Garen Mains

I'm not a Garen main but the answer seems pretty obvious to me so I'll throw my 2 cents in-

You want to pick Garen into immobile mage champions. He scales well with HP which makes him less vulnerable to burst damage. Immobile mages have a hard time hitting the targets they need when they're running away from a Garen. Take Xerath for example - he wants to hit the backline with his Q, but that lowers his movespeed while he's casting. If Garen walks up and silences him while he's casting, that just saved 500+ damage from your team (potentially your ADC) and it forces him to run. Now he's using his stun on you, which you shrug off with your tenacity and he can't afford to ult because you'll just sit on top of him spinning and execute with your ult.

On the other hand you don't want to pick Garen into a double ADC comp. He gets kited pretty well by ADCs and they aren't nearly as reliant on abilities. Those that are tend to have dashes built in to kite you anyways.

Hope that helps, good luck!

Multiple 1v1 champs, not much tanky cc imo. Garen gets pretty beefy and can delete assassins. He doesn't really care about being cc'd himself, but he's really not helping your team much other then the potential to insta kill 1 person.

If the other team brings alot of tank and aoe dmg, I feel garens usefulness falls off.

Yeah he's just in a pretty bad spot right now. He's not overly equipped to deal with some of the better tanks and if he wants to kill a carry he needs to build some damage but then he gets torn apart being in the front line. You're only hope is to get fed in lane.

As a Garen main I can tell you this, if they can' kite you then you are safe to pick him. Garen has two main downfalls that prevent him from being a viable pick.

The first is that he has no way to initiate a fight reliably, his only engage is ability to speed up which still requires him running dumbly into the enemies face.

The second is that he has no hard crowd control, this means that should he get into the fight he has no way of locking down enemies and forcing them to stay withing the spin. He simply can't keep up and his lack of dashes mean he is incredibly predictable.

The kind of team you want to fight is low health bursty asssassins/mages or adcs. People who can lock down Garen or not die to him immediately counter him hard. You will be heavily reliant on flash + Q for your kills and engages and enemies that can lock you down to prevent you from dropping assassins and carries will always stop you. Sadly this is the majority of what succeeds in the meta, so you can bet you will see a lot of cc heavy champions ready to spam slows or simply dash away from you.

If your team doesn't need much peel and the enemy team isn't entirely comprised of kiters and %health damage, Garen's a fun choice.

The less they can kite you, the better. He also excels against teams that aren't extremely tanky, since he can fully combo and dunk squishies.

Go look up MarineRevenge, he's a really good Garen player w/ his own twitch stream.

generally, when the enemy team goes either heavy to into physical or magic damage.

in case you can heavily itemize into 1 specific resistance type, you really get most out of your w passive. otherwise, his silence makes him effective against low mobility type mages, if you can get into their backline. watch out for passive supports and cc heavy teams. a janna on the enemy team means youre not going to get to them.

or to stop ad caster type assassins like talon , zed, yasuo or riven, in their tracks when they dive into your team.