The cast of League of Legends is so vast that the best way to find a character of interest is to just scan the roster of champions, looking for a distinctive feature. One easy archetype for gamers to understand is someone with a cool sword; that makes sense, because “cool sword” is basically on the bottom pyramid of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
There are fifteen champions who wield swords; we excluded characters who just use very big daggers. We also didn’t include skins; this is all mainline Runeterra lore. With such an arsenal of swords to admire, we realized that we needed to rank them, so we could determine which of these blades reigns supreme for Cool Sword Day. Here they are, from least cool to coolest.
Sub-par League of Legends swords
Gangplank
A brutal and blunt instrument, used for slaughter. Doesn’t really do anything, not the star of the show. Not a very cool sword at all.
Tryndamere
Very large, but not the source of Tryndamere’s rage powers, so not very impressive. Doesn’t seem to have any special crafting; it’s not a True Ice item like his peers in the Freljord, or a cursed weapon, or anything like that. It doesn’t help that Tryndamere needs a visual update badly. Maybe when they give him one they can give him a sword that doesn’t suck.
Fiora
Fiora’s very talented, and her blade is aesthetically nice, but all of her dueling prowess comes from personal skill. Fiora’s cool, but her sword isn’t cool independently of Fiora, so it’s not a cool sword.
Samira
Samira’s extremely cool, and she gets a novelty point based off the fact that she switches handily between gun and sword for style points. Her weapons aren’t automatically cool by association, though. If Samira dropped her sword and someone else picked it up and the camera moved to focus on them, I would immediately fall asleep. Not a cool sword.
Mediocre League of Legends swords
Yasuo
Yasuo’s blade is fashioned after his wind powers, which is a nice detail, but as far as we know the blade is not inherently magical. Yasuo does use it to guide his wind powers, similarly to a magic wand, so it gets a cool point thanks to that being a strong visual image in cinematics.
Master Yi
Did you know that Master Yi’s sword was carved by Doran, a legendary crafter, and they create blades blessed by ancient spirits of Ionia? Master Yi’s sword is actually the coolest part about him; it’s the rest of his goofy, action figure-like aesthetic that brings his ranking down.
Leona
Leona’s blade can turn into pure sunlight and teleport her to her foes; it also has a snazzy solar theme. This is pretty cool, but in the lore of League of Legends, the Solari are currently engaged in a genocide of the moon-worshipping Lunari, and using a cool blade for such an evil purpose means Leona scores a low ranking on the cool scale.
Cool League of Legends swords
Shen
Shen’s giant spirit sword is a link to a realm that runs parallel with reality, and it allows him to control the environment around him. Shen is also kind of boring — he’s a taciturn fellow who believes in balance — but it’s impossible to look at his giant spirit sword zooming around on the Rift and not be a little impressed. This is a pretty cool sword.
Garen
At first glance, Garen’s sword is functional and shiny, but not particularly cool. But his Ultimate ability is where things get really neat; he summons a giant golden version of his sword down from the heavens on an enemy’s head to execute them. This is actually a gift from the Aspect of Justice, and he is channeling her power. Garen looks like just a normal soldier, but he’s capable of summoning a great golden blade from the heavens — that’s indisputably cool.
Viego
Viego’s an interesting case because his sword, the Blade of the Ruined King, showed up in the game well before he did. In fact, the Blade of the Ruined King was so strong at one point that the meta-game was for everyone to just build multiple of them. In the novel Ruination, we find out a lot of lore about the blade’s history as Sanctity, the ancestral weapon of the royalty of Camavor. Viego unleashing a torrent of hell-energy in an attempt to resurrect his dead wife turned Sanctity into the sword we know today — and that’s pretty neat.
The best League of Legends swords
Kayle
Kayle is the Aspect of Justice who empowers Garen, and she wields her mother’s sword. As Kayle levels up, so too does her sword, and in thein the late game she uses it to send out waves of righteous fire. There’s also some sisterly drama there; Kayle can pull her sword into two smaller swords, and one belongs by right to her sister Morgana. Morgana turned down her duties as the Aspect of Justice because she disagrees with Kayle’s unrelenting policies. Kayle’s sword(s) represent her ideological disagreements with Morgana, but they’re also just cool.
Riven
Riven’s sword does a lot of work. It was forged with Rune magic in her homeland of Noxus, and she went to war with the great blade. When she realized the invasion of Ionia was unjust, she shattered her blade, and carries around a diminished, broken remnant of the sword. Her ultimate reforges the blade, which is taller than she is, and allows her to send out a wave of wind energy. Riven’s sword is relevant to her character, and it has tons of deep lore attached to it — that’s very cool.
Aatrox
League of Legends lore is a patchwork of stories and concepts, some of which have been stitched over several times with retcons. Aatrox is one of these characters; he started out as a generic demon guy, and he’s since been turned into a much more interesting villain through rewrites.
Aatrox was one of the Ascended, massive warriors fused from the Shuriman Empire’s greatest warriors with the divine power of the Sun Disc in the capital. Ascended are half-human, half-beast, and many of them draw clear inspiration from various members of the Egyptian pantheon.
The League of Legends version of Ra, the hawk emperor Azir, built a vast empire using slavery. One of those slaves, his advisor Xerath, chose to betray him out of spite for this sin. There was an ensuing disaster that wiped out most of Shurima, and the remaining Ascended descended into blood magic and civil war. Eventually, they were sealed into weapons by ancient heroes, and those weapons serve as their prisons.
Aatrox doesn’t just have a cool sword, he is a cool sword. Whenever someone grasps his hilt, he can claim their body temporarily, building himself a pale imitation of his past glory out of meat and blood. But eventually, he runs out of war, and he goes back into the oblivion of sword prison. Aatrox is a Cronenberg body horror nightmare; it’s the best.
The post We ranked all of League of Legends’ cool swords for cool sword day appeared first on Polygon.
