A Full Mug of Mead, Tip #9: Tibbers in the Tallgrass -- A Beginning Guide to AP Mid

If you find yourself enjoying farming away in top lane, but yearn for just a little bit more action and maybe even the ability to do quite a chunk of damage once the game shifts later, your next best bet is going to be slinging spells in the mid lane as your team's AP carry.

AP Mid -- 

No list of the Champions I feel play this role better than any other they can be forced into, means it's past time that I do that. I've divided the AP Mid Champs into A, B, and C groups, based on three factors. First, can they sustain themselves in lane without help from the Jungler? Second, how easy are they to play? And third, how likely, in blind pick, are you to get hard countered by the enemy teams' composition?

A Champion in Group A is always a safe pick, and I strongly recommend becoming good with at least one of them to start. As you begin to play draft games and ranked matches, you will need to add a few more Champions to your repertoire, and at that point, I recommend picking up a few of the hard counters to make your options as flexible as possible. Namely, you'll have your main Champion, if the opposing team doesn't pick a Champion which counters you, you can just go with that, and you'll have a stable of counterpicks to work with if they do find someone randomly that hoses your strategy or playstyle.

AP Mid Group A -- Ahri, Annie, Anivia, Brand, Cassiopeia, Gragas, Karthus, Morgana, Mordekaiser, Orianna, Twisted Fate, Veigar.

AP Mid Group B -- Fiddlesticks, Fizz, Kassadin, Katarina, Kennen, Lux, Malzahar, Pantheon, Sion, Talon, Xerath, Vladimir

AP Mid Group C -- Akali, Cho'gath, Galio, Heimerdinger, Janna, Karma, Kog'maw, Leblanc, Syndra, Zilean.

Also, with this list, keep in mind that some of the Champions appear in a lower tier than you might expect, and your mileage may vary. In general, Galio, Heimerdinger, and Leblanc are better as counterpicks, and Zilean, Janna, and Karma typically play better as support champions. Both Kog'maw and Akali will perform better outside of mid lane.

AP Mid Objectives -- 

1) Farm (Early Game) -- As with any solo lane, farming is your most important objective. You should be aiming to complete your bigger items faster than any other lane period. From Level 1 to 10, shoot to have 60 CS by 10:00. If you are level 11-20, you need to be closer to 70 or 75, and from 21-30 you need to perfect earning at least 85 by 10:00 consistently.

Farming mid lane is all about harassment and knowing where you are on the map. Crossing the river is extraordinarily dangerous, as most guides to jungling involve the words "after you finish your jungle, gank mid." Giving them a free roll to smash your face in is going to make it impossible to hit your farm targets. Having said that, your opponent is just as scared of crossing the river as you are, so the early game as an AP Mid will not usually involve a ton of aggression from your opponent, unless they have a clear advantage over you in damage trades. This is why it is so critical to harass your enemy whenever he or she gets within the range of your widest ability. Staying ahead of them, whether that means having more health, not using all of your pots, or simply overpowering them with damage, will allow you to easily win your lane.

2) Push and Roam (Mid Game) -- Many AP Mid Champions lack a ton of mobility, so their farming phase lasts a bit longer, and will involve your jungler giving you blue buff to keep up in CS and stay on top of your item build. However, you are free to roam if your lane is pushed too far to be farmed safely and you have the opportunity to secure a kill or counterjungle the opposing jungler. Although the mid turrets are probably the most important turrets to bring down, unlike top or bot lanes, you do not usually want to destroy the mid turret early, because doing so will allow the opposing mid to freeze their lane by the Inner Turret, and have plenty of gank support if you attempt to continue to farm. Weakening the turret is fine, so that you can bring it down at your leisure when you need to, but actually taking it down should wait until your team is ready or you've finished your item build.

3) Dominate the Team Fight (Late Game) -- As the ranged mage, you will be responsible for inflicting heavy amounts of damage and keeping the opposing team controlled with your deadly Area of Effect CC. What is that? How about a definition?

Area of Effect Crowd Control -- In order to win a team fight, it is necessary to impede the enemy Champions ability to use their spells and skills effectively. An AoE CC is exponentially more powerful than individual CC because it can hit multiple targets. The CC effects in League of Legends include Displacement Effects such as Walls, Knock-ups, Knock-backs, Fear, Slow, Stun, Silence, Snare, Charm, and Taunt. Fear makes your targets lose focus and become bewildered. Charm and Taunt cause the target to pursue or attack the caster without regard for what is happening around them. Slow inflicts a movement speed debuff and can affect attack speed or damage. Stun freezes your opponents in place and renders them incapable of fighting. Some Champions with AoE CC include: Fiddlesticks, Veigar, Anivia, Galio, or Morgana.

Once your crowd control is on, start pouring in the damage. Using items that increase Ability Power or Magic Penetration will make your spells more effective, and some Champions can come close to one-hitting an enemy if they have a full build and a powered up damage source.

AP Mid is a challenging and engaging role to play on a League of Legends team, and this guide should help solidify your understanding of how to get started. If you have any further questions or would like to see this topic revisited in an Advanced Guide sooner rather than later, e-mail wherethemeatcomesfrom@gmail.com, and tell me why or just head to the comments. Odds are, you can even be first!

Until next time, may all your ultimates end in kills and all your games with "Victory."

A Full Mug of Mead, Tip #5: The Short Kid Gets Picked Last, The Metagame and League of Legends

At the lowest levels, most Summoners just pick their favorite Champions or select someone from the free options that appeals to them and head into lane. It will happen fairly organically, although occasionally you might hear some fighting from three players who all want Mid.

