Nasus is a popular champion in Solo Q. He takes time to come online, but he works in Solo Q because other players won’t do enough to stop him. In Pro Play, however, Nasus gets shut down quicker, making him a useless champion. However, he does get picked in the Jungle from time to time. That said, he rarely appears at the top level, let alone in an important series final game at the Grand Final of a major event.
But don’t tell that to SkewMond, who did exactly that. It’s game five. The series hangs in the balance. Champion pools have been scraped dry, and KC are ready for whatever G2 can throw at them. Up steps SkewMond. Nasus. Jungle. Locked in. Nobody saw it coming, a pick we never see at the top level of League of Legends. Twenty minutes in, not only is Nasus doing fine, he’s deathless, and SkewMond is about to secure series MVP.
Nasus Play Rate
Here is where it gets fun, because Nasus in the jungle was not some random off-meta gamble. He was already quietly sitting near the top of the pile. Here is the current u.gg snapshot for jungle Nasus at Emerald and above:
That is not “fun pick that a pro carried”; that is “this champion is genuinely one of the strongest things in the jungle right now, and nobody was looking.” A 2.4% pick rate for a jungler is healthy and visible without being oppressive, and that near-five-percent ban rate tells you people have started to notice.
Now the fun part is the pick rate of Nasus jungle. In Patch 26.10, Nasus’ pick rate is 0.06%, roughly 16,000 games globally. In 26.11, that jumps slightly to 0.09% and 17,000 games. This is around the time the moment happens. However, in Patch 26.11, it goes through the roof.
Nasus moves to a 2.4% pick rate, with 51,000 games played. It’s also not surprising that EUW is the region that sees the largest impact, with Nasus moving from 6,000 to 18,000 games in the space of one patch.
Nasus is still very strong, and it remains to be seen what might happen in Patch 26.13, which just dropped. But with MSI and EWC around the corner, we could see more major changes to pick rates based on international matches.
Should you actually first-pick him in your promos?
A champion ranked first for win rate in his role at Emerald+ is not a troll pick, whatever your support types in chat. The catch is that Nasus jungle rewards exactly the thing SkewMond is elite at: snowballing a tiny early lead into an unkillable mid-game. He stacks, he gets fed, he becomes a problem. He does not do much if you int the first clear and spend the game three camps behind.
So by all means ride the hype. Just know that the dog bites hardest for players who can actually play to his pattern, and not because a Frenchman made it look effortless on a Sunday.