Should You Main Garen? Tier F
Garen is tier F for maining. Only 3 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 815,250 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Garen scores 0.34 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 0.34 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 1 Challenger · 2 Grandmaster · 86 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 815,250 games played worldwide · 8.85% pick rate · 6.58% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
Garen's going to have to be in F tier. Even though he does scale decently well into the late game. There's only one challenger Garen player.
And there's two Grandmaster players across three major regions right now. So you can probably name them. They might be famous, but I'm not too sure.
I don't really see him too often anymore. So, yeah, 9% pick rate shows up a lot. You know, people like playing Garen, but, doesn't typically reach the higher, Apex tiers that often.
I think master tier has a lot more, but this isn't going to be about master tier. But yeah, Nar, another champion that is pretty bad to main.
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.