Quick Answer: League of Legends Classic gives you 60 champions on their Season 3-era kits. If you're new or returning, start with champions whose kits barely changed in 13 years — Annie, Ashe, Garen, Malphite, Amumu, Sona — because your instincts (or your tutorial) still apply. The champions to approach with fresh eyes are the pre-rework kits: old Sion, old Taric, old Warwick, old Fiddlesticks and friends play nothing like their modern versions, and half the fun of this mode is that nobody under 30 has ever laned against them. This page covers the old role system, the best beginner picks, what the extinct kits do, and matchup basics; for rankings see the tier list, and for what to buy on all of them, the builds guide.
Champion select, 2013 edition — note the Runes & Masteries panel bottom-left: your build starts before the game does. (Screenshot: Riot Games / League of Legends, via the official League of Legends Wiki)
Getting Started in LoL Classic
Three things to internalize before your first lock-in (the mode basics live in our League Classic hub):
- Your pre-game setup is part of your champion. Runes and masteries add real stats — set up a basic page before queuing (armor Seals, MR Glyphs, damage Marks/Quints; a 21/9/0 or 0/9/21 mastery spread — details in the builds guide). New Classic accounts grow into this via Classic Levels, exactly like 2013 accounts did.
- Combat is slower and stickier than modern League. Fewer dashes, longer cooldowns, less damage per rotation. Fights are won by positioning and cooldown tracking more than by outplaying mid-exchange — trades you'd escape in modern League will kill you here, and trades that would kill you in modern League are survivable.
- Wards win games. No trinkets — vision is bought. Every player carrying one ward per back is the single biggest team-level edge available in early Classic lobbies.
Champion Roles in S3
The role map of 2013 mostly resembles today's — top, jungle, mid, ADC, support — but with different expectations per seat:
- Top is an island: long lanes, teleport-or-nothing rotations, sustain wars into splitpush or frontline duty. Bruisers (Jax, Olaf, Wukong), tanks (Malphite, Dr. Mundo, Singed) and oddballs (Nidalee, Kayle) live here.
- Jungle is item- and route-driven, with meaningful counter-jungling. Engage tanks (Amumu, Jarvan, Skarner, Nunu), skirmishers (Lee Sin, Olaf), and farm-to-carry picks (Master Yi with Feral Flare dreams) all function.
- Mid is the roam engine: Twisted Fate, Katarina and Ahri turn lane advantages into map advantages; artillery and control mages (Lux, Anivia, Karthus) turn it into siege.
- ADC carries harder and later than modern League — hypercarries (Vayne, Kog'Maw, Tristana, Twitch) are genuine win conditions with the right protection.
- Support is an economy-and-vision class built on gold-generation items and Sightstone. Engage (Leona, Blitzcrank, Alistar, Taric), enchanters (Janna, Sona, Soraka, Lulu) and utility mages (Zilean, Morgana, Lux) all support fine in this system.
Top 10 Champions for Beginners
Chosen on two criteria: simple to execute, and close enough to their modern kit that nothing you know is a lie.
| Champion | Role | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Annie | Mid | Point-and-click burst, stun management teaches trading windows |
| Ashe | ADC | No escapes forces positioning discipline — the ADC fundamentals teacher |
| Miss Fortune | ADC | Strong lane, simple teamfight job: find a line, press R |
| Garen | Top | Sustain, tenacity, no mana — survives lane-learning mistakes |
| Malphite | Top | Armor lane bully; one of the game's clearest engage ultimates |
| Amumu | Jungle | Forgiving clears, and his ult teaches teamfight timing better than any champion |
| Warwick (old) | Jungle | The classic first jungler: sustain covers routing errors, point-and-click ult |
| Master Yi | Jungle | Teaches farm-to-carry pacing; just accept the deaths as tuition |
| Sona | Support | Auras and poke with minimal mechanics; teaches back-line spacing |
| Soraka (old) | Support | Pure sustain support — bans no mechanics, teaches map awareness |
Note two of these — Warwick and Soraka — are pre-rework kits, but simpler than their modern versions, not stranger.
Pre-Rework Kits: What's Different
This is the section for both audiences: veterans who miss these kits, and newer players who've never seen them. Champions confirmed in the launch roster whose kits were later reworked out of modern League include Sion, Taric, Warwick, Fiddlesticks, Nunu, Dr. Mundo, Pantheon, Soraka, Kayle, Evelynn and Gragas — what follows describes their Season 3-era play patterns qualitatively (ability numbers inside the mode are Riot's to tune, so we don't quote any).
