What is Minion Dematerializer?
Minion Dematerializer is a rune in the inspiration tree that shares a slot with Biscuit Delivery and Future’s Market.
Minion Dematerializer will provide players with three consumable items that instantly kill a minion in the lane, granting increased damage against that type of minion for the rest of the game.
This is an incredibly niche rune, and champions who use an Inspiration Keystone often will find better use out of Future’s Market or Biscuit Delivery. The reason being that both of these alternatives provide a guaranteed benefit – the ability to borrow money to reach item spikes faster can be incredibly beneficial, and receiving healing items in your inventory while you’re on the map is always good.
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When is Minion Dematerializer good then?
Minion Dematerializer isn’t a lousy rune; it’s just a rune that requires particular use-cases to be more valuable than its alternatives. Let’s look at what some of the situations you’d want to take Minion Dematerializer may be.
1. If you’re playing a champion that barely struggles to clear waves.
The best example of this is Twisted Fate. TF is a champion that really would like to get out of lane with his ultimate ability, R – Destiny, to affect the map; however, he would like to be able to gain lane priority before he does that, so he’s not bleeding out experience and gold due to poor wave-state.
Twisted Fate at level 9 will find that his Q – Wild Cards just barely leave caster minions alive (unless you’re very accelerated from early game kills). However, suppose the same Twisted Fate uses 3 Minion Dematerializers on the caster minions. In that case, the increased 12% damage he does towards them will let him clear all the casters with a single ability – letting him shove the wave quickly to roam.
This is the preeminent Minion Dematerializer use case, and almost all Twisted Fate rune pages will use it.
In the past, champions like Gangplank, Leblanc, and Malzahar have all seen use-cases for dematerializing the backlines for more effortless wave clear – but certainly not to the same extent that Twisted Fate appreciates the rune.
2. You’re really good at playing Support
Most players will not be able to get the maximum benefit from taking dematerializer on support champions (considering the most significant benefit of dematerializer is the increased damage to minions, it might even seem counterintuitive to take the rune on a champion that doesn’t intend to farm waves).
However, if you’re really looking to improve your skills, there are certain cases when this rune can be valuable for supports in the bottom lane, and there’s a reason you’ll see professional players take it.
Higher ELO and professional supports will sometimes take minion dematerializer on tanky melee supports because they struggle to walk up to cannon minions to secure them with Spoils of War (the support item passive that will execute a minion below 40% health, granting gold and healing to your adc) without receiving uncontested poke damage in return. This gives these champions an easy way to contest cannons from range.
These tank supports also lack some of the shoving power that enchanter and mage supports can provide, so being able to make cannons disappear when you’re attempting to shove the wave in to deny farm to the enemy after a kill and recall will give a tempo advantage in your ability to get back out onto the map faster – every second counts in the game of League.
One rarer situation where a support might want minion dematerializer involves contesting early level-based power spikes. If you’re playing a lane where level advantage may give you the ability to secure a kill on level up (especially if you can get to level 2 or 3 before the enemy adc) dematerializer can provide a quick boost of experience.
Let’s imagine that your adc is three minions away from level 2. If one minion were low enough to last hit, one minion was below 40% health, and one minion were full health, your adc could cs the lowest minion while you melee executed the 40% minion and dematerialized the full health minion. This hypothetical would allow an adc to gain three minions of experience extremely fast, which could be the difference between surprising the enemies with a fast level-up and all-in, or handshaking the lane and farming it out until you find an advantage later in the game.
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3. You want to cheese the enemy.
While a lot of League of Legends content focuses on optimal use cases all the time, sometimes you’re just trying to execute a cheesy strategy that can take enemies unaware. The ability to make a minion disappear unexpectedly can allow champions like Irelia to reset her Q against minions she wouldn’t usually be able to (it registers as a kill if you Q to a dematerializing minion, giving you a stack of your passive and a Q cooldown refresh) all while the enemy is only expecting you to dash to low-health minions.
Other champions may attempt to dematerialize a minion and then use a skillshot such as Blitzcrank hook, thresh hook, or any other skillshot cc through the gap that was created (though more advanced players will be aware of the minion dematerializer visual effects and won’t fall prey to this type of strategy)
So while you might not take Minion Dematerializer often, it’s essential to know when you should – or how the enemy might utilize it against you. If you keep thinking about this rune critically and the strengths and weaknesses your champion might have, you might even find use-cases for the rune that other players haven’t discovered yet. Good luck getting the most out of this rune, and don’t stop trying to discover effective new strategies just because they’re not yet meta.
