With League of Legends Season 11 just a couple of weeks away now, we’ve decided to cast our minds back to Season 10 to alleviate your final days of preseason boredom. Come back ranked LoL, we miss you.
Anyway, we’ve already shown you which of the world’s top League of Legends pros were the most aggressive and bloodthirsty on the Rift in 2020 (hint: it’s a Russian), but now we turn to the reason we all pick up LoL in the first place: the champions. After digging through more of GoL.gg’s stats, we’ve found some interesting and surprising tidbits from Season 10.
Before we dive in, a few bits of admin. These are stats pulled solely from competitions involving teams from Riot’s 12 top official leagues. This includes splits within those leagues (e.g. LCS Summer Split) but also other cups or international events (e.g. the Mid-Season Cup or Worlds). Right, let’s get into it.
In his first full season as a League of Legends champion, it was Aphelios who was seen the most on the Rift across the competitive landscape. The product of 200 years of professional game design experience is clearly working as intended, then…
The champion was picked on 1,283 occasions across all competitions and commanded many a bot lane throughout 2020. This only just outweighs the number of times players banned Aphelios, which came in at 1,249.
| Position | Champion | Total Season 10 picks |
| 1 | Aphelios | 1,283 |
| 2 | Nautilus | 1,265 |
| 3 | Sett | 1,188 |
| 4 | Ornn | 1,122 |
| 5 | Ezreal | 1,009 |
With a total presence rate of 72%, Aphelios was the second most frequent champion to appear in the draft, and is topped only by the champion with the most bans of Season 10: Sett.
With a 79% presence rate, we certainly saw Sett’s face pop up a lot in the draft. However, this was mainly for bans. Sett was banned on 1,592 occasions by pro LoL players this year, more than any other champion.
| Position | Champion | Total Season 10 bans |
| 1 | Sett | 1,592 |
| 2 | Syndra | 1,315 |
| 3 | Aphelios | 1,249 |
| 4 | Kalista | 1,249 |
| 5 | LeBlanc | 1,235 |
He did also manage to get locked in over a thousand times as well, which is why his presence rate is so high.
Syndra was a close second behind Sett with 1,315 bans across all competitions.
By a long stretch, the champion with the best average KDA across Season 10 is one you may not expect: Yuumi. The Magical Cat was seen on the Rift on 323 occasions in 2020, and achieved an average KDA of 6.1, a considerable jump from the 5.6 KDAs posted by Jhin and Zilean.
Favoured by the likes of T1’s new signing Ryu ‘Keria’ Min-seok and Cloud9’s Philippe ‘Vulcan’ Laflamme, Yuumi has proved an effective pick for some of the world’s top supports.
And finally, we’ve got a random one for you. On sorting the stats by average damage per minute, a rather unexpected champion comes up at the top of the pile.
With 795 damage per minute on average – which is over 100 damage more than second place – is Teemo. Yes, really. Why? Well, you have toplaner Danny ‘Dan Dan’ Le Comte to thank.
The former Misfits player whipped out Teemo for a single game – a 25-minute defeat to G2 in the LEC Spring Split – which was the only appearance the champion made in LoL esports this year. His damage numbers mean Teemo’s average DPM is the best of Season 10.
Now, if we’re being serious and scientific here, we would exclude Teemo and look to a champion that actually saw in a considerable amount of game time. With just over a thousand games on the Rift in 2020, Ezreal stands out as a consistent damage dealer, averaging 637 DPM.
