Counter Guide

How to Beat Kassadin

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Kassadin spends the first stretch of the game losing, on purpose, and there's a point after which he stops losing and nothing you do changes it.

He's a bet placed at the start of the game. Whoever picked him has agreed to be worse than you for a long time in exchange for being much better than you later, and the matchup comes down to whether you collected on that. The late game has little to do with skill: once he's blinking every few seconds, the counterplay narrows to holding a specific button at a specific moment, and there isn't much else. So the work is all front loaded. The lane against him is about making sure the game doesn't last long enough for the bet to pay.

Matchup Snapshot Kassadin, the Void Walker

Where You Meet Him Mid lane

Damage Type Magic, and it ignores some of your resistances

Why He Is Frustrating He is simply somewhere else

Mobility A blink that gets cheaper the more he uses it

Biggest Threat Riftwalk [R]

Hardest Counter Nasus

What a Counter Needs

Enough early pressure to make the lane cost him something
A team that closes the game rather than scaling with him
A spell shield, or crowd control fast enough to land first

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Kassadin on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Kassadin

Nasus429 games56.4%
Yone1,805 games55.6%
Zed883 games54.4%
Vladimir503 games54.3%
Tristana411 games53.0%

Picks Kassadin Beats

Mel421 games44.9%
Orianna564 games45.2%
Diana496 games45.2%
Locke1,100 games46.6%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the mid lane against Kassadin. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 28,999 Kassadin games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Kassadin Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

He's close to untouchable once his ultimate is running. Riftwalk [R] is short, repeatable and cheap enough to spam, and there's no chasing a champion who leaves every couple of seconds.
He's built to survive magic. The shield on Null Sphere [Q] and his innate resistance make the standard mid lane matchup much harder than it looks on paper.
He picks his fights and only his fights. The blink means he arrives when the fight is already going badly for somebody, takes them, and is gone before the reply.
The late game isn't a skill matchup. Past a certain point the counterplay narrows to one summoner spell and one item active, and if either of those is down the fight is decided.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

He's genuinely helpless early. No range, no wave clear worth the name and no way to fight back. The stretch before his ultimate is long and he has to survive all of it.
He can't farm under pressure. Every lane where he has to walk up to a wave in front of somebody who can punish him is a lane where he falls behind the schedule he needs.
The blink costs mana that escalates. The more he uses it the more it costs (so a fight that goes long is one where the escape stops being free).
A spell shield takes his opener. Null Sphere [Q] is how he starts, and removing it leaves him standing next to somebody rather than on top of them.
He needs the game to last. There's no version of him that wins a short game, so the map matters more than the lane.

Countering Kassadin

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

Punish him from level one. The window is the first several minutes, and a lane he had to play carefully is a lane that costs him the timing.
Push the wave rather than trying to kill him. Denying the farm is worth more than a kill against a champion whose plan is entirely about arriving on schedule.
End the game rather than winning fights. Every objective taken early is time removed from the part of the game he was counting on. A won fight that goes nowhere is a fight he didn't lose anything to.
Take the Null Sphere [Q] and save the escape for the blink. Getting hit by it is survivable. Being where he wants you two seconds later isn't, and there's only one moment in that sequence where a button helps.

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

Playing a Bad Kassadin Matchup

Play for the wave. He's hard to kill even while he's weak (the fifty pieces of gold he didn't get are what win the lane).

Ping your jungler earlier than usual. A mid laner who can't fight back is the cheapest gank on the map (and the value of it decays quickly as the game goes on).

When the game reaches the point where the lane no longer matters, stop trying to solo him. Group, take the objective and make the game end. Playing his game late is a choice you're allowed to refuse.

Best Kassadin Counters

Take the early lane, out range him while he's still weak, or make the game short enough that the bet doesn't pay.

Zed Kills The Early Window

Void Stone [Passive] cuts the magic damage Kassadin takes and Null Sphere [Q] shields against magic too. Zed barely deals any. His damage is almost all physical, so both of Kassadin's defensive tools sit idle for the lane.

Razor Shuriken [Q] reaches 925 units and his shadows throw it again from wherever they're standing, so Kassadin gets poked from angles his melee range can't answer until Riftwalk [R] shows up. Death Mark [R] finishes the job, and Zed is untargetable while it goes in (there's no Null Sphere [Q] to throw back).

Jayce Out Ranges Him Entirely

He does his damage from a place Kassadin can't reach before his ultimate exists, which turns the lane into a farming problem with no solution.

He's also the correct answer to the schedule. A lane where the wave is permanently sitting on the enemy tower is a lane where the champion who needed to farm quietly didn't get to.

Anivia Owns The Wave And The Ground

She clears from a range he has no answer to and she doesn't have to accept a single trade to do it.

The wall is the other half, and it matters late rather than early. A blink that lands next to somebody is only useful if his team can follow, and dropping a wall behind him turns the arrival into a mistake.

Itemizing Against Kassadin

This is a matchup decided by one burst arriving out of nowhere, so the buys are aimed at surviving it rather than at trading with him:

Verdant Barrier is the early answer (a spell shield takes Null Sphere [Q], and that's the piece that makes the rest of the sequence work). Kaenic Rookern is the item for whoever he keeps arriving on, and the magic resistance matters more than usual here since a fair amount of his damage is priced to go through a smaller amount of it. Mercury's Treads adds magic resistance for anybody who didn't buy the shield (most of the team). Zhonya's Hourglass is the last word: he has to be next to somebody to do anything, and two seconds of that being pointless is usually enough for everybody else to arrive.