Counter Guide

How to Beat Sejuani

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Sejuani starts fights from a screen away, so the fight has already happened by the time it looks like one.

She's a jungler built around one very long-range decision, and everything else about her exists to make that decision safe to take. Beating her is mostly about her team, since a fight she starts perfectly and nobody follows up on is a fight where a tank walked into five people alone. Take away the follow up, or take away the range, and the champion stops being a threat and starts being a large amount of health standing in front of you.

Matchup Snapshot Sejuani, the Fury of the North

Where You Meet Her The jungle, arriving from somewhere unhelpful

Damage Type Magic, and there isn't much of it

Why She Is Frustrating You are held still for the entire fight

Mobility One dash, one very long ranged opener

Biggest Threat Glacial Prison [R]

Hardest Counter Lillia

What a Counter Needs

A way to negate one big projectile
Damage that scales off health rather than through armor
Early jungle pressure, before the items arrive

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Sejuani on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Sejuani

Lillia793 games55.1%
Zac436 games52.8%
Shyvana1,123 games52.7%
Rammus433 games51.7%
Amumu717 games51.5%

Picks Sejuani Beats

Rengar457 games43.1%
Graves1,465 games44.4%
Talon641 games44.6%
Qiyana570 games44.6%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the jungle against Sejuani. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 31,229 Sejuani games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Sejuani Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She engages from outside every warning sign. Glacial Prison [R] travels far enough that the first thing anyone knows about the fight is that it's already started and they're not moving.
Her crowd control is a whole-team problem. She applies it to everybody, repeatedly, and a team fight turns into a sequence of people being unable to act in turn.
She's very hard to kill for what she costs. The items she wants are cheap relative to what they do, and the armor she gets for free means an early duel with her is rarely worth starting.
She doesn't need to be ahead. A behind Sejuani who lands one good engage has contributed more than an ahead assassin who didn't, so winning early doesn't shut her down.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

Her opener is a projectile. It can be blocked, dodged or eaten by somebody standing in front, and every one of those outcomes costs her the entire fight she was planning.
She does no damage on her own. A fight she starts alone is a fight she loses alone. Isolating her from her team is close to the same thing as killing her.
The early jungle is slow and weak. She's not a good duelist before her items and her clear doesn't get her there quickly, so there's a long window for somebody willing to come and find her.
Percentage damage goes straight through the plan. The build is all health and resistances (exactly the shape of champion that certain carries treat as a free objective).
The stun tells you where she is. It's a long, visible projectile from a specific direction, and a team paying attention to that direction gets several steps of warning.

Countering Sejuani

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

Have somebody who can eat the engage. A spell shield or a front liner standing in the projectile's path turns the fight she designed into a fight she blundered into.
Invade the early jungle. She's beatable before her items and she's very hard to punish after them, so the window is narrow and it's worth taking deliberately.
Bring percentage health damage. Her whole build is the thing that gets exploited by it, and a carry with the right item treats her front line as the easiest target rather than the hardest.
Spread out before the fight starts. Everything she does is wide. Standing apart costs nothing in most fights and costs her most of her value in this one.

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

Playing a Bad Sejuani Matchup

Ward the flanks rather than the entrance. She's not coming from the direction the fight is facing, and the ward that catches her is the one nobody bothered to place off to the side.

Hold the defensive summoner spell for the engage rather than the follow up. The crowd control that arrives afterward is what actually kills people, and being out of position when it lands is the mistake.

Take the objective on your own terms or not at all. A contested pit is the exact geometry she was hoping for, and there's usually a version of the same objective available thirty seconds earlier for free.

Best Sejuani Counters

Beat her before the items, refuse the engage outright, or fight through the crowd control as though it isn't there.

Lillia Outpaces Her

Sejuani is slow to get a fight going. Permafrost [E] only stuns a target carrying four Frost stacks, and most of those come from her melee basic attacks and her melee allies'. Lillia spends every fight moving, with Blooming Blows [Q] stacking speed each time an ability lands, so four hits rarely add up on her.

Blooming Blows [Q] also deals true damage on its outer edge. The armor and magic resist Sejuani gets from Frost Armor (part of Fury of the North [Passive]) doesn't touch that part, and every camp Lillia takes early pushes Sejuani's items further back.

Sivir Refuses The Engage

A spell shield eats the opener, and the opener is the fight. There isn't a second version of it she can fall back on.

She also gives her whole team a reason to be somewhere else, and that's awkward for a champion whose plan requires everyone to still be standing in the place she aimed at.

Olaf Ignores It

Being unable to be stopped is the cleanest possible answer to a champion whose entire contribution is stopping people.

He also wins the fight that follows. She has a lot of health and very little damage, and he's built specifically to make the first of those stop being a defense.

Itemizing Against Sejuani

The first two are about her crowd control and the last two are about getting through what she built:

Mercury's Treads is the obvious purchase and, weirdly, still undervalued here, because her contribution is measured in seconds of other people not moving and this item removes some of them from every single instance. Quicksilver Sash is the more decisive version for whoever she's most likely to open on (taking the initial stun off turns a fight that started badly into a normal one). Blade of The Ruined King is the physical damage answer to a champion who buys health as a strategy (it does more on the carry than on anybody trying to fight her directly). Liandry's Torment does the same job on the magic side and it works particularly well here (she's usually the one standing in the middle of everything for the longest).