Hey there, I'm Zianni. I'm a challenger mid laner and Syndra is one of my favorite champions. She's been one of my best champions since Season 4 and I'm glad to finally get around to making a guide for her! Syndra is a really fun champion because she's extremely aggressive and has a large impact on any game. I pick Syndra into any team where I need mid lane priority for jungle match ups and look to duel as often as possible with my early game. If you enjoy one shotting champions and dominating the map through mid lane, Syndra is the champion for you. Check out my livestream at https://www.twitch.tv/zianni so you can become a challenger Syndra too!

Syndra is one of the best early game champions even after her Dark Sphere rework, her damage output is extremely high making her a constant threat regardless of HP and has a lot of control based on that threat.

She's an ideal champion for Solo Q because of this. The only issue with Syndra is her lack of mobility making her vulnerable to champions like Leona, Ashe, or Zoe. If you're able to snowball hard enough, then coming into you is exactly what you want.

Her team fight is incredible because of her wide range stuns covering a massive area and her ultimate being able to remove any player from the fight.

Aery

VS

First Strike

Summon Aery is a damage keystone combined with an extremely oppressive laning phase making it the most deadly combination. However, the trade off is we lose the utility and scaling that comes from First Strike.

It is my personal belief that Solo Q is completely dependent on personal impact if you're playing an oppressive champion like Syndra, there is no reason why you should opt for a scaling build or runes when you can have an immediate impact with your champion if the matchup allows for it. You want to take advantage of your laning phase potential to snowball as opposed to playing reactively and conceding those opportunities.

There are situations where your team composition will allow for First Strike and that's perfectly acceptable. This would be scaling mid match ups, or scaling junglers that slow the game down.

Aery

Summon Aery awards us for doing short trade windows to set up a kill window, keep your trades short and concise based around your cooldowns until ultimate is available.

Manaflow Band gives us the ability to poke aggressively and have infinite wave clear if we play around our runes.

Transcendence gives us utility in the form of extra haste, this gives us access to more balls to work with and increase our overall flexibility..

Scorch gives us additional laning power to burn through the enemies resources which stops them from contesting roams or plays around the middle lane. This makes it easier to control assassins or prevent them from playing confidently.

Biscuit Delivery gives us addititional resources to work with, this makes it easier to look for trades having another way to heal it back and infinite mana to spell cast with.

Free summoner spell CD and item haste gives us access to more luden procs, more access to seraphs shield and zhonyas. It's a really great rune.

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AP/AP and Armor/Magic Resist shards based on match up.

First Strike

First Strike is an extremely good scaling rune that offers utility in the form of gold, rewarding you for passive gameplay and getting a significant mid game spike. You should take this Keystone vs slower match ups or with boring junglers on your team

Magical Footwear is essentially 420gold in stats for free which coincides with your scaling playstyle but can be substituted for stopwatch if neccessary.

Minion Dematerializer is to match waveclear and safely control matchups through wave control.

Cosmic Insight gives us additional item haste for value on Luden's Tempest but also makes our summoners lower CD for utility.

Transcendence give us large amounts of utility by being able to cycle our cooldowns faster for more damage and survivability

Gathering Storm increases our scaling potential for free at no cost.

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AP/AP and Armor/Magic Resist shards based on match up.

Items are always going to be situational and based on the game state.


Mythics all have a corresponding bonus stat system which rewards you for completing legendary items.

The two most valuable mythics to us in that regard are Luden's Tempest and Liandry's Torment.

is our direct flat penetration approach which rewards us against squishy teams or snowball match ups. This is the only way to cap flat penetration on Syndra now. This goes extremely well with Electrocute.

Liandry's is our direct tank counter due to it's Max HP% burn. I highly recommend running Liandrys into tanky compositions. It also has additional Ability Haste compared to Luden's Tempest which allows for more utility, the bonus stat is ALSO Ability Haste which gives us the ability to build raw AP if we're not forced into situational purchases.

Sorcerer's Shoes is extremely important to the build because it reduces the enemy's magic resistance increasing our base damage by a hefty amount for 800g. It's also important to recognize that purchasing Luden's Tempest will bring your total magic penetration up to 24, most carries have a base magic resist of 40 meaning you'll be doing nearly 100% tool-tip damage if the enemy doesn't buy a Null-Magic Mantle before Shadowflame or Void Staff. (It's pretty nice to just add up the numbers in your skill descriptions and know when you can one-shot someone.)

