early jungle. He loses almost every duel before six (his mana runs out quickly), so there's a long window for a jungler willing to come and take his camps.
His ultimate needs people standing together. It hits a radius around him. A team spread out even slightly turns a fight-ending ability into a stun on one person.
A spell shield is a complete answer. One item or one champion can take the opener or the ultimate off entirely, and there's nothing else in his kit that fills the gap.
He does very little alone. A fight he starts without follow up is a tank standing in five people. Isolating him from his team is close to the same thing as removing him.

Countering Amumu

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Amumu comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Spread out before the fight starts. His whole value is measured in how many people were within one radius of each other, and that number is decided by where everyone was walking a few seconds earlier.
Have a spell shield somewhere in the team. It doesn't have to be on the carry. Any spell shield that eats his opener means the arrival never happens.
Invade him early. He's one of the worst duelists in the jungle before six and the punishment for taking his camps is close to nothing.
Save a defensive summoner for the ultimate. Getting hooked on its own is survivable. Being stunned in the middle of his team while the mages open up is not.

If you're already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Amumu Matchup

Ward the approach rather than the pit. He isn't sneaking anywhere (he's walking), and the ward that helps is the one that catches him crossing rather than the one that watches the objective.

Play the fight in an open space rather than a corridor. Almost every disaster involving him happens in a choke point where standing apart wasn't an option in the first place.

Take the early objectives while he's still weak. The dragons taken before he has items are effectively free, and the game where both teams wait is the game he's better at.

Best Amumu Counters

Outrun the opener, beat him before six, or fight from somewhere his radius never reaches.

Lillia Outruns The Bandage

Every ability Lillia lands stacks more movement speed onto her (that's Blooming Blows [Q]'s passive), and a fast target moving sideways is the worst thing to aim a Bandage Toss [Q] at. She heals off her own damage too, so the long skirmish he wants is one she's happy to take.

Lilting Lullaby [R] puts everyone she's tagged to sleep from anywhere on the map. She never has to walk into his radius to answer his ultimate with hers.

Shaco Beats Him Early

Shaco wants to be in the enemy jungle before the first clear is done, and Amumu does very little before six. A Jack in the Box [W] left on the camp he's walking to fears and roots him when he arrives.

He's also hard to start a fight on. Deceive [Q] turns him invisible and blinks him away, and the stun that opens every Amumu gank is a skillshot, which is tough to aim at somebody you can't see.

Ziggs Is Never In Range

He does his whole damage output from outside the radius, so the ability that decides most fights against him simply doesn't include him.

And on the rare occasion it does, he has a button that moves him out of it (more than most of the people standing next to him can say).

Itemizing Against Amumu

Two of these are aimed at the crowd control and two at the fact that he's mostly a health bar:

Mercury's Treads is the correct boot for almost everyone on a team facing him, because his contribution is measured in seconds of other people being unable to act and this shortens every one of them. Quicksilver Sash is the more decisive answer for whoever his team is aiming at (cleansing the stun turns a lost fight into an ordinary one). Kaenic Rookern is here for the damage rather than the crowd control, and it's worth more than it looks because he amplifies the magic damage arriving from everybody else on his side. Blade of The Ruined King belongs on the carry and it's the reason he stops being difficult to remove once the fight has settled.