Should You Main Neeko? Tier C
Neeko is tier C for maining, around the middle of the game. 3 Challenger and 8 Grandmaster mains across the three major regions, on 246,325 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Neeko scores 4.43 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 4.43 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 3 Challenger · 8 Grandmaster · 46 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 246,325 games played worldwide · 2.67% pick rate · 0.89% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
So, it's definitely a competitive champion. Nico is going to be in the C tier. So, definitely more niche of a champion.
You're kind of seeing a pattern here where the more popular champions are actually less good to play and this kind of holds well with my findings in higher MMR. So three challenger mains and eight grand match mains for Nico right now and pretty low right around where is in terms of pick man rate.
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.