- Old Sion is the roster's biggest museum piece: no unstoppable charge, no revive-march. The era's Sion was a stun-and-shield champion whose AP build detonated his shield for burst — an assassin-shaped zombie that modern players have no mental model for.
- Old Taric is the "gems are truly outrageous" Taric: a point-and-click stun, an armor aura and a heal — engage support logic with none of the modern skill-shot dance.
- Old Warwick has no camouflaged pounce-from-fog; he's a sustain jungler whose ultimate is a point-and-click suppression — simple, and still a lesson in flash timing for his target.
- Old Fiddlesticks plays the same horror-movie ultimate game (crowstorm from fog is eternal) but with a channeled point-and-click drain and a silence instead of the modern effigy mind-games.
- Old Nunu is objective control incarnate: consume the camp, control the buffs, channel the map's scariest "get off the Baron" button.
- Old Dr. Mundo hurls cleavers and regenerates through entire team rotations — the purest stat-check top laner of the era.
- Old Pantheon is all-in lane bullying with a point-and-click spear-stun setup and a cross-map ultimate drop.
- Old Soraka is the infinite-sustain lane battery the modern rework deliberately killed — starcall spam, mana battery for the ADC, global heal.
- Old Kayle is a hybrid attack-speed skirmisher whose intervention ultimate is unchanged in spirit: the best "you can't kill my carry" button in the roster.
- Old Evelynn is the S3 stealth assassin — permanent map-pressure by existing, which is why vision wards (see builds) spike in value the moment she's locked.
- Old Gragas is a bruiser-mage hybrid with body-slam engage — closer to a diving wrestler than the modern barrel zoner.
If a kit above sounds alien: that's the pitch. These play patterns existed for years, were competitive, and are learnable in an afternoon.
Counters & Matchups
Era-appropriate matchup logic, stated as principles rather than a fabricated matchup table — week-one Classic is too young for anyone to honestly publish per-matchup data:
- Sustain beats aggression it can't be killed by. Dr. Mundo, Warwick, Soraka lanes bend but don't break; win by denying farm or roaming, not by forcing kills into regen.
- Point-and-click beats stealth and dodging. Old Taric, Warwick and Pantheon don't care about your juking; conversely, mobility (Lee Sin, Katarina) devalues skill-shot-dependent picks (Blitzcrank, Lux, Morgana).
- Hard engage beats poke; disengage beats hard engage. Amumu/Leona/Jarvan comps run over siege teams; Janna, Gragas' old body-block, Zilean speed and Shurelya's actives unwind the dive. Draft accordingly — the triangle is the S3 meta in one sentence.
- Hypercarries beat everything after 40 minutes. If you can't end against Vayne, Kog'Maw, Tristana or Nasus comps, you eventually don't. Kassadin and Twisted Fate (see tier list) exist to make sure the game doesn't get there on your terms.
- The banned-by-absence effect. Several kits' historical counters (Thresh's lantern against dive, Zed against immobile mages) aren't in the roster yet — expect matchup wisdom to shift with each roster wave.
Advanced Tips by Role
- Top: track the enemy jungler's start side from leash timing; long S3 lanes make ganks lethal. Buy the early Vision Ward for the river bush — it stays until killed.
- Jungle: your first clear decides your first gank. Counter-jungle only with lane priority — old jungle camps are lean enough that a stolen camp genuinely hurts.
- Mid: push-and-roam is the S3 mid's job description. Wave-clear speed is worth more than raw kill pressure — ask any Twisted Fate opponent.
- ADC: last-hitting under tower and kiting without modern dashes are the two skills to drill; Classic's slower combat rewards clean orb-walking more than modern League does.
- Support: own the vision economy — Sightstone charges, Vision Ward sweeps, Oracle's on a lead. Your gold-gen items mean every ward you place was, in effect, free.
Written August 4, 2026, six days after League Classic's launch. Roster and kit-version facts are sourced from the official League of Legends Wiki's League Classic page ("the champions in League Classic will have their older gameplay kits"); pre-rework kit descriptions are qualitative accounts of the Season 3-era designs and deliberately quote no in-mode numbers, since Riot may tune values within Classic. Matchup guidance is era-derived principle, not match data — Riot publishes none for this mode. Updated as roster waves land (first: August 12, 2026).
One Hit Kill Guides' League Classic coverage was created under Riot Games' "Legal Jibber Jabber" policy using assets owned by Riot Games. Riot Games does not endorse or sponsor this project.