Should You Main Alistar? Tier D
Alistar is tier D for maining. Only 6 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 309,833 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Alistar scores 1.91 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 1.91 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 0 Challenger · 6 Grandmaster · 45 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 309,833 games played worldwide · 3.36% pick rate · 1.17% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
Alistar, we're going to have to go with bad tom. So this is one of the few champions. I'm going to mention this surprising pretty surprising actually to me.
There are zero challenger players across three major regions. So this is NA, US again and Korea. And only six GMs.
So even helicopter is not a challenger right now I think. But he is a GM I think. So there are there are a few Alice like maybe one or two here and there.
But the mains are sometimes not high elo. Of course, like they could just be not grinding, but yeah, we aren't seeing too much representation at the top for Alistar. But yeah, is basically the only guy I know who plays it.
So yeah, I mean, you can let me know if I'm missing anybody, but I think he's the only one.
How this was measured
Two numbers, one division. First, how many players are currently in Challenger or Grandmaster maining this champion in Korea, Europe West and North America, from onetricks.gg. Second, how many ranked games the entire playerbase plays of this champion worldwide across every rank, from op.gg. The result is high elo mains per 100,000 games played, then reduced by the champion's ban rate, because a champion you cannot pick is a champion you cannot main.
This is not a win rate list and it is not a patch strength list. It measures availability-adjusted high-elo main density: how much Challenger and Grandmaster main representation a champion has relative to how often it is played. It is not the probability that maining this champion will get you to high elo. The score counts Challenger and Grandmaster mains only, drawn from a tracked pool that starts at Master; it does not include the Chinese server, and it counts accounts rather than people, so one dedicated player with several high elo accounts shows up more than once. Patch 16.15. The full plain English explanation, including everything this list cannot tell you, is on the main list page.
Popularity is not the signal. What matters here is how densely high elo mains appear relative to how often the champion is played.