A League of Legends player with over ten years of experience. I usually hover around the master tier and have experience playing every lane and champion. My goal with writing is to share my knowledge and help everyone reading improve themselves as a player.
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As the game gets more mature, it naturally gets more standardized. People discover the most optimized strategies, and they start honing on them. This can make the game feel boring for many players.
Luckily, there is a way to combat this staleness, and the best way to do it is to utilize some cheese strats. These strategies are often high-risk, high-reward, and incredibly satisfying to play.
In this article, you will learn about these best cheese starts in League of Legends, and how they will improve your gameplay:
Invading is probably the most common cheese strategy. It entails entering the enemy territory, in order to score an advantage by getting a kill, disabling the enemy, or stealing their jungle property.
Early Game Invading
Invading is usually done in the early game, but it can be done in any phase of the game. When it comes to early invading, it is best done with all teammates present. This minimizes the risk of getting killed and increases the chances of killing an enemy.
If you plan to utilize invading, it is always best to arrange it in the champion select. This way your teammates will know what’s up as soon as the game loads. As a result, your chances of scoring an early lead will significantly increase.
For example, in the cases where you get first blood, you will have a statistical advantage of 10%. The game win probability goes up from 50% to 60%. Definitely, not a bad deal.
Late-Mid Game Invading
Invading in the later stages of the game is a skill in itself, and boy does it pay well. Becoming great at invading will help you breeze through the ranks, and it will help you become a much more well-rounded player.
Jungle Tracking
Depending on what you play, there will be different variables dictating how to invade, but there is one consistent across all roles, jungle tracking. Jungle tracking revolves around tracking the enemy jungler, and understanding their positioning on the map across time.
When you know where they are, it makes it easy to catch them off guard, and get some lead. The first skill you should add to your tracking stack is noticing where the enemy starts, this can be done easily by checking which players come to their lanes later.
The ones that come later are the ones that gave leash, and this makes it pretty clear where the enemy has started. Another thing you can pay attention to is the laner’s HP and mana bar, if they seem even a little spent, it means they have spent it on helping their jungler.
From here you can be confident that most junglers will path their way towards the opposite side, while full clearing their jungle. This means that you will be able to approximate their position at all times
Another thing that will help you track the enemy jungle is keeping the track of their CS (creep-score). Since each jungle camp gives 4 CS, it is not hard to deduce which camps they killed based on the CS.
Matchup Knowledge
Other than getting good at tracking, you will also need a good matchup knowledge to pull off this cheesy strategy. You have to be able to predict the outcome of the fight, this means knowing how strong your champion is, and how strong the enemy champion is.
Additionally, you will need to expand this calculation to your laners and the opposing laners. When you put all these things together, you will become great at invading, and you can expect a significant improvement in rank as a result.
2. Funneling
Coming in hot with another cheesing strategy. This is hands down the cheesiest strategy you might encounter in League of Legends, and probably any other game for that matter.
Funneling is a strat that revolves around funneling most (ideally all) gold to one designated carry. The carry is usually a hyper-scaling champion that has the ability to run through entire teams solo.
Funneling creates such a high discrepancy between the carry champion, and everyone on the map, which makes it really hard for the opposing teams to deal with it, especially if they are not extremely coordinated.
The cheesy strat is generally frowned upon in the League of Legends community, as it completely changes the way the game is played, and it is not fun for either team playing for reasons I will explain.
Yi and Taric Funneling
The most popular funnel involves Yi and Taric. This combination has Taric going midlane, usually with smite, and Yi going jungle. The Yi will then proceed to fast-full-clear his jungle, while also dropping by midlane to collect some lane CS from time to time.
As you might imagine, all the gold and experience makes Yi scale extremely fast. After a while, the two can start taking every objective and roaming the map, killing everyone in sight.
What is frustrating for other players is that they are all forced to adapt to this cheesy strat. The enemies have to focus on shutting down Yi, and preventing his snowball. Which is really hard to do, while allies all have to play around Yi, and without Yi.
Since Yi will spend all the time focused on himself, the allies will be left vulnerable to ganks and other pressures from the enemy team. More often than not, this will result in much toxicity, and sometimes, games get trolled.
Should you play funnel?
If you are considering funnel, there are two things to consider. The first thing to consider is viability. Riot has made many changes to the jungle in season 13, and some have made this strategy significantly weaker.
For example, the lane minions give less XP to junglers, which makes it harder to level up, and subsequently decreases the chance of snowball. Also, the current meta favors ganking over farming much more. Anyhow, if you get good at funneling, the playstyle can still be viable.
The second thing to consider is the mental aspect. You will often be flamed, and you will probably decrease the game enjoyment for all the other players in the lobby. If this is something you do not mind, you will have no trouble playing funnel.
3. Cheesy Jungle Picks
There is a set of junglers that are meta in every given season, and most players get used to playing against them. This makes the champions much weaker, as the players get trained to exploit their weaknesses.
A good way to counter this is picking some cheesy champs, this will leave the enemies in the dark, not knowing what to expect, while you will be there knowing all ins and outs of the champion you are playing.
