Goodbye charms, hello Exodia anomalies! Set 13 Into the Arcane has released and tons of crazy combos have already mutated beyond what we expected.
Let's first breakdown the set mechanic and try to understand it more clearly.
The Anomaly will be an extension of your composition similar to a 4th augment or 4th item for your carry. Support / Utility options do exist, but they tend to be situational backup options. Taking 2 completed items for a tailored champion, for example, is very powerful if you are playing Artifactory or if you are playing a Scrap composition. If you are chasing a vertical like Sorcerors you can place Nami in it for guaranteed emblem. But those are rare scenarios and not the norm. You should generally always be aiming to buff your primary item holders.
Generally you should be evolving your Primary Carry over your Primary Tank. This is because in late game situations, there are many things that can damage your backline and win such as large Jinx AOE, Twitch piercing, or Heimerdinger missiles. In those spots, your tank will survive and unless it deals AOE damage, it will fail to close fights. This is ultimately why people prefer itemizing 2 carries / 1 tank as opposed to 2 tanks / 1 carry in the late game. Damage scales much better than tankiness due to carry items having more general fight impact. Anomalies are similar.
There are 3 big mistakes we see people making on early climbs during this set.
1. Playing weak comps/lines.
This is primarily fixed by sticking to our tier list. Play good comps and avoid the weak ones. If you are picking things like Silver Hero Augments this patch, you are at major risk for a bot 4. These augments will get finely tuned over the course of the set, but for now stick with the known S/A comps if you want to climb. B tier comps can climb but they are rare and you still may struggle to top 4 even if you hit everything.
2. Slamming the "wrong" items.
We will likely do an item dive in a future meta read this set once we collect high enough sample size, but for now here's a general snapshot of the item tier list.
VERSATILITY - Sunfire is the best early game item to slam in the game due to how much it can spike your board with less drop off due to the HP buff. Other anti-heal items are also generically good such as Red Buff and Morello. Shojin is the most flexible carry item. Most 5 costs want Shojin as their mana generator. Bloodthirster is the most flexible fighter item for both AD / AP melee. Warmogs is the strongest generic tank item.
AD: There are many good users of Last Whisper this set as opposed to Evenshroud and Tanks will in general struggle to stay alive this set due to Anomalies (unless you buff a tank anomaly). There are many sources of AD caster power so Infinity Edge is quite solid too.
AP: As always, AP comps love Ionic Spark due to instant Shred as opposed to waiting for Shiv procs. Archangels is very strong early and BIS Heimerdinger, Kogmaw, and other backline AP.
Other items in A tier and below are also slammable, but they are used for specific comps or they may be too valuable of a component for the tradeoff such as Deathcap and Deathblade.
3. Overprioritizing Econ over HP preservation
This third point is an important one. A huge mistake players make will be focusing on making economy to a fault. If you have no opener and 4 pairs, hold those units! Don't sell to make 10 so aggressively. Delaying for one or two rounds will hurt your econ significantly, but if you can start a 2 or 3 winstreak on Stage 2, do it. However, it's all within a delicate balance -- don't be stuck in a W/L/W/L situation and not make gold because you kept leveling up.
Very few comps can afford to full lose streak early at the moment because of the 4th major spike in the game: the Anomaly. If you're at only a few lives and someone hits a crazy wombo combo, you will inevitably rotate into them. Think of it as the entire lobby has the capability of spiking similar to a Fortune cashout (including you!).
The good news is that it's not so obvious how to do it, especially since the set is so new and stats are so scarce to come by. We'll eventually cover in-depth in a future meta read on how to approach Anomaly building once we get a better grip of the mechanic ourselves.
S-tier: Black Rose AP Flex, Sentinel Heimerdinger, Family Reroll
A-tier: Scrap, Zaun, Ambushers, Twitch, Enforcers, Sorcerors, Kogmaw, and Conqueror
The S-tier are the 3 comps you should always check to see if you have a good spot for it.
