Why Garen v Darius is an impossible matchup. Some thoughts on Top Lane, Counterpicks, and Waveclear

inb4 that one Garen main goes "well actually"

A lot of people on the Boards like to complain about how badly Counter Picks dominate and determine Top Lane matchups. While I wouldn't try to excuse it nor will I pretend I have a magical solution to the problem, this post will attempt to illuminate the problem by focusing on a single concept to explain why Counter Picks exist and why they feel so impossible. Sometimes Counterpicks result from champion interactions; Fiora's Riposte being a clean answer to Irelia's Stun. Sometimes it's Power Spikes and Windows; Kled has a fantastic early game into almost all Top Lane matchups but falls off linearly the longer the game goes on. Today however, I will be focusing on Waveclear, and how damning it is when you don't have the range, mobility, or matching wave clear to do anything about it.

Garen is perhaps the best champion in the game to illustrate how badly a bad matchup can get. Operating entirely at melee range with no mobility past a movement speed buff on his Q, it's incredibly easy for a champion to have just enough range and wave clear to completely lock Garen out of the lane. For today's example, we're using Darius.

Let's play out a scenario between two equally skilled players. Both players are hitting the minions, and every time they get in striking range of each other, they trade Qs. Sometimes Garen gets right within Darius' range and wins the trade, sometimes Darius clips Garen just right and he wins the trade. But every time they do this, Darius' Q is also hitting a bunch of minions in the process, and Darius gets a push lead.

Garen's smart enough to know that if he keeps trading autos into Darius' bigger minion wave, he's going to lose. So he backs up, the waves play out a bit, and eventually the wave rebounds off of Garen's tower and is pushing into Darius now.

The problem is, Darius can still go in for trades and CS thanks to his Q's range. He can also thin the wave, and now it's frozen just outside of Darius' tower. Garen could try to break the freeze, but if he does that, he will just get pulled under tower and get chunked with little opportunity to trade back. He's also pushed incredibly far out, exposing him to Jungle threats while Darius remains safe. His only hope is for Darius to misplay, missing a Q or a Hook as Garen attempts to bait it out and break the freeze that way. Ultimately however, the matchup is no longer Garen's to win, it's Darius' to lose. And Garen will continue to starve until then, if Darius ever messes up and gives Garen an opportunity.

The moral of the story is to never first pick Garen.

Mid Lane doesn't seem to have this problem nearly as badly as conventional mid laners have the range and wave clear to farm at least kinda even while losing. But Top Lane's roster is filled with champions, often melee, often lacking mobility, and often lacking significant wave clear. Once the lane hits a tricky situation, such as getting frozen against by superior range and wave clear, many Top Laners simply don't have a good response to the problem. In fact, in some matchups like illustrated above, there's no real response to the problem if the disparity is great enough. The next time you see a Top Laner on the Boards complaining about the problem, remember that there are real factors behind the complaint. Many Top Laners don't have an answer to superior range and wave clear, and if they get frozen against, the only thing they can do is just sit down and starve.