The Newbie Review: First Time Playing Mordekaiser

Disclaimer: I know nothing about anything, and I suck in general. Take everything you read with a grain of salt.

tl;dr: He's ridiculously fun, but grievously feast or famine.

I just was playing as the Iron Revenant for a bit in ARAM, and let me say this:

I sucked, and it was amazing.

Granted, I was playing against a fed Udyr and Jhin. Which, if you don't know, will give you a stunbot and a permanent fourth shot while they have ghosts (I read a lot about every champion to compensate for my utter incompetence). And I died a lot. And I was very much the weakest link of the team. And I had the time of my life.

And I can honestly say the only time I've had more fun in League is fighting for the title of Grandmaster at Arms with a Fiora while I'm playing Jax. Morde is just really freaking cool.

I didn't care that I died left and right. I didn't care that even with three armor items I fed Jhin and Udyr to high heaven. I didn't care that I was losing fights with the enemy Soraka. With boots I was still being outrun by almost everyone in the game.

None of it mattered because his Q and his Ultimate are so. Damn. Satisfying.

Yes, I fed the ever loving SHIT out of both Jhin and Udyr. It didn't matter, though, because their strength became mine when I killed them. I tanked tower shots with the ghost of their Poppy. I had a shield that could only be broken by the 2000 damage auto attacks of Jhin or the attentive ultimate of a pure glass Malzahar.

And let me say, I understand why Mordekaiser is in the state he is in. I could have been slamming my face into the keyboard for all I understood of his W and its timing, and the E was simply a button I'd press whenever I could. Every time I got a kill, the course of the game would change drastically, and I had no clue what I was doing. The fight was a six versus four. GG.

I can only imagine the unholy things Malicious Metal can do with him.

However, there are noticeable issues apparent even to an amateur like me. If the rest of my team hadn't had any CC, I would never have laid my hands on the enemy. I had to bum rush a Hextech Gunblade to become even relevant in the game, and I couldn't contribute anything to my team reliably until I had four items complete. The power of his shield reduces the potential of other, more interesting parts of his kit, and his power curve isn't so much a curve as it is a salt flat leading to the five thousand foot cliff rising off the back of level six.

Now, keep in mind that every possible condition for this game went the way it needed to for me to experience the full spectrum of Morde. I had opponents who played into his strengths. I had fantastic allies who could cope with my idiocy. The game was long for an ARAM match, and quite back and forth. It didn't seem like my enemies knew how Mordekaiser works. I don't blame them.

But regardless, the potential of this champion for incredible highs and lows was apparent from the start. It's easy to see why his mains revere him so much: he's just fun without being flashy, which is rare in League these days.