A Newbies Guide to Taboo: Metamancing

At some point or another, we all get bored with the game and want to have some fun. Some of us do it by playing our mains, over and over, facerolling games like its nothing. Others of us have friends we hang out with and goof off with. But my all-time favorite thing to do for fun: Metamancing. Metamancing is the act of doing something considered weird to the " meta", a list of professionally defined characteristics that are followed and unfortunately is an extremely controversial topic; People believe that the meta is set in stone, and that breaking the meta can only hurt people.

This is not true in any regards.

Metamancing IS allowed in League of Legends, and don't let anyone tell you different. What you need to be aware of, is that Riot does not want you to be a troll and feed the whole of Africa. If you do something weird and do bad with it, your teammates have every right to report you because you made it a bad experience for them. Now with that, lets continue onwards so I can describe how you can go about your very own metamancing without getting punished by Riot. Note, that people will still get mad at you; just keep your confidence and do well. If you do that, there's nothing they can really report you for.

The first rule of metamancing: You should not metamance with a character you're unfamiliar with. Always start with characters you're extremely in-tune with. This is because a later step of the process really hinges on you knowing your champions ins and out better than you know yourself.

The second rule: Find some friends that are willing to play with you, just to start out. Nobody metamances perfectly their first few times; Atleast if you're with friends, there's no huge chance of people getting mad at you and reporting you.

The third rule: Find a viable candidate to metamance with. Some characters just CANNOT metamance, such as Draven. He doesn't have any alternate scalings, and there's no way he can stack items to highlight his specific ability set. I will say, that characters with a lot of utility are amazing candidates, such as supports.

The fourth rule: Decide what you want to do, and make a build revolving around what you know about them. I'll give you an example that I personally love:

Sona was my main for roughly a year. After that year, I started to get bored playing her, and decided to mix it up a bit. I knew that Sona's Q got you right on the edge of auto attack range, and your Q passive plus your normal passive promotes autoing after every Q you do. This immediately established the first component to my ludicrous idea: ADC Sona. Trinity Force was a must go because of what I said above, so that became part of the build. This made me quickly realize that I'd want to build her very similar to Ezreal, cause she's likely going to have mana problems and rely on poking. Then, I added Ionian Boots, Essence Reaver, a Statikk Shiv, and an Infinity Edge. This allowed me to conform to Sona's base archtype in terms of who she is: She's a Poke Burst mage, so I want to quickly Q, then Auto in hopes of bursting them down. With that, I left the last item as a wildcard for some adaptation. I tried it in norms with a friend who was a support main, and I INSTANTLY fell in love with it. I did it game, after game, after game, with the same result almost every time: It was an amazing success, and confounded everyone.

The fourth rule, part B: Choose a lane you think you can manage it in. This can be considered metamancing on its own, if you choose a lane out of the norm. Make sure you know what you can take. Here's an example of this:

A long time ago, AP Evelynn was actually a very popular mid laner. I had started playing her a bunch quite a few seasons later, and fell in love with her. One day, I got the brilliant idea to try her where I first saw her: mid lane. By this time, AP Evelynn was barely a thing anymore, and no matter what, she was always played in the jungle. I knew her strengths and weaknesses very well: She's a Melee Mage with spammable mid-short range poke, has a passive to surprise people, and it also regenerates her mana. This gave me a distinct idea: Play her into Melee Champions in mid lane, and in cases where they're a longer range, use your passive to out-sustain them and surprise them. I also knew that I had the added benefit that it would be unlikely for my laner to call MIA when I went missing, because of how often I stealthed. This means that I had open access to gank anything I wanted to! The results were astounding: It worked almost every time, and I found my new favorite counter to Yasuo (Evelynn's Q goes through his Windwall).

And last but not least; Rule Number 5

Stay confident in your skills. If you aren't confident in your skills, you're setting yourself up to lose. The main problem with metamancing is that people frown upon it, and because of that you can be very disheartened to try it. But it's always worth the reply you get after you do well with it. I don't know how many times I made people go speechless with the countless places and ways I've played Sona, and everytime is just as rewarding as the next. It can be just as fun for your opponents as well; I've had people laugh their butts off because a Sona was one shotting everyone she met and carrying the game. Also, remember that change happens because people take the steps no one else was willing to take: you could find that you yourself start to slowly change the meta because people suddenly realize that something they thought was weird is actually incredibly good!

And with that, I leave you, my fellow metamancers, with one last word of advice: Do not tilt if you start doing bad. Bad games happen, whether you metamance or not. Use it as a learning experience; If you lost to a specific champion, maybe it means you shouldn't play it against them. Maybe, you shoulda tried to modify your build and made it more adaptable to the situation. One loss is not the end of the world, nor is a couple reports.

Now I shall let thee go and practice an art most foul. Enjoy your metamancing, and good luck!

• Queen of Heals

P.S. Please do not do this in Ranked until you're extremely comfortable with it. Ranked is a very competitive place, and if you were likely to get reported, its much more likely so in ranked due to people actually trying to get to their Season's Dream Rank. So just don't do it until you know you can do it effectively at your tier, and if you notice it stops working at higher tiers, just DON'T PLAY IT IN RANKED!