Reign of Gaming

Well yeah, but in laning I understand he's a pain in the ass. His only real function late is to chain kills together, though obviously he becomes a problem if he can do that.

Is there a legit counter to AP Yi?

There really are WAY too many counters to Fiora's ultimate. Haha.

I'm focusing primarily on laning matchups. Teamcomps, particularly in solo queue, are such a fussy and complex thing to mess with or write on. With there being over 100 champions, to give details on every possible teamcomp or to counter the opposing team in that way would be impossibly difficult.

Obviously, one will need a viable team composition, but the team that does that AND has favorable matchups in laning would obviously be more successful. You can't really study the pro game in this way, because they plan and flow and cover each others' mistakes so much more fluidly. So, to be clear, I'm more interested in 'general' laning matchups, not trying to counterpick entire teamcomps with the flimsy coordination the average players more commonly have with one another.

In solo queue, the best one can reliably do, I feel, is by winning their own matchups and creating a greater horizon from which their personal success can lead to that of their teammates as well.

A good start to this, if you ask me, is in champselect, and giving yourself the most ideal matchup you can while still filling out the domains (for example, the proper mix of tankiness, poking, teamfight presence and overall damage) that your team needs.

Ah, and Lee Sin's perhaps an even more significant counter to Akali, actually. Though really any stealth-revealing mechanic serves the function of negating Akali's only defensive mechanism, this one's built-in multiple times.

I can also definitely see how Cassio would beat out Morde in many situations with her greater range and DoTs that are able to keep Morde's shield from ever building, alongside her ability to stop his pushes. 

While I understand your viewpoint and I agree to a certain extent, that wasn't really the purpose of this thread. It's more for me to line up and study to later document counterplay. I never said countering someone in a lane guarantees your team victory or that it should take precedence over everything else in champselect. It doesn't. Synergy matters. Even if you counter every lane and the jungle, if your team has no front line and their team has a powerful one, you'll get rolled lategame unless your whole squad snowballs out of control early.

That said, I feel you're underestimating the importance of winning lane matchups. If your team counterpicks well and maintains good synergy while they do it, and all skill levels are equal, your team SHOULD come out of laning in a win-or-draw situation at every position and a very significant edge going into midgame. Earlygame and laning will determine much going into midgame, and many games end there, but even if they don't, advantages and success in the midgame also determines lategame. Don't underestimate the impact of winning your lane 1v1. It leads to dragons and successful jungling since your jungler won't have to concern themselves with 'covering' and the success of a given lane. It puts a strain on the opposing jungler when they have to drop what they're doing or lose a tower, or camp a lane due to a teammate failing.

Lane matchups are important, and smart counterplay can have quite a hand in this in every game.

True Ice is more of a situational thing. If you have a hard initiator or an anti-carry (Jarvan, Vi, and Jax come to mind among others) it can definitely work wonders, but in today's meta almost all support items are a situation thing. Philo Stone, once considered essential to supports for the GP10, is an item neglected by many high-elo supports. GP/10s are no longer must-have, because supports don't have to blow all their cash on wards all game long. They certainly don't hurt, but when I see a support rushing Shurelya's here in S3 I typically think to myself that they're behind on the meta.

Granted, I'm 'only' a gold myself, but most games go by where I don't even buy a Shurelya's or a Shard of True Ice. More often I wind up with Twin Shadows because of the utility it provides in allowing you to safely go and solo-ward certain key locations (Baron in particular) or predict/shut down ganks throughout the game. Movespeed's also amazing, and AP aids certain supports more than you might realize (Janna's shield has a great AP ratio, as do Lulu's pokes or a couple of Nami's skills).

Mikael's Crucible is also an incredible item that I highly recommend, and one I find in my inventory more often than Shurelya's.

Thanks for your input, everyone. I'm definitely taking all of this into consideration and writing some new ideas down.

What is Mordekaiser's 'hardest' counter? I don't know if he has a stone-cold hard counter. Some champs simply don't. But what's the closest to it?

I'm not a regular Irelia player, but I've personally run into Olaf in top lane before and it was frustrating, to say the least.

The Kayle-Darius thing might not be hard enough to call a hard counter, but she definitely has all the tools she needs to win the matchup, I'd say.

While I understand playstyles are the greatest 'counter' to certain champions, I want this to be a very specific and in-depth series, so I want to ask maybe more specifically myself: What are the hardest counters in the game that you can think of? Who, if you pick a certain champ, do you absolutely DREAD running into your lane from the opposite side?

Example: Yorick's ghosts make any kind of harassment of the rarely-seen Lane Trundle nearly-impossible, for example. He almost can't fight or harass Trundle 1v1 at all because everything he summons will be healing him the whole time. I'd call this a hard counter even if Trundle doesn't come out of the lane 10/0 and snowballing, because it's just an effortless win-or-draw scenario for Trundle, barring constant unforeseen ganks from Yorick's teammates.

Honestly, I've found the absolute best builds on Elise to be full or near-full tanky. Liandry's and then just all-in tanky I've had a lot of success with, or straight into Sunfire->FH or Warmogs. Her %damage abilities kind of ensure that she'll always be able to damage targets, and I find that if you can outlast them with tankiness, Elise will come out on top in more matchups than I'd have ever thought she could.

But for muramana itself, I guess it could synergize with certain tanky items you could get along with it, like one of the above posters wrote. FH and Iceborn aren't bad choices on her, though after that I'd be a bit at a loss what to get. If you're going Muramana, I'd think that you should to go all the way with it and keep stacking mana, so I'm not quite sure what I'd go for after that. I'd think you were a bit lacking in HP and possibly Mres at that point, though.

Jax over Fiora is definitely one worth mentioning. There've been a few featurettes like this one here and there - championselect.net has a few - but I want these to be very specific, and Jax is obviously a very specific counter to Fiora since he can shut down almost everything she does when it's 1v1, unless he's just utterly blown his cooldowns on other crap already. On the other side of the coin, I had Jayce as a solid hard counter to Jax.

Galio's also quite the party pooper for LeBlanc, along with most other 'burst-style' AP mids.

I'll add these to my list.