League of Legends dev settles 14-year debate by revealing the MOBA's worst matchups, and one character is such a loser that he's 3 of the bottom 4

The worst matchup in League of Legends has been revealed - and it's so one-sided that it's also the second- and third-worst matchups too.

A 'hard counter' is one character or strategy that entirely shuts down another. Think rock-paper-scissors - rock will never beat paper, so you might argue that paper is a 'hard counter' to rock. The idea is found across all kinds of games, but if you find yourself on the receiving end of one in a game like League of Legends - with its lengthy games and focused 1v1 laning phases - it's unlikely to feel very fun to play.

Now, Riot has revealed arguably the hardest counter in the entire game. In a post on the League of Legends subreddit, one user asked "What do you think is the single worst champion matchup in the entire game?" Phrased another way, "What champion, when facing a specific other champion, do you think has the lowest chance of winning?" With a roster of 164 champions, there are a lot of potential matchups, but a Riot QA Engineer quickly jumped into the thread to provide the definitive answer: Malphite vs Sylas is so one-sided that Sylas has the massive upper hand, almost regardless of how you play him.

To get a sense of what that means, it's worth discussing who these characters are. Malphite is essentially a sentient mountain, whose main role in the game is as an anti-physical damage tank, and who has a massive, teamfight-engaging ultimate ability in which he charges forward and knocks up anyone caught in the blast. Malphite wants to build lots of armor, but he can build magic damage instead if he really wants to blow people up with that ultimate (but at the cost of his tankiness).

Sylas is, for all intents and purposes, a communist wizard, whose own ultimate allows him to steal the ultimates of other champions. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Sylas does the exact wrong kind of damage for Malphite, and can take his ultimate away to use on his own team, twisting it with the magic damage that Sylas already wants to build so that it does way more damage than Malphite can hope to do.

Sylas is also a real bully in a direct fight between the two of them, thanks to his innate ability to heal a percentage of the damage he does. To counter that, Malphite can buy an item called Bramble Vest, which curtails enemy healing. Unfortunately, it's an armor item, so while it's nice for Malphite, it does nothing to reduce the damage that Sylas is already doing, making it a very expensive gold sink in a matchup that Malphite is already struggling in.

It's such a disastrous matchup that it barely matters where Sylas plays the game - Malphite will still probably lose. The mage can be in the mid lane, top lane, or even the jungle, and he'll still counter the mountain so hard that those three possibilities are three of the four worst situations in the entire game. The maths behind exactly how many different matchups there are in a given game is too hard for my tiny brain to comprehend - one 2014 attempt to calculate the number of total team permutations topped out at more than 47 quadrillion, and the maths has only become more complex since then. Yet for all those possibilities, the mage whoops the mountain harder than pretty much all of them.

The only matchups that come close are actually pretty similar. Elsewhere, GalaxySmash revealed Rammus vs Mordekaiser features in the other slot in the bottom four when both characters play top lane, with Rammus' jungle role not far behind. Funnily enough, Rammus is another armor-stacking tank, while Mordekaiser is another melee-focused magic user with plenty of healing in their kit. That's a pretty substantial pattern, but it's also probably what you get if you build a physical damage tank into a magic-heavy matchup - team-building is important, people.

League of Legends Worlds 2023 has just kicked off, shortly after these Korean players did so well they exempted themselves from military service.

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.