Vel'koz 8.13 post mortem. Why did his winrate drop from 50% to 46% in one patch?

No changes to Vel'koz, no changes to items that he uses. His pick rate barely changed too.

The information in this post is sourced from op.gg

What happened? Here are his counterpicks which saw significant increases to pick rates in 8.13

Kassadin: 3.14% -> 5.76% Fizz: 7.45% -> 8.03% Anivia: 4.98% -> 5.27% Yasuo: 8.86% -> 10.95% Ekko: 5.47% -> 6.12% Orianna: 2.53% -> 4.8% Total: 35.43% -> 40.93%

Counters who saw a significant decrease in pickrate: Talon: 11.62% -> 10.31% LeBlanc: 10.82% -> 9.47% Total: 22.44% -> 19.78%

I left out a few champs who didn't have very significant changes in their pick rates.

Considering only the above champs, Overall Change: 57.87% -> 60.71%

~3% overall may not sound bad but it's worse than it looks because the majority of those champs which saw an increase are his hardest counters according to the stats.

Personally I think that immobile mages like Vel'koz need more itemization flexibility to be able to adapt to meta changes. You might say "Look, you have Hourglass and Banshee's. What are you complaining about??"

The problem is mages give up way too much to adapt their build paths. Banshee's and Hourglass have no health, mana, or sustain. They also have low AP. The resist stats basically do nothing for us as well. So if we rush them we're completely giving up our midgame. For a mage the only viable 1st buys MUST have mana, health, or exceptionally high AP.