I see on other parts of forums that certain champions are usually banned in ranked.
-So what champs are usually banned? I dont want to practice with them only to find out I cant use them 90% of the time. Thanks for the help.

you should still practice with them so the other 10% of the time the enemy has to fight an OP Shen

To elaborate on which champs are banned

Shen
Malphite
Blitz
Alistar
Ezreal
Amumu

There are others, but within the last week these have been the ones I've seen banned most often. 5/6 of them have very stong CC that can be game changing late game and ezreal is very strong through out every phase. Shen is generally #1 ban in every elo. He has a lot of map control on top of a great taunt.

Keep in mind before and after hitting 30 you should get a lot of practice in on Normal Draft to get a better feel for Ranked.

Shen, Malphite, Amumu, Alistar, and Blitzcrank, although recently it's largely up to who's banning. For example, I always ban Teemo, Taric, and Graves since I can always rely on the enemy captain to ban Shen for me.

With Ez's recent W nerf he's been seeing alot less bans lately. But yeah... Shen, Blitz, Malphite and Alistar are all very common choices across all levels of play (you can pretty much rely on the opposing captian to ban 2 of these guys) save the really high ELO bracket where they tend to ban mostly based off of who a particular player is known for.

Other common choices tend to be: Amumu, Shaco and Morganna

Shen and Malphite are almost always banned.

Don't forget about Casseopia, she is banned quite a lot as well.

I constantly see karthus and katarina banned.

This is just untrue.


The common bans depend a lot of what skill level you are playing at.

At low ELO, you often see pubstompers like Tryndamere, Kassadin, Shaco and LeBlanc banned simply because unskilled players don't know how to deal with these characters and they are capable of ending a game in 20 minutes if you let them get fed. At skill high levels, people know how to not feed, and most of these characters become useless mid-late game if they aren't extremely fed.

At higher ELO, you see bans for different reasons - mainly champions that synergize well in team fights (such as Amumu, Malphite) or champions that can play around the current meta (Twisted Fate, Shen, Nidalee) by either extensive early-mid game roams and ganks or split pushing.

Beyond that, there are bans for champions that are just overpowered. Before his nerfs, Ezreal was banned quite often. Right now, I'd say Katarina is most deserving of a ban for being OP. People make the same argument for Amumu, although that's debatable.

And then there's Blitzcrank - no one wants to play against Blitzcrank. He's a champion that can easily win a game with a single pull. It's pretty reasonable to say Blitzcrank is one of the most punishing champions in the game - a single mistake will lose you the game against a team with Blitzcrank.

Olaf is sometimes banned, too. Because I mean...he's Olaf. He's a strong top and is already hella tanky by mid game.