Once you finish a Legendary item, the Mythic bonus will put you up to 29.

Most low elo players even up until masters will ego and refuse to buy early magic resist making double Magic Pen an extremely strong combination. (Due to the magic pen formula, flat pen can never bring MR below 0.)

Once our core is completed, we're essentially purchasing items based on the situation. If the enemy is building MR you can instead opt to build % Magic pen in a Void Staff, a survivability item ( Banshee's Veil/ Zhonya's Hourglass), or raw damage ( Shadowflame / Rabadon's Deathcap). Shadow Flame is more optimal since it has an additional flat damage built into it and good survivability from the health.

To be impactful, you need a strong foundation.

Nothing in history has been achieved without the necessary conditions, League of Legends is no different. To carry a game, you need to make an impact. There are many ways you can do this, but it all begins in the same spot. Everything in the game can be traced back to the beginning, every decision you make will change the course of the game. This can be described as the flow, the flow can be influenced by every player and controlling the flow is your objective.

Before you worry about things outside your sphere of influence, your primary focus should be setting yourself up for success. Before anything else, we must identify our match up, our composition, and finally our win condition. While the game starts with champion select, the reality is that you’re only capable of defining your own actions. There is no value in putting emphasis on variables we can’t control; therefore, we must also pursue a playstyle that enables any possibility.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to the match up, this can be broken down into three categories.

The Champion

Keystone + Runes

Summoner Spells

While the champion is self-explanatory, we must ask ourselves what contributes to the champion. It’s strengths and it’s weaknesses. The most common things we take notice of are the difference between ranged and melee. This is valuable information that will change the way you trade depending on your champion. A ranged champion will always have the advantage over melee in the early levels, often this will be your only window to create an advantage vs an assassin.

The next step is their keystone, players will typically enhance their champions strengths or make up for weaknesses with their keystone. This can drastically change a lane as there is a big difference between Arcane Comet and Electrocute. Your goal is to identify what their plan is and play around it.

A burst mage will often take Electrocute; the benefit is larger trades at the cost of being infrequent. You can choose to either avoid trading in small skirmishes, poke, or extend trades to take advantage of their cooldowns.

While keystones have less variety for mid than other roles like Press the Attack, Lethal Tempo or Conqueror, it’s still something to keep in mind. The second portion of keystones are the supporting runes that accompany it.

The secondary tree is used to augment your strength or to cover your weaknesses. An example would be the difference between taking domination second to improve your damage potential or taking insight for extra lane sustain. While most champions are locked into some keystones, secondary trees are extremely flexible and should be changed depending on the match up. Identify where you struggle and take precautions to solve it. Biscuit Delivery is a popular rune because it can help with difficult match ups, whereas Eyeball Collection will give you a stronger spike. Make a decision based on your match up.

Remember to check armor/mr to see if they're weaker than usual, not taking the right defensive stats can change a match up!

Summoner spells are often disregarded until they **** us over. I’m sure we’ve all had that moment where we tower dive someone and we didn’t realize they had barrier.
Mid lane has three dominant summoner spells.

SUMMONER SPELLS All three are extremely valuable and can change the flow of a game. - FLASH is a must include because it’s both a playmaking tool and a defensive tool. The cooldown should always be tracked so you can take advantage of its absence or play around its availability. (I.E Flash ult) IGNITE at this given moment Ignite is one of the most powerful game changing tools, it can single handedly win lanes or secure kills you’d otherwise miss out on. There is almost no situation where you wouldn’t want to play around or take advantage of this spell. TELEPORT while typically inferior in lane for Solo Q has incredible application and a lot more variety to it. You can use it to avoid an unwinnable match up, join team fights, or simply get back to lane faster. While the application of this spell is more difficult than Ignite, it has a lot more influence than Ignite if you can control the flow. Teleport can be considered your second safety-net, if you get poked out of lane you have another try or you can use it to force an enemy out of lane with the unexpected item advantage. While it isn’t as straight forward as Ignite, you’re creating a situation where the enemy must fight you with an item disadvantage or resource disadvantage (Mana usually.) A common scenario is poking the enemy out of lane only for them to Teleport back and zone you off the wave because your mana bar is low. If the enemy has Ignite, there is no way for them to play around this outside of resetting at the cost of their minion wave crashing. In this scenario, we directly controlled the flow of the game by giving them only two options to respond to; both bad options.

