Counter Guide

How to Beat Annie

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Annie has a stun that can't be dodged, and she gets to decide exactly when you find out about it.

She's the champion everyone learns on and half of those people never stop being scared of, because the thing she does well doesn't get worse as the players get better. A stun you can't sidestep is a stun you can't sidestep at any rank. What changes is the counting. A good opponent knows how many spells she's cast and plays the wave differently on the fourth one, and a bad one still gets hit by the same combo at nine minutes that got them at four.

Matchup Snapshot Annie, the Dark Child

Where You Meet Her Mid lane, and bot lane more often than you'd think

Damage Type Magic, arriving all at once

Why She Is Frustrating There is no dodging it

Mobility None at all

Biggest Threat Pyromania [Passive]

Hardest Counter Xerath

What a Counter Needs

Range, because she has very little of it
Magic resist bought before it feels necessary
A way to be somewhere else during the four seconds after she reaches you

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Annie on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Annie

Xerath616 games54.5%
Fizz761 games54.1%
Veigar839 games52.3%
Malzahar788 games52.2%
Syndra908 games52.0%

Picks Annie Beats

Ryze458 games43.9%
Mel497 games43.9%
Yasuo1,815 games46.3%
Katarina835 games46.6%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the mid lane against Annie. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 24,573 Annie games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Annie Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

The stun is point and click. Pyromania [Passive] doesn't ask her to aim. Skill expression on the other side is limited to not being in range (a harder ask than it sounds in a lane you also have to farm).
Level 6 is a real threat. The whole combo lands inside a second and it's front loaded, so there's no window between the start of it and the part where somebody has died.
Her ultimate keeps fighting after she stops. A summon is a second champion in the fight who chases, tanks a tower and does damage while she's busy being somewhere safer.
She's fine in two lanes. Being able to show up as a support without changing anything about how she plays makes her much harder to draft against than her kit suggests.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

Her range is short. Shorter than almost every mage she'll be standing across from. Every threat she has requires her to walk into a place she can be punished for standing in.
She can't move. No dash, no blink, no way to reposition. A jungler arriving from the side is very close to a guaranteed kill, and she knows it (which limits how far up she'll stand).
The stun is visible before it happens. Anyone paying attention can see it's ready. Playing carefully for the ten seconds that state lasts costs almost nothing and takes the whole champion off the table.
Mana runs out. She's expensive early and she has no answer to being pushed in other than spending more of it (that's the loop that ends with her walking home).
The burst is a one-shot deal. If it doesn't kill, she's a short-ranged mage standing in the middle of a lane with nothing to press, and that's a long few seconds.

Countering Annie

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

Count the spells. The single highest value habit in the matchup. Four casts and you back off. It works at every level of play.
Out range her rather than out trading her. Any mage who can hit her from outside her own range turns the lane into a farm she can't collect safely.
Buy magic resist earlier than the build order says. Her burst is tuned against somebody who hasn't. One cheap item is often the difference between dying and walking away with a third of a health bar.
Have a way to not be there. Untargetability, a blink, a spell shield, anything. She's spent everything at that point and the fight inverts immediately.

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

Playing a Bad Annie Matchup

Play from behind the wave rather than beside it. Her range is short enough that a lane held one step further back is a lane she can't threaten without walking past the minions (a decision your jungler can punish).

Reset your own positioning every time her stun comes up rather than every time she casts. The dangerous state lasts as long as she wants it to, and she'll hold it through a whole wave to get one good angle.

Treat her summon as a champion. Fights get lost to people ignoring it, and it's targetable, killable and worth the time in a long fight.

Best Annie Counters

Beat her from further away, leave before the combo resolves, or simply refuse to be a target during it.

Xerath Out Ranges Her

The gap between his range and hers is the entire lane. She can be hit at a distance where nothing she owns is even a threat.

That also solves the part after lane. She wants to walk into a team fight and press a button on somebody; he never has to be inside the range where that's possible.

Kassadin Leaves Mid Combo

He can be gone in the middle of the thing that was supposed to kill him, so her strongest sequence becomes a wasted set of cooldowns.

The rest of the game is the other half of it. She's built to be scary now, and he's built to make now stop mattering.

Vladimir Isn't There For It

Untargetable at exactly the moment her damage lands is the cleanest possible answer to a champion whose damage all lands at one moment.

He also heals through the chip she does in between, so the slow version of the lane doesn't work on him either.

Itemizing Against Annie

Two of these stop the combo outright and two are the fallback for when it lands anyway:

Verdant Barrier is the early purchase that changes the matchup, because a shield sitting on you means her opening spell hits nothing and the stun she was counting on never gets to lead into anything. Banshee's Veil does that job for the rest of the game and it's worth building on whoever she's most likely to be aiming at rather than on whoever is laning against her. Mercury's Treads is the boot to take here (the stun is the part of her kit that decides fights, and the damage is only what happens afterward). Zhonya's Hourglass is the insurance policy, and it's specifically good against her because her whole plan resolves inside about a second and a half.