Mel Medarda has many League of Legends players struggling to counter her raft of abilities, but there are a few relatively simply pointers that can help.
League of Legends may have had a rocky start to 2025, but not all has been received poorly. While the Hextech Chest debacle is certainly controversial, with many players thinking the game is slowly moving toward losing its free-to-play roots, the Noxus-themed changes have generally been more positively received.
In addition to revamping Summoner’s Rift, League of Legends 2025 Act 1 also introduced new champ Mel Medarda to the playable champion roster. The character already has many fans thanks to her role in the animated Netflix series Arcane. But her abilities are rather controversial, resulting in her getting an extremely high ban rate. Those matched up against Mel will surely want to know how to counter her abilities.
Champions including Vel’Koz, Xerath, and Taliyah are strong picks against Mel due to their powerful poke abilities.
Others like Kassadin and Fizz are also great picks because they’re hard to reliably attack and can dive onto her, so she can’t utilize her passive effectively and might find herself overwhelmed.
Long-range characters such as Viktor, Ryze, Veigar, and Taliyah have a high win rate against Mel. These champions work well because of their crowd-control abilities as they leave Mel with less mobility. Players taking advantage of her immobilization period must be wary of the cooldowns of her barrier, however.
While Veigar’s E is excellent at immobilizing and quickly eliminating Mel, she can use her barrier to reflect his sure-hit ultimate attack. Veigar’s rather squishy, and having his ult reflected back may take him down.
Players against Mel must avoid being attacked for free because she can execute with her passive. Stay away to prevent her from dealing 3 or 6 stacks early whenever she uses her Q or E abilities. Those who find their health low should consider recalling after crashing or freezing the minion wave and using the teleport spell to return to lane quickly.
At the start of the landing phase, it’s a good idea to poke Mel to ensure she can’t farm as much. Like other champions, Mel’s damage is directly affected by her item builds, and ensuring she doesn’t have the required gold to buy core items will let players shut her down.
Countering Mel in the bot lane is similar to how players can do in the mid lane. Characters that work against her while playing bottom are those with good range and poke, like Caitlyn and Ziggs. They must bait out her barrier ability before playing aggressively and then punishing her for it. Caitlyn’s ultimate, in particular, is easily reflected, as is the ultimate of other popular ADCs like Ashe.
Mel’s strength comes from team fights and she’s not as good alone, so players must take advantage of that. Teams playing against Mel should prevent her from ending the game early because she doesn’t scale well, unlike some other mages. While she may seem very strong initially, most ADC and mage champions can eventually scale beyond her. Since regular League of Legends games can often be drawn out into late-game situations that dramatically change how champions interact, players will mostly have to watch out for her reflect and execute abilities earlier on. The exceptions include when Mel is fed enough to deal high damage consistently before her opponents can reach the same state, at which point counter-play becomes more difficult.
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