League Classic brings back three long-forgotten systems. Here is how Runes, Masteries and old-school items actually work, and why they feel so alien next to the League you have been playing.
League Classic landed on 29 July alongside Patch 26.15, and it included three systems that modern League quietly buried years ago: Runes you buy with IP, a Masteries tree you actually spend points in, and a shop full of items that got deleted somewhere along the way.
If you started playing after 2017, you have literally never touched two of these. And if you were around for Season 3, congratulations, your muscle memory is about to become useful again. So before you load into the old Rift and start panic-clicking, let us walk through what Classic Items, Runes and Masteries do, and how they differ from the League you know.
Runes
Modern runes are free, you pick them fresh every game, and half of them actually do something. Electrocute chunks people, Grasp heals you, Lethal Tempo dumps attack speed into your hands mid-fight. Forget all of that. Classic runes are pure stat sticks.
Before a game, you build a Rune Page, and you fill it with four flavours of rune:
- Marks (the red ones): offensive stats. Attack damage, armour penetration, attack speed, that sort of thing.
- Seals (yellow): defensive stats. Armour, health, health regen. Your survivability glue.
- Glyphs (blue): magic stats. Magic resist, ability power, cooldown reduction, mana.
- Quintessences (purple): the chunky ones. Each Quint is worth roughly three of the smaller runes, so this is where the big movement speed, AD or life steal goes.
Riot has made this a lot less painful than it was in 2013, mind. Everything is Tier 3 from the off, you unlock runes just by playing, and there is no upgrading nonsense. You start with three Rune Pages, get two more from Classic Levels, and can buy extras with IP (yes, Influence Points are back, pour one out). Forget to set a page, and you get a sensible default, so you are a little sub-optimal rather than actively griefing your team.
Masteries
If runes are the stats, Masteries are the personality. And if you picked up League any time after the 2017 preseason, this is the bit you have genuinely never seen, because Riot deleted Masteries entirely and folded them into the current rune system. An entire mechanic, gone, and half the player base never knew it existed.
- Offence (red): damage. Straight up.
- Defence (yellow): tankiness and sustain.
- Utility (blue): cooldowns, mana, movement, gold, the sneaky stuff.
Reaching the good stuff at the bottom of a tree takes 21 points, which is most of your budget, so you are always picking one main tree and sprinkling the leftover nine somewhere else. That is why old League builds were written as numbers. 21/9/0 is your damage-hungry bruiser. 21/0/9 is an AP carry who wants a touch of utility. 0/21/9 is your immovable tank support. Say “21/9/0” to anyone who played back then and they will know exactly what you meant.
Classic Items
Classic brings back nearly every item from League’s first few years, and the shop plays by completely different rules from the one you know. A few things that will short-circuit a modern player’s brain:
- Gold per 10 items – Philosopher’s Stone, Kage’s Lucky Pick, Heart of Gold, Avarice Blade: cheap items that passively earn gold every ten seconds. Supports (and greedy junglers, and the legendary Bankplank) would stack several and simply get richer for existing. Filling half your inventory with GP10 was a real, respected strategy.
- Snowball items – Sword of the Occult, Mejai’s Soulstealer, Leviathan: dirt-cheap items that stacked stats every time you got a kill or assist, then dumped most of it when you died. Get fed, become a god. Feed, become a very expensive paperweight. High risk, silly-high reward.
- Cursed actives – This is the era of Deathfire Grasp, an item whose active nuked a chunk of the target’s max health and turned certain mages into one-shot machines. Actives mattered, and knowing which button to press won fights.
Classic vs modern League
| System | League Classic | Modern League |
|---|---|---|
| Runes | Bought with IP, slotted into pages as flat or scaling stats. Purely passive. | Free, chosen fresh each game, with active keystones and adaptive effects. |
| Masteries | A separate 30-point, three-tree talent system you spend into pre-game. | Gone. Merged into the rune system back in the 2017 preseason. |
| Items | Gold-income items, snowball stacks, wild actives and unstandardised builds. | A leaner shop with mostly settled, predictable build paths. |
| Currency | Influence Points (IP) for runes and extra pages. | No rune costs at all. Everyone gets the lot for free. |
Modern League hands you a clean, free, streamlined toolkit. Classic makes you buy your stats, spend your talent points and build a genuinely weird item pile, then trusts you to make it work. Go set a page, lock in your main, and we will see you on the Classic Rift.