I got out of a game just now, where some d-bag said, "League of tanks? entire team is tanks, gg" or something to that effect.

On our team was Malphite, Cho'Gath, Eve, Olaf, and Udyr.

He then went on to insist that Olaf was a tank, and that because Eve was stacking Sunfire Capes (lol) that she was a tank too.


Is learning what champs are and are not tanks really that hard?

Dude, Eve is the best tank in the game. I love tower diving with Eve. I once went 1v5 under their Nexus towers, whole minion wave piled on top. Not a scratch on me.

But yeah no, he was just an idiot. Ignore him. Personally, doesn't matter what you call your champ so long as you play them right.

Tank: Tanks are champions who are designed to take huge amounts of damage. Tanks are usually champions that sport high amounts of health and armor. If left alone, tanks are able to accumulate high amounts of damage or disables on their foes

He meant that everyone on your team was extremely tanky, which they were.

Yes, it really is.

Tanks are basically hard to kill AND have a strong initiation move. Mord is hard to kill, but he's not a tank, because he has no initiation.

By contrast, Galio is hard to kill and has one of the game's best initiation skills.

Blitz is iffy if he's a tank, since Q is a great way to open a fight (Pull the carry, crush the carry)

Last night I was told I was "one of three tanks" while playing Xin. :/

I'll go the opposite direction and pull something I remember reading off some red post

You can build any character multiple ways thus making them either tanks, dps, or mage by simply choosing items.
So yes, all 5 of those could have been tanks.
The line between tank and beefy DPS however is a thin one and it isn't really all that clear.
Granted however, they were not true tanks as only true tanks have a taunt.

tl;dr
Were they actually tanks? No.
Did you build them into tanks? Probably.

Sunfire Eve is for real, man.

You can also call champs like Garen and Morde a subset of tanks, or "offtanks", because they're a good choice for a second tanky character on a team if you feel that you need one, but as you say lack initiation or cc.

This differentiates them from champs who are hard to kill but whose primary function is actually dealing strong dps, like Olaf (though that again is different from being an actual dps carry).

Anyway, this stuff is a bit semantic. If you know how to play Galio well, it doesn't matter whether you call him a tank or not. It's helpful to define the terms for facilitating out-of-game strategy discussion, but once the game starts it's a bit meaningless.