Frost Queen's Claim Midlane

This item is cheaper than or , and gives you higher base mana regen (note that both of grail's passives give you unparalleled regen at low mana). It is weaker in that it only gives you 10% cdr (compared to 20%) and +50 AP (compared to +60 and +80 respectively). If you buy early you'll get +GP10 reducing the overall cost even more. Additionally, and , the components in the build path, come with a passive that, when used intelligently, offset the damage lost from lower AP ratios AND improve your gold income. So just by those numbers it's looking pretty competitive.

Then there's the active. We've heard that "immobile mages" are getting looked at next, but dear sweet jesus does this thing punish them hard. The active is a long-range automatically-targeted 40% for 4 second slow that doesn't require vision, but grants it along with the slow. On a 60 second cooldown. If you're an immobile mage and you get hit with a 40% 4 second slow, you're probably toast.

Go queue up as midlane and rush this thing. You'll probably finish it around lvl 6, maybe a little later. Come back to lane, pop the active, and all-in. Watch what happens.

There are a whole lot of AP champions who don't have a 40% 4 second slow (that's unavoidable by a significant portion of the champion lineup) in their arsenal for a very good reason. Shouldn't this active scale with level or something? Yikes.