Here are my top cheesy jungle picks:
1. Nasus Jungle
Nasus jungle is the highest quality off-meta cheesy pick. Playing him in the jungle allows you to stack much faster than you would playing him traditionally, and this will allow you to surprise the enemies, and hard-snowball the game.
Clear and Build
The playstyle for this pick is quite simple. All that you are required to do is stack the jungle camps. To do this efficiently, I would recommend starting at the Red Buff. Since the Red Buff gives healing, it is great for making you clear with healthy HP.
As soon as you are done with the Red Buff, you can go on stacking the other camps. Starting with Krugs, and then going for Raptors, all the way to Gromp on the opposite side of the map.
When it comes to items, you should aim to strike a good balance between CDR and tankiness. The CDR, will help you proc the Q more often, which will allow you to get more damage off, and the tankiness will allow you to survive longer.
It is important to note that building damage is not really significant. It is truly a noob trap. The damage items are just a drop in a bucket compared to the damage you will get from your Q, and you would be trading survivability for essentially nothing by building them.
Gameplay
The gameplay for Nasus jungle is nothing advanced. The thing you will want to focus on is getting stacks, and after some 10 or 15 minutes, you can start seizing the game. The easiest way to do this is by farming towers and objectives.
Whenever your team is grouped on one side, you can make your way to a distant location where you can spend some time alone with a tower. When you ult, you will be able to take the tower within seconds.
The same can be done with objectives too. Nasus jungle is extremely good at killing objectives quickly, due to the sheer power of a well-stacked Q.
When it comes to the later stages of the game, you will simply want to focus on the enemy carries. Using W on squishy targets will make it easy to pass all the enemies, and run down the opposing backline.
2. Twitch Jungle
Twitch jungle is another noteworthy jungle pick. It has been around for a while, but now is the perfect time to play it. The jungle changes have made the ganking playstyle more favorable, and since Twitch jungle is a ganking champion, it’s clear how it makes him a decent pick.
As Twitch jungle, you might struggle clearing the camps in the early game, and that is okay. Because on the flip side, you will be able to perform ganks as soon as you hit lvl 2. My favorite thing to do as Twitch jungle is to clear the red buff, and then gank midlane or toplane, depending on which lane is pushed further by enemies.
To make the ganks easier, I recommend running Press the Attack, this keystone enhances the damage you will do after auto-attacking an enemy 3 times. It is perfect to use alongside E to execute enemies early.
If you want to learn about 10 more off-meta junglers, I recommend reading this article.
4. Proxy Farming
Proxy farming is definitely one of the cheese strategies that you should know. It entails farming the enemy minions, between the enemy towers. This means that the minions will never reach the lane, and they will not be able to protect the enemy tower.
Additionally, proxy farming forces the opposing laner to fight minions under their tower, which can result in losing some CS gold. This strategy is mostly done in the toplane, but it can be done in botlane from time to time.
Proxy farming is a strategy that can be countered by ally support. With correct timing, the team playing against proxy can take down the champion that is proxying by grouping against them. Since most champions that are good at proxying have many escapes, trying to catch them will often result in a waste of time.
The champions that are most popular for proxying are the following Singed and Tryndamere. Both have kits that allow them to clear the waves at extraordinary speeds, as well as many escape tools.
Here is a good article to learn more about proxying.
5. Fake Recalling
Fake recalling is a small cheese strategy that you can use in many games. Its aim is to trick the enemy into thinking that you have recalled, while you are still in lane. The most cheesy way to do it is by recalling on the edge of a bush, while the vision is still on you, once the recall timer is down to 0.2 seconds then you can simply walk into the bush, this will create an illusion of recalling.
I have found that this trick works around 90% of the time. The enemy will think that I have recalled, and I will be able to do a surprise play. To make this strategy work, however, you will also need to know your champion limits well. If you try to surprise an enemy when you are weaker, you might end up being the surprised one, in case the play fails.
6. Roaming as Support
Roaming as support is a really effective strategy. In the past, it was really cheesy, as it was not utilized by many players, but as time went on, more and more players started using it. Despite being meta now, it is still fair to call this a cheese strat.
Roaming as support is much like roaming in any other role, but there are some upsides that make it a little more viable and sneaky. As a roaming support, you are not under a huge threat of losing resources. Your ADC will soak up the extra XP, and the loss will be much less than that of a roaming mid laner or top laner.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though, as roaming at bad times can leave your ADC vulnerable to dying. This can backfire pretty badly, and it can cost you a game pretty quickly. Things get even worse if you happen to be matched with a short-fused ADC.
Anyhow, roaming is a great strategy that every support player should have in their skillset. It can net really positive results, and when fully mastered, it delivers insane returns in the SoloQue environment.
Conclusion
Cheese strats are the best way to have fun in League of Legends, gain leads, and tilt your enemies. Which strategy you will want to employ in your game depends on what you want to get out of the game. To get the most lead, you can consistently invade, or play something like Yi/Taric funnel, and if you just want to have fun, you can go for exotic picks like Nasus and Twitch jungle.
(5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)
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