Counter Guide

How to Beat Sona

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Sona wins bot lane by never doing anything you can point at, and she loses it to a single fight she wasn't allowed to walk away from.

She's a support with no crowd control for the first six levels and no way of leaving a fight at any point in the game. What she has instead is a slow accumulation: a little healing, a little damage, a little speed for everybody near her, applied every few seconds forever. Left alone, that becomes a lane where you're somehow always slightly behind and nothing memorable has happened. Interrupted even once, it becomes a lane she can't get back. Everything about beating her follows from noticing which of those two games is being played, and doing it in the first ten minutes rather than the twentieth.

Matchup Snapshot Sona, Maven of the Strings

Where You Meet Her Bot lane

Damage Type Magic, in very small pieces

Why She Is Frustrating You are losing and nothing happened

Mobility None, and no defensive spell either

Biggest Threat Crescendo [R]

Hardest Counter Braum

What a Counter Needs

An all in that works before level six
Grievous wounds, applied by somebody who is in the fight
Range, or a reason she cannot stand where she wants to

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Sona on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Sona

Braum581 games55.6%
Blitzcrank1,182 games52.3%
Seraphine2,452 games51.8%

Picks Sona Beats

Bard596 games45.1%
Alistar569 games45.9%
Vel'Koz622 games46.0%
Pyke955 games46.2%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Sona. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 34,045 Sona games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Sona Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

The healing never stops. It's small and it's constant, so a poke lane against her is a lane where the damage evaporates between trades.
Her team moves faster than yours. The speed aura sounds minor, and yet it decides an enormous number of fights, because it determines who arrives and who is still walking.
Power Chord [Passive] punishes a lazy step. Every few casts she has a free hit with a real effect attached, and a player who doesn't track it takes a trade they thought was safe.
Her ultimate ends a fight instantly. It's one of the widest pieces of crowd control in the game and it doesn't need to be aimed carefully, so any grouped fight against her is a gamble.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She has nothing before six. No stun, no root, no escape. The lane in that window is a lane where she can't punish anything and can't protect anybody, and that window is long.
She dies to being touched. There's no dash and no shield for herself. Any engage that reaches her is an engage that finishes, and she's standing at the front doing her damage.
Her mana runs out. The constant trickle is expensive, and a lane that forces her to keep healing is a lane where she's out of everything before the fight that mattered.
Grievous wounds is very effective against a trickle. Halving a large heal is annoying. Halving a small heal applied constantly removes most of what she contributes.
She can't start anything. Until her ultimate exists she has no way to force a fight, so whoever else is standing there sets the pace of the lane.

Countering Sona

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

Fight her before level six. This decides the lane. She has no answer in that window and no way to make up the gold afterward, and every plan that waits is a plan that let her scale.
Buy grievous wounds early and cheaply. The healing is a trickle, and a trickle is exactly the shape of healing that a cheap component turns into nothing.
Watch her passive rather than her health bar. The free hit is on a counter she's managing (and you can manage it too). The trades that go wrong against her are almost always the ones that walked into it.
Make her stand somewhere uncomfortable. She has to be close enough for the aura to reach her team, so there's always a place she has to be, and it's rarely a safe one.

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

Playing a Bad Sona Matchup

Trade after she has used her second cast rather than before. Her rotation is public information and the window where she has spent it is a window where she's a fragile support with nothing to say.

Don't group in a straight line for objectives while her ultimate is available. It's the one part of her kit that wins a game on its own and it needs your team to have made the same mistake she was hoping for.

If the lane has already scaled, stop trying to win it and go somewhere else. She's at her best in a long bot lane and at her worst in a game where the fights keep happening in places she had to walk to.

Best Sona Counters

Stun her where she stands, pull her off her carry, or beat the healing with damage that lands all at once.

Braum Stuns Her Where She Stands

Concussive Blows [Passive] turns Braum and his marksman into one stun. Winter's Bite [Q] puts the first stack on her from about 1000 units, his carry's basic attacks add the rest, and the fourth stuns her. She has no dash to break the count, and Song of Celerity [E] cuts out early once she's taking damage.

Unbreakable [E] covers the other half. It intercepts hostile projectiles, and both Hymn of Valor [Q] and Crescendo [R] are projectiles, so the poke she trades with and the stun she's saving hit his shield before they reach his carry.

Blitzcrank Pulls Her Off Her Carry

She's only worth anything standing next to her carry, and Rocket Grab [Q] drags her across the minion line to somebody else's. It stuns on the hit, so there's no heal to throw out on the way.

Power Fist [E] knocks her up the moment she lands. Miss the grab and the lane goes quiet for a while, so wait for her to step out from behind the wave.

Miss Fortune Damage In One Lump

A heal that arrives in pieces loses to damage that arrives all at once, and her whole pattern is built on the first of those.

The lane pressure is the other half. Miss Fortune is strong in exactly the early stretch where Sona has no crowd control, and that's when the bot lane against her is actually decided.

Itemizing Against Sona

Two of these are aimed at what she does and two at what she can't survive:

Executioner's Calling changes the lane, and it's cheap enough to buy on the first back (her healing is small and constant, and cutting it is the difference between an unwinnable poke war and an ordinary one). Serpent's Fang covers the other half of what she gives away, since a fair amount of her protection arrives as shielding rather than healing. Mercury's Treads is aimed squarely at her ultimate (the only thing in her kit that ends a fight on its own, and the only thing worth buying a boot for). A Control Ward matters more against her than against most supports, because the fights she wins are the ones where her team arrived first and the speed she gives them is how they did it.