Since few, if any players, will be dead set on playing in the Jungle or as a support Champion who doesn't kill any creep, those roles are typically left unfilled, as everyone tries to play to their particular style. As they might say on a never-forgotten 90's sitcom, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Except that what works when you are level five is not going to pass muster once you start playing against other 30's with full Runes and Masteries.

The lanes are set up in the traditional metagame as Solo Top, AP Mid, ADC, Support, and Jungle, for a reason, and it isn't because someone randomly decided that order looked pretty.

Solo top and AP Mid get lanes to themselves in order to maximize the number of minions they can slay. This, in turn, leads to quicker acquisition of powerful items, and access to higher levels faster than they would earn if they were splitting experience. The Champions that play in those lanes tend to be reliant on their item builds and need to have high levels in order to chain their abilities together effectively.

Solo Top bruisers are designed to play by themselves, able to hold their own even in 2 on 1 gank situations. The squishy AP Mid, on the other hand, gets help from either Top or Bot Lane without too much stress caused by roaming through the river or jungle areas.

For Duo Bot Champions, they work well with a teammate. The support often uses devastating Crowd Control effects (known hereafter as "cc") to Stun, Slow, Silence, or Fear opposing Champions and help their ADC escape from sticky encounters. With a Support around, protecting them, the Carry is free to farm and focus on harassing the enemy, splitting the experience but not the gold.

The Jungler likes having a lane to him or herself, and can farm through the Neutral Minion camps fast enough to mimic playing against waves of minions. Without a successful kill early, the Jungler will normally be behind on levels, gold, and experience, but makes up for it with powerful presence during ganks.

When your team composition does not fit this traditional mold, it can have a negative effect on the laning phase of the game. Champions may become underleveled or be unable to purchase the items they need at the times that they need them. If you don't have a Jungler, the opposing team's Jungler can roam your side of the map. All while stealing buffs and ganking from unexpected positions; wreaking havoc seemingly at will.

Remember what I said about Solo Top Champions being able to handle 2 on 1s with relative comfort? If you try and go against a top lane champion like Singed or Irelia with more than one person, all you are doing is letting them farm under turret while slowly out-leveling and earning more money than you.

Keeping all of that in mind, there are unconventional strategies that some teams will adopt to attempt to beat the metagame. This is a brief list of less common set-ups and what they do. More in-depth treatment of each strategy will come later, when each is covered individually. Also, please note that some teams will experiment with the traditional five roles playing in different lanes; this is a legitimate common strategy that will appear with some frequency at higher levels, and therefore does not fall into this section.

2/1/2 -- The most common non-metagame set-up that you will encounter, usually because no one on the team feels comfortable in the Jungle. When run as an actual strategy, 2/1/2 requires either a Support player in both Top and Bot lanes so that the team is not attempting to have two Champions farming the minion waves, or a lane designed to demolish opposing Champions, earning gold through kills rather than creep (see Kill Lane).

Kill Lane -- From time to time, you will fight against or with a team that insists on having two high damage carries play alongside each other. This is known as a kill lane, as one of the carries will farm and the other will harass constantly, hoping to catch either the support or the enemy ADC out of position for an easy kill (earning them the gold and experience they are otherwise losing from not farming).

Double or Duo Jungle -- In this set-up, each lane plays solo, generally requiring a tankier ADC like Warwick or two traditionally Solo Top Champions, with one playing in bot lane. Two roaming Champions will score experience from the Jungle, frequently heading into the opposing Jungle to steal buffs and Neutral Monster camps. Ganks from a Duo Jungle are particularly frightening, as they can turn a 1 on 1 into a 3 on 1 slaughter without warning. Usually, in a Duo Jungle strategy, one of the junglers will have a teleport ability such as Pantheon's, Twisted Fate's, or Shen's, in order to provide even more presence anywhere on the map.

Double or Duo AP -- With two competent AP Mid players, this 1/2/2 strategy can be overpowering very quickly, resulting in a broken turret in the middle lane as early as the 3:00 or 4:00 minute mark. Once the tower is down, one of the mid Champions will start roaming, if not both, creating a rush environment that greatly speeds up the game. When done well, this is hard to counter, as the Jungler will frequently be underleveled and the opposing AP Mid will have been cut off from farming, starved by the power of the Duo AP lane.

Tri-Lane -- A very uncommon strategy that works like the Duo AP method. Designed to break a turret as fast as possible, this 3/1/1 arrangement preys on unprepared teams that send their Solo Top unwittingly to his or her doom. The three Champions that lane together usually start in the Jungle, biding their time to let the opposing Solo Top push the lane far enough that they can score a fast kill and clear the minion wave before the other Jungler can react.

ARAM --  Not so much a strategy as it is a kind of sub-game for LoL players, ARAM stands for All Random All Middle, and plays out exactly as you would expect. Random Champion picks for both teams that smash together in the mid lane until one team loses the game.

In Conclusion --

Finding strategies to beat the metagame is an entertaining exercise in itself, and while I take a fairly aggressive stance against tricky play, I do so only because when you are starting out, even once you hit 30, you open yourself up to crushing defeats as long as the other team is able to react fast enough to your chosen course of action. When I address each strat individually, I will expand on the counter play options that each is susceptible to, but for now, be confident that knowing your role and playing the traditional team is your easiest route to success and skillful play.

Until next time, may all your ultimates end in kills and all your games with "Victory."