Popular items for each and every champion

Welcome back, friends.

I scraped more games this week than ever before. The data collection tech is ramping up here at LeagueMath.com as season four comes to a close.

I took every player in Challenger league or Master league (in NA) on Saturday afternoon (over a thousand players) and I downloaded every ranked solo queue match that every one of them played on patches 4.18 and 4.19. It was a lot of matches. I look forward to mining that data in the weeks to come.

Let's start with something simple though. All 121 champions appear in that data set, and though some are played more frequently than others (I'm looking at you Lucian and Mordekaiser), I have siginificant data on the item builds chosen by the best players in NA on every champion.

This table has one row per champion, and displays (in order, most popular on the left) the top ten items in final builds of that champion over the entire data set.

Enjoy.

Item decisions are, in general, extremely nuanced. Last week's article started to scratch the surface of one specific aspect, but suffice to say, building the same thing every game is sub-optimal.

However, this table might be a good place to start, especially if you're inexperienced with a champion. For example, the best players don't build any swords on Veigar.

I like how Dr. Mundo has four breast plates (Spirit Visage, Sunfire Cape, Warmog's Armor, and Thornmail) two shields (Doran's Shield and Randuin's Omen) and a Giant's belt. Very tank.

Evelynn is interesting, with two jungle items in her top ten. There must be a real, viable choice there. Well played, Riot.

It looks like the consensus is to build Gnar tanky. Though, we do see a Brutalizer there. Here's an appropriate moment to plug my article on armor penetration.

Janna with Frost Queen's Claim and Mejai's Soul Stealer. Ha! This meta comes from the recent world championships, where EG (and others) brought this build out. I haven't run the numbers, but I don't think it was especially successful. I guess people just want to build snowball items. Soraka has a Mejia's too!

Anyway, not too much analysis to do here. Should provide for some fun staring and thinking, though. If you have any questions or comments, as usual, I invite you to get at me. I'm sure I've overlooked much of interest.

Now that is not a small table. Ha! I enjoyed making it and I hope you enjoy looking at it. There weren't as many big surprises here as I expected. I guess at the end of the season, and at the highest levels of solo queue, the meta will be as established as possible. I'm looking forward to the season five changes. I'm sure they will shake this table up quite a bit.

You stay cool (or warm as the case may be), and close; I'll be back with more league-y math-y fun here at LeagueMath.com.

No data api was harmed in the making of this article. Everybody keep playing zillions of games for me to download and analyze, ya hear?

Peace.