Quick Answer: The champions that defined Season 3 are defining Classic. Kassadin, Twisted Fate, Lee Sin, Jax, Vayne, Blitzcrank and Amumu headline the S-tier: take them whenever they're open. Read the methodology before quoting the list — Riot publishes no winrate data for this mode, so every Classic tier list is editorial judgment built on Season 3-era champion strength and early community play, not match statistics.
Version note: Ranked on the July 29 launch roster (patch 26.15), updated August 11, 2026 — the day before Classic's first content patch. Roster and mode facts are verified against the official League of Legends Wiki's League Classic page, linked inline. Re-ranked when roster waves and mode patches land.
The loading screen says it plainly: these are the Classic versions — old kits, old rules, old tier logic. (Screenshot: Riot Games / League of Legends, via the official League of Legends Wiki)
What is LoL Classic? (30 seconds)
League Classic is Riot's permanent Season 3 game mode, launched July 29, 2026: the original Summoner's Rift, old runes and masteries, the S3 item shop, and 60 champions on their old kits. New to the mode itself? Start with the League Classic hub. This page assumes you know what Classic is and just want to know who to pick.
Two roster facts shape every ranking below. The pool is 60 champions, all from the game's earliest years, so many Season 3 terrors (Thresh, Zed, Elise, Vi) simply aren't in the mode yet, which promotes the champions that used to contest them. And champions play their old kits, so your memory of the modern champion can be actively misleading — old Sion, old Taric and old Evelynn are different games entirely (see the champions guide).
S-Tier Champions
Pick these in any draft where they're available:
- Kassadin (mid) — the defining ban of the actual Season 3, and the logic hasn't changed: survive to 6, then roam the map at will. The smaller roster means fewer of his historical counters made the cut.
- Twisted Fate (mid) — take him when you want the map, not the lane. Destiny is arguably the strongest ultimate in a mode with slower rotations and no modern wave-clear power creep.
- Lee Sin (jungle) — the S3 jungle king gets the S3 jungle he ruled. Play for early skirmishes and Wriggle's-era duels rather than a farm game.
- Jax (top) — draft him when your team can survive to 40 minutes, which S3 games routinely do. Old itemization (Trinity Force, Guinsoo's) is exactly his wheelhouse.
- Vayne (ADC) — hypercarry logic compounds in a slower mode. Games last longer, peel supports (Janna, Lulu, Alistar) are all in the roster, and true damage ignores the tanks S3 builds produce.
- Blitzcrank (support) — one landed hook still decides a lane. Draft-only queues mean he can be answered, but the answer costs a pick.
- Amumu (jungle) — take him for the best teamfight ultimate in the launch roster, on a map and meta that funnel into five-man fights around Baron.
A-Tier Champions
Excellent picks with a real weakness or a higher skill ask:
- Mid: Ryze (the S3 tank-mage machine gun), Karthus (Requiem punishes a mode with less mobility), Katarina (resets thrive in longer fights), Gragas (old barrel logic, strong roams).
- Top: Malphite (anti-AD lane bully with the game-deciding ult), Dr. Mundo (S3's signature regen tank), Singed (proxy chaos, worse punished in old jungles), Olaf (early-game axe machine).
- Jungle: Jarvan IV (flag-drag engage, healthy clears), Evelynn (old stealth Eve — map pressure this roster struggles to answer).
- ADC: Ezreal (the S3 blue-build safety pick), Kog'Maw (protect-the-Kog comps are fully supported by this roster), Corki (Trinity poke midgame).
- Support: Sona (lane-winning poke plus a teamfight ult), Lulu (the peel package hypercarries want), Leona (all-in engage that punishes 2013-era positioning), Zilean (speed, slow, and a revive).
B-Tier Champions
Solid, playable, situational. Most of the roster lives here, and in a mode with no ranked queue, B-tier is not a reason to skip a champion you love:
Ahri, Annie, Anivia, Ashe, Brand, Cho'Gath, Fiddlesticks, Janna, Kayle, Lux, Malzahar, Miss Fortune, Morgana, Nasus, Nidalee, Nunu, Pantheon, Shaco, Sivir, Skarner, Soraka, Taric, Tristana, Twitch, Veigar, Wukong.
Reads from inside the pile:
- Nasus scales forever, but S3-era early games run long enough to bully him out of the game first.
- Nunu and Shaco reward coordinated play — objective control and early cheese — more than solo queue chaos.
- Anivia and Veigar punish the mode's slower midlane rotations, so pick them into a lane you can hold; both are immobile in a roster full of assassins.
- Tristana and Twitch are late-game insurance policies. Only draft them with a frontline that buys them time.
C & D-Tier Champions
Bottom of the list: kits that were already struggling in their own era, or that depend on opponents not knowing 13-year-old counterplay.
Gangplank, Garen, Heimerdinger, Master Yi, Rammus, Sion, Teemo, Tryndamere, Warwick.
Context matters here. Several of these (Master Yi, Warwick, Garen, Teemo) are still fine picks for learning the mode: simple, cheap to execute, and brutal against disorganized games, which describes plenty of week-one Classic lobbies. They rank low because their ceilings collapse against players who remember how to itemize and kite, not because they can't take games. Old Sion is the outlier worth trying — the pre-2014 kit is genuinely strange (see pre-rework kits), and AP shield-detonation builds shock people who've never seen it.
How We Ranked These Champions (Methodology)
Riot withholds all match data for Classic, notably winrates, explicitly to "preserve gameplay exploration and prevent aggressive metagaming," and third-party stat sites do not track the Classic queue as of this writing. So the ranks above weigh three things instead: documented Season 3 strength of these exact kits (who dominated 2013 solo queue and competitive play, who got permabanned, who was a known scaling monster), roster context (60 champions is not 2013's full pool, so missing counters promote some picks and missing teammates demote others), and early community discussion, weighted lightly because week-one metas are wrong everywhere.
Use it accordingly: treat a one-tier gap as noise and a two-tier gap as signal. Nothing on this page is a winrate claim.
Roster & Mode Updates
The list above covers the 60 launch champions. Two kinds of updates will move it:
- The first wave is Ionia, and it lands August 12, 2026. Classic's first content patch arrives alongside modern League's 26.16 and adds Akali, Kennen and Shen, each on an old kit: Akali's from June 2012, Shen's from April 2013, Kennen's from July 2013. The official wiki moved all three into the available roster on August 10, taking it from 60 to 63. Remaining confirmed future additions: Caitlyn, Fiora, Graves, Irelia, LeBlanc, Mordekaiser and Urgot, still without dates.
- The same patch carries Classic's first balance pass, which is the part that moves this list. Riot's patch preview names Lux, Dr. Mundo and Alistar among the buffs and Tryndamere, Twitch, Janna and Heimerdinger among the nerfs — mostly reversions to older numbers rather than new design. Write-ups of that preview disagree on the full list beyond those seven, so treat anything wider as unconfirmed until the notes publish with the patch — one of them puts Blitzcrank, the S-tier entry on this page, among the nerfs, and the other does not. Practical reading if you are picking today: none of the agreed nerfs touch the S-tier, so the ranking above should survive the patch largely intact, and Lux is the clearest riser.
- Mode patches. Per the official wiki, Classic "is expected to branch out from the modern version of the game, with patches expected at the same cadence," tuned to preserve the slow-paced design. Re-check this page after any patch that touches champions.
Wondering what to build on any of these picks? That's the builds guide. S3 itemization differs enough from modern League that the right champion with the wrong build still loses.
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.