Should You Main Graves? Tier D
Graves is tier D for maining. Only 25 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 945,743 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Graves scores 2.42 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 2.42 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 6 Challenger · 19 Grandmaster · 110 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 945,743 games played worldwide · 10.27% pick rate · 8.28% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
But yeah, Graves, honestly, this is going to surprise most people, but it's going to be bad to M Graves. The reason being is because he does have a very high ban rate, and he does have a very high pick rate. So, he shows up in over 10% of games.
And he is banned in 8% of them. And he I mean, I perma ban Graves myself, so you basically won't get to play him with me. On enemy team.
So there's that I guess anecdotal evidence as well, but essentially a lot of people have Graves as their perma van. It's not going to be as good to main as a result. So the higher you go, the more he will be banned and you won't be able to play him.
And there only there are six challenger Graves mains and there are 19 GM Graves mains. So he does have the representation in higher MMRs, but he is banned or picked a lot. So he is highly contested as well.
So you're not going to be able to play him basically. I think this is one of the picks where he is okay if you can play him in like patches where I guess even win rate data kind of shows him is fairly low. But yeah, he has a lot of games behind him.
But he has very high ban and pick rate. So these are one of the champions where it's not going to be to your benefit 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.