Counter Guide

How to Beat Swain

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Swain has no dash, no blink and no escape, and somehow he still gets to decide when the fight ends.

Most immobile mages are a puzzle you solve once. Swain isn't, because the thing that beats immobile mages is walking at them, and walking at him is the exact plan his kit was built to punish. He wants a short fight in a small space with somebody held still in the middle of it, and every part of the kit is a different way of arranging that. When it works he leaves the fight with more health than he started with, and he keeps a piece of it. If you want a sense of the company he keeps, the solo queue tier list is the page to check.

Matchup Snapshot Swain, the Noxian Grand General

Where You Meet Him The support slot, and plenty of mid

Damage Type Magic, delivered slowly and on purpose

Why He Is Frustrating He gets permanently bigger for touching you

Mobility None whatsoever

Biggest Threat Nevermove [E]

Hardest Counter Zilean

What a Counter Needs

A way to cancel or ignore a root
Anti-heal on somebody, before the fights get long
The range to make him walk

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Swain on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Swain

Zilean590 games55.8%
Brand1,625 games55.1%
Lulu2,116 games53.7%
Soraka1,130 games53.5%
Sona637 games53.4%

Picks Swain Beats

Neeko656 games46.3%
Rakan778 games46.4%
Pantheon1,467 games46.8%
Pyke1,821 games46.9%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Swain. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 56,283 Swain games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Swain Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

Every fight makes him bigger. Ravenous Flock [Passive] takes something permanent off you and keeps it, so a lane that trades evenly on the health bars isn't trading evenly at all.
He's unusually hard to burst. The passive health he has been collecting all game sits on top of whatever he built, and Demonic Ascension [R] refills the rest of it while you're trying to finish him.
The root doesn't need to be aimed well. Nevermove [E] travels out and comes back, so a miss on the way is a second attempt on the way home. Standing still after dodging it is how most people get caught.
He can start a fight from off the map. Vision of Empire [W] is thousands of units of reach, and it doesn't care that he's nowhere near it.
He's happy in a bad spot. Being surrounded is what his ultimate (Demonic Ascension [R]) wants. Collapsing on him is often the thing that turns the fight around for his team.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

He can't leave. There's no dash and no way out of a bad position. Everything after the first piece of hard crowd control on him is free.
The ultimate has a footprint and it isn't large. It drains whatever's near him. Everyone who steps outside that radius has removed themselves from the entire spell.
Healing is the whole engine. Grievous Wounds takes away the reason he was allowed to be in the middle of your team.
Everything he does is telegraphed. The hand (Nevermove [E]) travels, the ultimate has a windup and the delayed field lands where it landed. None of it is instant, and none of it is point-and-click.
He's slow. If nobody is willing to be within his range, the champion has no way of changing that, and the lane simply happens somewhere he isn't.

Countering Swain

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

Refuse the root, or remove it. A spell shield, a cleanse or a shield on the target beats the entire opening he was building toward.
Buy Grievous Wounds early and say so out loud. One cheap component in the bot lane changes this matchup more than an item slot anywhere else.
Stand outside the drain. His ultimate is only a radius. Take a step back and the spell is doing nothing to you at all.
Make him walk. Anything with more range than he has turns his lane into a farming exercise, because he has no way of closing the distance.

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

Playing a Bad Swain Matchup

Do not stand behind your own minions in a straight line with him. The hand comes back through the same lane it went out on, and the return trip is what catches people.

Treat the delayed field (Vision of Empire [W]) as a wall rather than as damage. It's asking you to stand somewhere worse, and the safest answer is usually to give up the wave rather than the position.

When he ults, look at the ground and not at his health bar. The fight is decided by how many of you are inside the circle, and that's a decision you can still make after he presses it.

Best Swain Counters

Cancel the setup, take him out of the fight entirely, or never come within reach of it.

Janna Removes Him From The Fight

Swain's ultimate is a radius around a champion who can't move, so it's the single most cancelable teamfight spell a support can face. Monsoon [R] takes every target away from him at once and leaves him draining empty ground.

She also handles the setup. Her shield and her speed boost turn the walk out of a root into something survivable, and a Swain whose combo doesn't convert is a Swain paying a lot of mana for nothing.

Sivir Her Spell Shield Eats The Root

Everything in his kit is one spell that has to land first, and Spell Shield [E] is the cleanest answer in the game to a champion with one opener. She simply declines the hand and gets mana back for the trouble.

The rest of the matchup suits her too. He can't follow a champion who speeds up whenever she wants to leave, and he can't contest the wave against her once she has a couple of items.

Karma Never Enters His Range

Her poke reaches further than anything he owns, so the lane becomes a question of whether he's willing to walk into it, and he usually can't afford to.

She also carries the answer to the one thing that beats her. Her shield covers the root's target and the speed on it pulls them out of the drain before it has done anything worth doing.

Itemizing Against Swain

He's magic damage that heals, so the buys split neatly between stopping the heal and stopping the crowd control that sets it up:

Executioner's Calling is the purchase that decides this matchup and it doesn't have to be the person he keeps rooting who buys it. Mercury's Treads is aimed at the part that actually kills people, which is the time you spend held in place rather than the damage arriving while you're there. Banshee's Veil is unusually good here because his whole sequence needs one specific spell to land first, and a shield that eats it costs him the fight rather than a slice of it. Wit's End suits whoever he keeps choosing to stand next to, since it answers the magic damage and gives back the attack speed to finish a champion who can't run away.