The new champion

Yeah it's weird. I don't know how they'll make him different from Maokai besides being a kind old grandfather tree while Maokai is your grumpy ass old war veteran who can still kick the ass of anyone who messes with his grandkids.

Well I mean in WoW we have trees like this:

http://media.blizzard.com/wow/media/wallpapers/fan-art/wallpaper24/wallpaper24-large.jpg

And more recently this:

http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2015/november/VSNightmareAncient.jpg

Seeing a different side to the concept helps to embellish it and give a greater appreciation for what's there; Maokai and Ivern are both similar beings, but tread much different ground. I mean Yasuo and Master Yi both encompass the samurai archetype in their own ways, but are distinct from one another. This can work, and I'm glad Riot's revisiting some older themes with fresh ideas. I mean yordles are great in part because they've been taken in many different directions and they're wholly unique from one another. The Ascended are similar. If it can work for diminutive fuzzy folk, immortal warriors and samurai, I feel like they can make it work for trees.

Like other have said we have a bunch of champions that share the same theme some how but they are diffident enough. I mean just look at the 4 ninjas we have.

I will be willing to place money on that the only thing they will share beside looks are 1. they both have a lot of cc and are best play as some sort of tank.

That's speciest. The whole "human" thing has been done over 60 times but you don't hear us sentient trees complaining, do you?

Meddler on the overlap thing with Maokai:

In terms of potential overlap with Maokai that was something that was also on our minds when developing Ivern. We made sure to regularly check that we were delivering fairly different gameplay, visual appearance and personality despite the thematic overlap as a result. Hopefully that comes through as intended, really curious to see what you folks think once he's revealed.

I was upset that it wasn't the art Brofresco showed in his video. The Radagast style forest wizard look was pretty cool. Not too crazy about another tree.

We also have couple void monsters, and 3 fish champions.

Im glad it's not another human champion, they get stale pretty quickly, on the other hand monster and mythical champions can really show how creative the developers can get

I'm 100% sure Riot has already thought that they might seem too similar, so I'm really interested to see just how different they make him feeling from Maokai.

I thought bird champion was taken, but here we are

Nah, he looks as though he's a smoother, harder type of wood, almost stone. Good thing we don't have a champion made of stone/wood. ...