Theory: Rune Pages

Rune pages are a luxury, and as with many luxuries they bring benefits to those who can afford them. A player with twenty rune pages has an obvious advantage over one with just two rune pages. The reason for this is intuitive; being able to carefully tailor a rune page to the specific needs of a champion greatly increases their effectiveness.

Building a rune page is something of an art. While most pages aren't "wrong" per se, finding the right rune page can make or break champions, match ups, and item builds. This takes time, effort, attention to detail, and most of all purpose.

Rune pages should focus on the following purposes or goals as they relate to a particular champion:

1. Avoiding awkward or costly itemization.
2. Shoring up a critical weakness.
3. Maximizing a strength/abuse case.
4. Countering a specific champion/match up.

All of these goals and purposes are primarily early-mid game concerns. While runes are still useful later in the game, their relative effectiveness drops as champions gain levels and items. The advantages of a late game rune page are so minuscule, and the early game cost so high, that it isn't remotely worthwhile to build or use one.

The best rune pages tend to address multiple purposes in an elegant way or take one purpose to an extreme. An good example of both is the pure Armor rune page.

For jungle Nautilus a pure Armor rune page serves multiple purposes. It improves his jungling speed (#2), increases his sustain (#2), and allows him to use more advantageous starting items (#1). The best alternatives might barely surpass the pure Armor rune page in speed, but only at the cost of sustain and starting item selection.

The pure Armor rune page can also be used against champions with absolutely obnoxious harass or early kill potential such as Pantheon, Yorick, or Garen. By going all in on defense it becomes possible to survive the early abuse of these match ups without needing a specific champion to counter them. This is an extreme measure, but more effective than being shut out of the game.

Not all rune pages will push champions over critical thresholds or apply in a multitude of situations, but that doesn't mean the effort is wasted. The further you progress as a player the more you'll encounter matches where lanes and skirmishes are won on razor-thin margins. The right rune page can change whether it's you or your opponent who walks away from kill with infuriatingly low health. It may take time, but the more you think about and experiment with rune pages the better you'll become at building them.