Black Rose can support multiple players as long as you have high econ because of the sheer number of variations you can play. The concept is similar across every variation: Play 5 Black Rose + 4 trait secondary. 4 Visionary and 4 Form Swappers tend to perform the best (mainly because you're playing around 5 costs), but you can also play 4 Dominators and 4 Sorceror. There are even underground variations like splashing in Experiment, but try that at your own risk.
Variation of BR that almost no one plays but caps very high.
While Black Rose is one of the highest cap frontlines for him, Heimerdinger can also be played in a Sentinel frontline. This is very similar to the Remix Rumble K/DA Ahri build that played 6 sentinels and stalled with infinite AP ramping with Corki as your duo carry. There are a couple variants you can play of 4 Sentinels if you hit Malzahar. Heimer is undoubtedly the strongest 4-cost AP carry to consider every game.
Lastly, Family Reroll has shot up the ranks post B-patch thanks to massive buffs to the trait and Violet. Most players choose to duo carry with Draven due to a shared Pit Fighter trait and how much Draven can snowball early game. There is also a 6 Pit Fighter variant players are angling for that is also becoming the more popular way to cap the board. The kicker? Lots of players are saving up their gold to all-in the Anomaly for a 4* Violet. A JP player has forced it purely to rank 1. Here's the profile if you want to look closer:
If you're contested though, this can be very painful. We anticipate the player found this out before everyone else on the B-patch so pure 1-tricking is unlikely to succeed.
The A-tier comps tend to be deep verticals or conditional rerolls. The best reroll comp right now appears to be Camille Ambushers, focusing on Smeech as a duo carry and capping around Jinx. There is also an emerging Family Camille (Camille Famille) variant that is emerging among whispers of the top player circles, but the stats look quite poor so be careful when trying it. Kogmaw was dominant the first few days but the B-patch nerf hurt it considerably and should now be played only if you have great start (unit + great item).
The verticals from least conditional to most are the following: Scrap > Rebel > Enforcer > Sorceror / Conqueror. All of these comps perform best with an emblem, but Scrap is the best without one. 8 Enforcer most notably can use so many 4-2 Trait Unlocks which caps the board very high when you land things like Martial Law.
We saved the final comp discussion of A tier for our choice of meta breaker: Experiment Twitch Flex. This comp is, simply put, very hard and not for beginners. It may look simple on the surface: Play 5 Experiment and fill in the rest with whatever you hit as a duo carry / tank! The execution of it ends up being very tricky due to the game-to-game hex shifting and your level 8 rolldown variance. However, this comp's upside is enormous because the cap is incredibly high. It can fit in nearly every 5 cost with an easy splash:
Caitlyn - Sniper (Twitch)
Leblanc - Sorceror (Zyra)
Sevika - Pit Fighter (Urgot)
Malzahar - Visionary (Nunu)
Mordekaiser - Dominator (Mundo)
The other legendaries are also easily splashed with a simple link:
Rumble + Corki for Scrap + Artillery
Jayce + Elise for Formswapper + Bruiser
Jinx is the only odd unit out, but that's largely due to her design being Rebel and Ambusher depedent.
If you're an AD flex lover, slam that Rageblade and get your pans out. It's time to cook.
As always we end with the best openers for you to consider on Stage 1 and 2. The strength of these openers largely depend on upgrades and items so don't only hold the best units if you are giving up pairs of other solid units.
S tier: Conquerors Draven, Scrap Bruisers Trundle, Sorceror Sentinels Lux, Family Pit Fighter Violet
A tier: Enforcer Maddie, Visionary Vex
B tier: Rebels, Quickstrickers, Watchers, Chem Baron
Good 3-costs to keep from orb for Stage 2: Swain, Gangplank, Cassiopeia, Kogmaw
These are all based on 1 and 2-cost openers. The more effective boards you can build for cheap, the higher the tier. This is because you're more likely to 2* units and snowball momentum. If you need to 2* a unit to be effective (example: Urgot 2), then it makes it hard to justify holding for unlikeliness of upgrading + impact on your economy.
That's all for now. Thanks for being a loyal Patreon sub! If you have any further questions, feel free to drop them in our Discord server. See you on ladder!