Consider the summoner spells of your enemy and consider where you have an advantage. Do you benefit from trading to look for a kill opportunity with Ignite, or do you benefit more from scaling with the safety of Teleport?
To properly identify the conditions of our victory, is to identify our win condition. While this term is often used on a larger scope (I.E Winning the game) we can apply this to both the laning phase and the macro phase.

We’ve considered the aspects of our lane and our win condition. All that remains is ensuring our ability to have an impact on the game. There are core tenets that I advise for any mid lane player.

Build your domain

If you want to control the game, you always start from the middle lane. Your sphere of influence will expand as you grow stronger and enable more opportunities around the map. To grow stronger, we must ensure our survival and that our gold generation is adequate.

Survival

The middle lane is your base of operations, your Fortress. You must properly defend your Fortress by setting up Ward Control to prevent enemy ganks and gain vision of your lands. Your wards will act as a spy network keeping you, The General, informed. This will allow you to keep your Fortress safe and use its strategic positioning to punish troops trespassing in your lands. Acting without vision puts you at the mercy of your enemies.

While dying is acceptable, each death comes at the cost of valuable resources. (Gold and experience) No matter the match up or circumstances, your primary objective is to be consistent. To be undying is to exert pressure on the entire map.

Gold Generation

To carry, you need resources. The most important building block of your game starts with last hitting, games are won by item advantages and the easiest way to build a lead without putting yourself at risk is by this basic mechanic. A gold lead translates to an item lead, and an item lead translates to presence on the map. This basic interaction is overlooked by many players but is the core of gameplay. For newer players, your goal is 7-8 cs per minute and for experienced players leaning towards 9 in solo Q.

Lane phase is a battle for resources.

Once you have secured your foundation in the middle lane, you can begin to extend your influence. Your wards that were originally defensive will begin to move into enemy lines and feed you information. Objective control and jungle skirmishes are yours to decide. While you can continue to stay mid lane and farm up safely, if you can’t translate your early game pressure into a lead it has no value.




Syndra's laning phase is based around the new splinter passive and generating gold through short trades when you have First Strike. This means you can play through wave manipulation more consistently and focus on either creating gank windows for your jungler or just scaling up.

With rune diversity, you can play aggressively, passively, or any other variation that fits the game context. Syndra is incredibly broken right now so I definitely recommend playing her.

For this purpose, we're typically looking to play around Dark Sphere in conjunction with Scatter the Weak to proc the splinter effect before disengaging. The goal is to cast when they're last hitting since they'll be locked in position.

By playing around cooldowns, we deny them the chance to do damage back and then get them low enough to where a combo can threaten a kill usually with ultimate.

Electrocute playstyle is essentially the same since you're still playing for splinters it's just easier to create kills off your trades.

The ideal goal is to get someone to 50-60% hp so that you can create a situation where you can full combo.

Once you hit level 6, you're looking to max range Dark Sphere then wait for it to recharge, follow up with Scatter the Weak pick up ball with Force of Will and recast along with Dark Sphere that's been recharged. This garuantee's a 5 ball ultimate, 6 balls if you have the Dark Sphere upgrade.

Realistically, you'll have 80-100 splinters by 20 minutes.

40 splinters by level 7 no matter what.

120 splinters by 25.

Mid game can sometimes be troublesome for Syndra because of her mobility, but as long as you position correctly in team fights you'll be able to find important picks because of the massive range on your initiation or disengage an aggressive all in.

If you opted for Ignite, you'll feel very bad about yourself because side laning is completely dependent on champions and you might have 0 opportunities to farm a side lane.

If you have Teleport and its a favorable side lane match up, you'll be able to consistently farm side waves for resources and pressure objectives without being contested.

You should almost always contest objectives with your kit or look to utilize your oppressive 1v1 pressure in a side lane instead of splitting resources 4 ways mid for the sake of ARAMing.

If you have questions, you can find me at Twitch.tv/Zianni

Thanks.