Data: itemization

The builds the ladder has solved, and the ones it hasn't

Updated 13 July 2026. Corpus: 115,000+ ranked games, patch 16.13, verified clean.

Some champions have exactly one first item, bought in game after game with almost no disagreement. Others are a genuine argument, where the most popular core shows up in barely a third of builds. That split, between the champions the playerbase has solved and the ones it is still fighting over, is its own kind of tier list, and it is measurable.

How to read these tables

These are completed-item shares from end-of-game inventories, restricted to champion-and-role cells with a real sample. A few honest notes on what that does and doesn't capture:

• Final items, not buy order. Riot's match record stores what you finished, not the sequence you finished it in. So this is "what the core build converges to," not "what to rush first." Purchase-order analysis is a separate, harder problem we're working on.
• Share is popularity. The percentage is how often the item appears, nothing more. We deliberately do not rank these by win rate: a raw item win rate is dominated by when the item is bought (defensive items look weak because you buy them while behind), so it is a misleading measure of an item's strength. Popularity we can report honestly; strength needs the debiased method below.
• Sample floors. Every row shown clears a few hundred games on the champion-and-role, with the game count printed so you can weigh it.

Solved: one core, no argument

These champions have a first item so forced it is nearly a stat on the champion itself. When 19 out of 20 players buy the same thing, the build question has been answered and the interesting decisions are elsewhere.

Irelia is the cleanest case: Blade of the Ruined King in 96–97% of games whether she is played top or mid, a build that travels with the champion regardless of lane. When a core is this fixed, the games are won and lost on when the item comes online and what goes around it, not on the choice itself.

Contested: the most popular pick is still a minority

The other end. For these champions the single most-built core shows up in fewer than half of games, which means the plurality build is losing the argument as often as it wins it. A live debate, a champion with real build flexibility, or a meta mid-shift: the low share is the signal that the answer is not settled.

Malphite is the instructive one: at 1,200+ games, the 42% on Sunfire Aegis is not thin data, it is a real disagreement, the tank-versus-burst-AP identity crisis showing up in the item slot. When you play a champion from this table, the "standard build" is a much weaker default than it feels, and paying attention to the enemy team actually matters.

Even the boots are an argument

Boots are the itemization decision players think about least and copy most. For some champions they are as contested as the core, and the majority choice is a coin-flip against the field.

Master Yi's boots split five ways with no option above 20%: defensive Steelcaps against AD, Swiftness to stick to targets, Lucidity for uptime, all viable, all situational. This is the kind of decision players autopilot and shouldn't.

The honest caveats

• Consensus is descriptive, not prescriptive. A solved build tells you the ladder agrees, not that the ladder is right. Whole champions have been stuck on a suboptimal "standard build" for entire patches because everyone copies everyone.
• Shares move with the meta. A contested build today can solve overnight when a patch tunes one item, and a solved one can crack open. The game counts tell you how much weight a row can bear.
• This is the popularity layer, on purpose. We are showing you what people build because we can measure it honestly. What people should build is a claim we won't make from raw win rates.

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