Should You Main Swain? Tier D
Swain is tier D for maining. Only 14 of its mains are Challenger or Grandmaster across the three major regions, against 633,118 games played worldwide.
Reviewed for League of Legends patch 16.15.
Verdict. Swain scores 2.12 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, against a median of 2.26.
The numbers
Score 2.12 high elo mains per 100,000 games played, ban-adjusted · 3 Challenger · 11 Grandmaster · 111 tracked mains in KR, EUW and NA · 633,118 games played worldwide · 6.87% pick rate · 3.93% ban rate
What this means
From the video: Vambient's breakdown, lightly cleaned from speech
The next up is going to be Swain. Swain is going to be a little bit tough to main these days. Sort of a counter pick in the bot lane and the mid lane option.
So he is picked 7% of the time and banned 4% of the time. Three challenger Swain players, 11 Grandmaster Swain players. I think it's okay if you really know what you're doing on Swain.
So, we can move him a little bit up as well, but the stats kind of as say that he's not that good. There's a lot of people picking him and there's it's not very like not very successful, I guess.
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.