Teamfight Tactics (TFT) – Champion Origins Guide

by Falagar / Articles, Teamfight Tactics / 06 Jul 2019

Champion Origins

At first let’s take the two unique ones out of the way. Robot is an origin currently exclusive to Blitzcrank – it allows him to have the ultimate ability charged up and ready to go at the beginning of every fight. This why, at the start of every combat he hooks and knocks up a target. Exile is Yasuo’s origin. It grants him a shield equal to 100% of his HP at the beginning of the round, as long as he is not adjacent to any allied unit.

DRAGON

placing two Dragons in your teamcomp makes them immune to magic damage. This passive makes them a great counter against the Sorcerers and Elementalists. There are two Dragons in the game – Shyvana and Aurelion Sol. Remember not to stack magic resist items on them!

PHANTOM

Having two Phantoms on your board makes one random enemy unit start the combat with only 100 HP. With a little bit of luck or AoE damage, you can instantly delete this character at the beginning of the fight. Mordekaiser, Kindred and Karthus are all a part of this category.

The Phantom passive adds another element of randomness to the game. If you get rid of one of your opponent’s strongest champions you might auto-win the round. If the curse is placed on a less useful, weak unit, it’s not going to mean that much.

VOID

Triple void makes your whole team ignore 50% of the enemy units’ armor. It works great against armor stackers and Nobles. The four Vodlings in the game are: Kassadin, Kha’Zix, Rek’Sai and Cho’Gath.

Both first tier units in this category: Kassadin and Kha’Zix can actually scale surprisingly well into the late game, if you itemize properly. Kassadin excels with attack speed and tank items, while Kha’Zix is a powerful assassin that can make use of some extra attack damage.

PIRATE

This origin has an interesting and kind of a gimmicky passive. If you have at least three Pirates, after every round against other players you’ll get a treasure chest. It can contain from 0 to 4 extra gold coins. The money generation can be useful if you can get the bonus quickly and without losing too much HP. Champions that form this category are: Graves, Pyke, Gankplank and Miss Fortune.

IMPERIAL

having two of them makes one random champion from this category deal double damage, collecting all four of them gives every one of your Imperials this powerful bonus. Units of this origin are: Darius, Katarina, Draven and Swain. Banking on being able to find all of them is definitely risky, but this synergy is really strong and each one of the Imperials has a great potential to hard carry with the correct items.

NINJA

This is probably the most unique synergy in the game. Having only a single Ninja makes them deal +40% attack damage. This bonus goes away if you have two or three of them, but having four grant +80% attack damage on all of them. These four Ninjas are: Shen, Zed, Kennen and Akali.

This weird dynamic makes a single Shen or Zed really powerful in the early game and Akali a great addition to every mid and late game team that needs some raw power. You should never have two or three Ninjas on the board due to the anti-synergy.

Getting all four of them is good, but significantly weaker than the Imperial synergy and really risky, since you have to pray to the RNG gods to get them all quick. Four ninjas + another assassin gives you a nice double synergy that can let your Akali shine, but it’s not the most reliable strategy.

WILD

if you have two of them, they will generate fury stacks with every auto-attack. Each stack gives 7% attack speed that caps at +35%. If you have four Wilds, your whole team gets this passive. The champions that form this category are: Nidalee, Warwick, Ahri, Rengar and Gnar.

This origin is really strong early, but they don’t scale really well. Rengar is definitely not the best Assassin in the game, Ahri is decent, but pretty much everybody will prefer Aurelion Sol in her place and the tier 1 units don’t scale that well, even with items. It leaves Gnar as the only potential hard-carry. If you have Nidalee and Gnar in your comp arealy you can get Shyvana or Swain for extra shapeshifter synergy.

Wild is great if you want to get through early game without losing much HP, but later you should transition into something that scales better. This synergy is heavily countered by armor, dodging and strong burst that doesn’t allow them to fully stack the bonus attack speed.

YORDLE

If you have three of them, all Yordles have 20% chance to dodge auto-attacks, if you have six the bonus grows to 50%. It’s strong against auto-attackers. The champions that are a part of this species are: Tristana, Lulu, Kennen, Poppy, Veigar and Gnar.

To be honest, I haven’t seen too many people trying to stack Yordles in my games. 6 Yordles with one extra Sorcerer can be a good strategy. It hard counters certain compositions like Nobles and Wilds, but the passive dodging almost useless against strong spell casters like Sorcerers and Elementalists.

NOBLE

three of them give 35 health on-hit and extra 100 armor to one of your Nobles. Having all six provides this bonus to all of your champions of this origin. To get this powerful passive you’d have to collect: Fiora, Garen, Vayne, Lucian, Leona and Kayle.

At first, this composition has been dubbed the most overpowered in the game, sometimes even compared to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Exodia. There are a couple problems with that. First: the bonus for three Nobles is not that great, you need to get all six of them to be really strong. Adding the fourth or the fifth one doesn’t really provide you with anything and you have to collect them anyway.

The second drawback is: it has multiple counters that are actually much easier to assemble. Granted, six Nobles counter most Wild, Blademaster, Gunslinger and sometimes even Assassin comps. However, they get soft countered by the triple Void armor penetration. Moreover, Nobles lose pretty handedly to Sorcerers and Elementalists, since they deal mostly magic damage as they rely on spells.

GLACIAL

Stacking Glacials gives all your units of this origin a chance to stun targets on auto attack. For two Glacials it’s 20%, four extend it to 30% and the cap at 6 is 45%. Reaching it requires finding: Braum, Lissandra, Ashe, Volibear, Sejuani and Anivia.

In my opinion, this strategy is actually the safest bet, mostly due to the fact on how smooth the transition is. Not only the bonus gets better every two levels, instead of three, but adding the third and the fifth Glacial are further power spikes, since these champions will also use the on-hit passive.

Since the stun can proc on auto-attacks, the build scales tremendously with attack speed. Usually these builds rely on classic front-to-back compositions with full attack speed Ashe as the massive carry, almost always paired with a second Ranger to buff her even more.

Item-wise Zeke’s Herald provides AoE attack speed steroid that you can put on all your Glacials to proc more stuns. Furthermore, Sejuani works really well with mana, since her Special Ability is a giant AoE crowd control. Items like Titanic Hydra or Runaan’s Hurricane let you hit multiple enemies at once and stunlock them even harder.

DEMON

Collecting Demons allows them to consume enemy’s mana and deal true damage equal to the mana that they depleted. For two of them it’s 40% on hit chance, four make it 60% and six up it to 80%. There are seven units of this origin in the game: Elise, Varus, Aatrox, Evelynn, Morgana, Brand and Swain.

Even though the passive seems pretty powerful, not that many people decide to stack Demons in their games. Not that many comps rely on their Special Abilities what would make this origin vulnerable to counters, but I don’t think that it’s the main reason.

First of all, Elise is really weak, Varus is not the most reliable marksman due to the long casting time of his ultimate and Evelynn is not that strong either. At the same time, there are no Demons in the first tier which makes stacking them a little bit more difficult. At the same time Aatrox and Brand are really powerful units that can be set up as carries in respectively Blademaster and Elementalist comps. Both of those champions can deal tons of damage with Spear of Shojin, while Brand can also use some more mana or AP.

Falagar

He is the founder and editor of Magic Game World. He loved gaming from the moment he got a PlayStation 1 with Gran Turismo on his 7th birthday.
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