Should You Main Kai'Sa? Tier F
Kai'Sa is tier F for maining. Only 11 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 1,654,950 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Kai'Sa scores 0.64 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 0.64 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 4 Challenger · 7 Grandmaster · 69 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 1,654,950 games played worldwide · 17.96% pick rate · 3.14% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
Kai'Sa picked like picked or banned 20% of the time. Only four challengers are playing Kai'Sa as a main right now and seven grand masters. So I'm using mainly onetricks.gg by the way and op.gg as stats for these champions.
So whatever's on there is accurate. If you think it's not accurate, then you can probably take it up with them. But yes, so far what I've seen it's fairly good.
But yes, so because so many players play Kai'Sa, everybody kind of knows how to play against it and there's very few challenger GM players for Kai'Sa. Even though there are so many players for Kai'Sa. So yeah, it's going to be a little bit tough to imagine maining Kai'Sa right now just because it's so popular.
Similar situation to Caitlyn.
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.