How do you play against Poppy as Aatrox?

Yeah thats kinda the thing with all these tanks toplane. THey get to outdamage you while rushing tank items rofl. Oh and those tank items are also alot cheaper than your damage items, so basically you are behind from the beginning since you have to farm 700 more gold then them to complete your first item.

Conclusion: Play Maokai, Ekko or Poppy top or don't play toplane.

You don't. And if you have to play against her, try to :

1). Freeze lane as much as you can and wait for your jungler help 2). Farm and ignore her. You will never get to kill her, no matter how ahead you are.

simple question simple answer .... you dont . just ban atrox [slayer-jinx-wink]

You could just play ...

As of current like many have suggested, Aatrox and other light fighters/divers are not well off in the meta. If you still choose to play him or other similar to him such as trynd, etc then just be warned that you will be overshadowed in terms of not only tankiness but also team utility, teamfight potential and cc.

Against a Poppy, the match up is quite stale. Whilst she does do more damage to you in an instant she cannot prolong trades until she gets tankier as you are able to trade back moderately and then sustain up most of the damage she inflicted onto you. What I like to do I start W and trade frequently with most top laners including Poppy so long as you be mindful of their power spikes and levels. In a level 1 fight, you both fair quite evenly but as I said she will become much more tankier and harder to lock down and deal with (be mindful of her shield procs and deny as best as possible without making yourself vulnerable for a gank or stun lock into the wall). In most of my Aatrox vs Poppy games, there is no real winner in the laning phase as usually one of us is only 1 or 2 kills ahead but it honestly isn't that big of a deal. The damage you build on Aatrox will be mitigated by the tankiness Poppy builds on herself.

P.S - This is my smurf that I haven't been on in a few weeks, don't mind the match history I was having a slump week :p