Riot is making new mage champions too unreliable in an effort to release unique champions.

As someone who greatly looks forward to new mid lane champion releases the last 3 mages have been extremely disappointing.

Riot is making new mages far too unreliable and adding in huge amounts of counterplay in an effort to make unique champions. This by itself isnt necessarily an issue, but it becomes a problem when theres a large amount of existing champions that are not only highly reliable but often have high mobility. Whats worse these existing champions rarely ever pay a price for reliability and mobility. Most traditional mages while still vulnerable to these champions have at least some way to self peel and punish them with burst, or otherwise play safely enough to survive lane.

Lets look at the 3 newest mages released.

Ekko - Pretty much has never been a strong champion in his intended role mid because hes supposed to be a lowish burst, squishy and unreliable assassin. Combining these things simply doesnt work, and thats why we have seen Ekkos only real success come from building tanky in the jungle and top lane where higher survivability allows his kit to actually function.

Aurelion Sol - Aurelion Sol overall has overwhelmingly bad match ups in lane and is easily counterpicked. Pretty much any champion with a gap closer renders him utterly helpless because his long cooldown ult is his only form of self peel. Assassins like Zed, Fizz, Leblanc, Talon ect who can continually jump on you from long range are able to massively out trade you and it often feels like you cannot retaliate in any way.

Taliyah - Will likely suffer similar issues to Aurelion Sol, the fact that her doing good amounts of damage seems to rely upon comboing easily dodged/dashed out of spells and not having any damage whatsoever on her passive or ult will make her a poor duelist.

The common responses seems to be, "well just roam" if you cant win lane. The main issue i have with these new champions is not you cannot find a way to be effective, but than you feel utterly helpless against certain champions, namely assassins. Traditional mages while also very vulnerable to assassins at least have the option to try cc and burst down the assassin first, mages like Aurelion Sol and Taliyah have no such option causing you to feel completely helpless in certain situations.