Counter Guide

How to Beat Maokai

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Maokai never kills anybody. He just keeps them exactly where his team wanted them.

He's a tree that heals, and both halves of that matter. The healing is why a lane against him rarely produces a kill and why the poke you've been landing all game hasn't added up to anything. The tree is why every fight afterward happens in the spot he picked. He doesn't need gold, a lead or a won lane, so the ordinary way of beating a top laner doesn't work on him. What he needs is for the game to be decided in a group, in a corridor, near a wall. Beating him is a matter of taking those things away and refusing to trade damage with something that gets it back for free.

Matchup Snapshot Maokai, the Twisted Treant

Where You Meet Him Top lane and the jungle

Damage Type Magic, spread over a long time

Why He Is Frustrating Nothing you did to him stayed done

Mobility One dash that has to hit somebody

Biggest Threat Twisted Advance [W]

Hardest Counter Mordekaiser

What a Counter Needs

Damage that scales off health rather than a flat number
Grievous wounds, on somebody who can apply it early
A reason to fight somewhere other than a choke point

Patches 26.16-26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Maokai on Patches 26.16-26.18

Best Picks Into Maokai

Mordekaiser620 games56.6%
Sett586 games55.8%
Nasus1,000 games55.4%
Gangplank455 games54.9%
Dr. Mundo465 games54.4%

Picks Maokai Beats

Jayce409 games41.8%
Malphite723 games48.4%
Jax601 games48.6%
Yone983 games49.3%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the top lane against Maokai. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patches 26.16-26.18, Silver and above, 19,531 Maokai games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Maokai Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

He gets his health back for nothing. Sap Magic [Passive] means the poke war has a floor and he's standing on it, so a lane built around chipping him down doesn't go anywhere.
He's useful with no items at all. Killing him early is much less rewarding than it is against almost any other top laner, because his job doesn't depend on his gold.
He owns the ground. Between the saplings and the wall of roots, he decides which parts of a fight are available, and that decision is usually worth more than damage would have been.
He doesn't have to win the lane. He can lose every trade and still arrive at the first grouped fight doing exactly what he was going to do anyway.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

He can't kill you. His damage is low and it arrives slowly. A player who accepts that they won't win the lane and simply doesn't die is playing the matchup correctly.
Grievous wounds turn him into a normal tank. The healing is load bearing. Cut it and the trades that were unprofitable become ordinary, immediately and for very little gold.
His engage is a dash that has to connect. It's his only way of covering distance, and it's a straight line at somebody. Dodged, parried or blocked, he is a slow champion standing where he started.
Percent health damage undoes the entire build. His answer to being attacked is to be large, and the counter to being large has been the same for years.
He's completely absent from a split push. He's slow, he doesn't duel well without help, and a game happening in two places at once is a game his tools don't reach.

Countering Maokai

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

Buy grievous wounds earlier than feels necessary. This is the single highest value decision in the matchup (and it costs less than a component of most builds). Everything else on this list works better afterward.
Bring percent health damage. A flat damage number against a champion whose whole plan is a large health bar is the least efficient way to spend a build slot.
Fight in the open. His roots and his sapling zoning are worth several times as much in a corridor. The same fight in a wide space is a fight where standing apart was actually possible.
Make the map bigger. He's one of the slowest answers on the board to a lane pushing somewhere else. A game with two things happening is a game he can only attend one of.

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

Playing a Bad Maokai Matchup

Give up the wave rather than the health. He's going to win the shoving contest, and there's no version of this lane where fighting for the last twenty percent of a wave was the right call. Farm what's safe and wait for the item that changes it.

Watch for the sapling before you walk into the brush. Almost all of the chip damage that decides this lane is damage nobody meant to take, and it's sitting in the two or three places anybody would walk.

Don't chase him. Chasing looks free (he's slow), and following him leads somewhere his team was already standing.

Best Maokai Counters

Cut the healing, take a percent of the health bar, or make the game happen somewhere he can't walk to in time.

Fiora Takes A Percentage

Her damage scales with how much health he decided to buy, so the build that answers everyone else is the build that feeds her.

She also has a clean answer to his one gap closer. His engage is a committed dash at a specific person, and a parry turns the moment he was counting on into the moment he loses the lane.

Vayne Ignores The Health Bar

The same principle from range. Three hits is three hits whether he built resistances or not, and there's nothing in his kit that changes that arithmetic.

She's also unusually good at the specific problem he creates, because the fight where somebody has been pushed into a wall is the fight she was hoping for.

Yorick Fights Somewhere Else

He takes towers faster than a champion with no damage can defend them, and the choice this forces is the one thing that genuinely hurts a champion built for grouped fights.

The duel isn't close either. Yorick brings more bodies than Maokai has crowd control for, and the healing doesn't keep up with damage that never stops arriving.

Itemizing Against Maokai

One of these decides the matchup and the other three make it comfortable:

Executioner's Calling is the item that matters and it should be bought before it looks urgent, because the healing is what makes his trades work and it costs very little to switch it off. Blade of The Ruined King is the percent health answer for anybody holding a weapon (it converts his own build decision into your damage). Kaenic Rookern is aimed at the fact that all of his output is magic (and it also covers the mage his team is protecting behind him). Mercury's Treads is the boot for whoever he's likely to root, since the root itself is short and the part that hurts is everything his team does during it.