Counter Guide

How to Beat Brand

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Brand can't stun you until he's already hit you once. Everything about beating him lives in that sentence.

His kit is a sequence rather than a set of options. The burn has to be on you before the stun exists, the stun is what buys him time for the rest, and the rest is what actually kills people. Break the order anywhere and the whole thing collapses into a slow immobile mage with no escape standing in the open. That's the good news. The bad news is that he only has to get it right once, and a fight where four people are standing together is a fight where getting it right once is enough.

Matchup Snapshot Brand, the Burning Vengeance

Where You Meet Him Support, and mid lane

Damage Type Magic, and it keeps ticking

Why He Is Frustrating One landed skillshot is the whole fight

Mobility None whatsoever

Biggest Threat Sear [Q] on an already burning target

Hardest Counter Xerath

What a Counter Needs

A way of not being hit by the first one
Enough reach to punish a champion who can't step back
Teammates who understand what standing together does here

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Brand on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Brand

Xerath1,814 games53.2%
Leona2,586 games52.7%
Soraka1,350 games52.1%
Rell752 games51.5%
Milio1,283 games51.3%

Picks Brand Beats

Mel723 games44.5%
Swain1,625 games44.9%
Malphite642 games45.2%
Camille665 games45.3%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Brand. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 59,705 Brand games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Brand Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

He turns one mistake into all of them. Sear [Q] on a target who's already burning is a stun, and a stunned target is a target every other part of his kit lands on for free.
Your positioning decides his value more than his own does. Clumped champions are worth far more to him than good aim is, and somehow most teams clump without noticing.
The damage doesn't stop when he does. Walking out of range mid-fight doesn't end what's already on you (the burn keeps ticking), so the exchange keeps costing after you've decided to leave it.
He's dangerous from the moment the game starts. No ramp, no items required, no scaling excuse. He's a threat at level three and stays one.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

The sequence has an order and you can break it anywhere. No burn means no stun, and no stun means a mage aiming skillshots at a target who's allowed to keep moving.
He can't leave. There's no dash, no blink and no shield. Anybody who reaches him is having a very short conversation with him.
Spreading out costs him most of his value. The bounce needs somebody nearby to bounce to, and a team standing three seconds apart has deleted a large part of his kit for free.
He's expensive to miss with. An early Brand who throws the opener and doesn't connect has spent real mana on nothing and can't threaten anything until it comes back.
He's a soft target for absolutely everyone. Immobile, fragile, and standing in a lane. Any jungler on the map would like to hear where he is.

Countering Brand

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

Deny the first hit. It comes before the stun (the burn has to land first). Everything downstream of that is somebody else's problem.
Get on top of him. He has no answer at all to being reached.
Stand apart. Two extra steps between you and your teammate is the cheapest counterplay in this entire matchup and it costs nothing to do all game.
Punish the miss. His opener has a real mana cost and a real cooldown, and the window afterwards is one where he genuinely can't stop you doing anything.

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

Playing a Bad Brand Matchup

Move before he casts rather than after. Reacting to the projectile is a coin flip. Being somewhere unpredictable when he decides to throw it isn't.

Don't stand on your minion wave when he's looking for an angle. A lot of the damage in this lane is collected by people who were standing exactly where a large ability was always going to land.

And check where your support is before every trade. If the two of you are close together, the trade you're about to take isn't the one you think you're taking.

Best Brand Counters

Reach him, blank the opener, or refuse to be where the fire is.

Leona Reaches Him First

Zenith Blade [E] reaches 900 units, the same as Pillar of Flame [W], and when it connects Leona is on top of Brand before he's lined anything up. Shield of Daybreak [Q] stuns him on arrival, and Solar Flare [R] starts the same fight from 1200.

Eclipse [W] is why she can walk in. For three seconds she takes a flat chunk less from every damage instance, and his burn arrives as a steady stream of small ticks.

Yasuo The Wall Ends The Sequence

Every dangerous thing Brand owns is a projectile, and a wind wall removes a projectile outright. The stun never happens because the thing that enables the stun never arrives.

Mid lane is where this comes up, and it's about as lopsided as matchups get once the wall is up.

Sivir Eats The Opener

A spell shield is worth more against a champion who needs a specific ability to land first than against almost anybody else, because on top of saving health it stops the next four seconds from existing.

Itemizing Against Brand

His damage is all magic and it lands in pieces, so magic resist works better here than it does against most mages, and the pieces that matter are the ones bought early:

Mercury's Treads earns its place on the tenacity rather than the resist (the stun is what converts a bad moment into a death, and shortening it is worth more than reducing the burn). Banshee's Veil is the one he genuinely hates, since a spell shield cancels the sequence his opener was there to start. Maw of Malmortius does a similar job for a champion who wants attack damage anyway, and its shield tends to appear at exactly the point in the combo where people die. Force of Nature suits anyone who has to stand in the fire for a living (it answers repeated small hits and gives back the movement speed that gets you out of the next one).