Counter Guide

How to Beat Yuumi

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

You do not beat Yuumi. You beat the person she is sitting on, and the sooner your team accepts that, the easier the game gets.

Every instinct in a fight points at the wrong target here. She is untargetable, she heals through your poke, she speeds her carry out of your crowd control, and she does it from a position no ability in the game can reach. What she cannot do is anything on her own. She has no way to hold a lane, no way to punish a dive, and nothing to offer a partner who is already dead. Countering her is not a trick, it is a decision about who your team is allowed to look at.

Matchup Snapshot Yuumi, the Magical Cat

Where You Meet Her Bot lane, attached to somebody else

Damage Type Magic, and most of it is not hers

Why She Is Frustrating You cannot target the champion causing the problem

Mobility Whatever her partner has

Biggest Threat You and Me! [Passive]

Hardest Counter Alistar

What a Counter Needs

Hard crowd control that lands on her partner rather than on her
Grievous Wounds, because a constant trickle of healing is her whole contribution
Enough pressure in the first fifteen minutes to make the lane unplayable rather than merely annoying

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Yuumi on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Yuumi

Alistar1,564 games57.5%
Thresh4,160 games56.9%
Leona3,203 games56.3%
Nautilus3,964 games56.1%
Braum1,212 games55.9%

Picks Yuumi Beats

Bard1,193 games47.8%
Soraka1,567 games48.8%
Karma1,802 games49.4%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Yuumi. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 67,292 Yuumi games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Yuumi Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She cannot be punished. You and Me! [Passive] removes her from the fight as a target while leaving her in it as a source of healing, damage and movement speed.
She never runs out of value. The heal is small and constant, which is worse for you than a large one, because it wins the trades nobody remembers having.
She undoes your crowd control. Movement speed handed to a carry at the right moment turns a successful engage into a fight where the person you caught simply left.
Her ultimate arrives from a safe place. It is a long range lockdown cast by someone who is not standing anywhere you can contest.
She makes a fed carry unkillable. Every point of healing and speed goes to the one champion your team was already struggling to reach.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She is worth nothing on a losing lane. Everything she does is a multiplier. A carry who is behind is a carry she cannot fix, and she has no way to generate the lead herself.
She has no answer to a dive. There is no escape, no disengage and no way to make a lane safe. A bot lane that simply walks at her twice can take the tower and the game plan with it.
Crowd control does not care that she is attached. Locking down her partner is exactly as effective as it would be against any other duo, and the healing does not stop it.
Grievous Wounds cuts the trickle. The one item that answers her is cheap, early and almost never bought before the twentieth minute.
She brings no crowd control until her ultimate. For the first stretch of the game she cannot stop anything at all, and a team that engages on her partner is unopposed.

Countering Yuumi

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

Attack the partner, every time. This is not advice, it is the entire counter. The number of games lost to people chasing an untargetable cat is not small.
Buy Grievous Wounds in the support item slot, not in the fourth item. A steady heal is beaten by a cheap component and almost nothing else.
Dive the lane before it becomes safe. She cannot make a tower dive go badly for you. Very few supports can say the opposite, and this is the window where the matchup is decided.
Spend your crowd control immediately rather than saving it. The speed she hands out is reactive. Chaining lockdown before she can react is worth more than holding it for a better moment that will not exist.

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

Playing a Bad Yuumi Matchup

Play for the lane and not the fight. She scales into a teamfight better than she plays a lane, so the pressure that is worth anything is the pressure applied early.

Force fights where her partner has to walk somewhere first. A duo that arrives together is her best case, and a fight that starts on a flank is her worst.

Stop tracking her and start tracking the carry. Her position on the map is meaningless information and it is the only information most people look at.

Best Yuumi Counters

Three ways to beat a champion who cannot be beaten directly: remove her partner from the lane, stand in front of the one missile she trades with, or win the window before any of it scales. One counter each.

Nautilus Takes The Partner Away

He removes the carry from the fight for long enough that nothing she does about it matters. The heal keeps ticking and the target still can't move, and that's the idea.

He is also the reason the early dive works, because the lane has nothing that punishes him for walking in.

Braum Blocks The Poke

Yuumi's damage in lane comes from one missile she steers off her partner's back, and Braum's shield eats projectiles. Standing between that missile and his marksman turns her main trade into nothing, and he takes none of the damage from the first hit.

His passive stun is the other threat. Once Braum lands one basic attack, his marksman's attacks stack toward it too, so the partner she's healing is always one short trade away from a stun.

Lucian Wins The Early Window

He is at his best in exactly the stretch of the game where she has no crowd control and no way to make a lane safe, and he is happy to keep taking that fight until the tower falls.

This is a counter you have to actually play. He does not passively beat the composition later, so the lead has to be built while it is still cheap.

Itemizing Against Yuumi

The first two are the matchup and the last two are ordinary insurance:

Oblivion Orb and Executioner's Calling are the same purchase for the two halves of the roster, and one of you has to make it inside the first fifteen minutes rather than once the carry is already unkillable. Mercury's Treads shortens her ultimate, which is the only piece of crowd control in the matchup that can actually stop your engage. Control Ward is here for a duller reason: the lane you are trying to dive is only divable if you know where the enemy jungler is not.