Anyone who has played League of Legends has faced the disadvantage of blind picking. Selecting your champion without knowing what you are up against can put you in an unfavorable position. For junglers especially, it can also put your entire team in an extremely tough spot.
Junglers can influence all lanes, turn lane counter matchups, secure objectives and set the tone for the game. Therefore, you can say it is the most pivotal role in both early game success as well as objective control. This is why we will focus on finding the best blind pick junglers.
Getting counter-picked in the jungle will affect you and your team. The enemy jungler can use their superior champion matchup to limit your movement on the map. Consequently, they can also stop your lanes from playing freely.
In this article, our goal is to list some of the most solid picks to blind pick for jungling. There are many reasonable options other than those we have listed, but the mentioned ones have turned out to be the most reliable options no matter the meta.
Jarvan IV
Jarvan is one of the most pivotal jungle champions in League of Legends. He is always a frequent part of professional League of Legends gameplay as well as casual games. Jarvan is truly a timeless champion, a fact that is proven by his success in every meta of the game.
Jarvan is such a great blind pick option because of his flexibility. Consistent clear speeds, creative gank paths, crowd control abilities, and utility make it so the champion can be made to cater to any playstyle and any jungle meta.
The flexibility also extends to the build paths you can follow when playing Jarvan. You can go for a bruiser build or you can follow a tank build, whichever seems more suitable for the situation. The bruiser build offers significantly more damage while the tank build offers a lot more in the way of engaging fights and offering utility for his team.
With his Ultimate, Jarvan is able to lock in any immobile enemy champions in a small space. This gives his teammates the perfect opportunity to quickly get rid of the enemy high priority targets and win fights. All in all, the champion does not really have any drawbacks.
Graves
Ever since Graves was reworked all the way back in 2015, he has been a mainstay of the jungle role. Graves has some qualities that make him an extremely safe and effective blind pick for junglers. He is also one of the few ranged junglers that can be blind-picked.
Graves is a ranged champion so there is no fear of being at a disadvantage if the enemy picks ranged champions. Graves can do heavy burst damage and is a constant threat to deal with for the enemy carries. Not to mention, he can outlast a lot of people thanks to the stacking defensive stats with “True Grit” usage.
Furthermore, Graves has exceptional jungle clearing speed as well as staying constantly healthy throughout the clear. Due to these features, it is very rare that Graves can be counter jungled or caught unawares by the enemy jungler.
To top it off, you can itemize in different ways according to your enemy champions. Lethality build is an effective burst damage build for Graves while you can go auto attack-based high DPS build to deal with tanks or bruisers.
Lee Sin
It would not be wrong to think of Lee Sin as the most iconic jungle champion the game of League of Legends has seen. Lee Sin has been a fundamental part of the jungle role ever since the champion was released. In any list of junglers, there is a very high chance that Lee Sin will be mentioned.
There are many reasons that make Lee Sin such an effective jungler, not the least of which is the lack of bad matchups. Lee does not have any so-called losing matchups in the jungle role where he does not get any counterplay. In fact, in a lot of the matchups that you can get Lee is the favored champion in a one-on-one situation.
Lee Sin is also one of the most active and impactful early-game junglers. High damage as well as high mobility in the early game with abilities such as “Safe Guard” and “Sonic Wave” make sure he can clear camps and move around the map relatively quickly. His Ultimate ability only adds even more burst damage and outplay potential to his kit.
Last but not least, Lee Sin has the ability to change the state of the game by finding a good Ultimate onto the enemy carry to reposition them in a place where your team can kill them. This is one of the few tactics in League of Legends to have its own separate name and as such worth mentioning i.e ‘Insec’. If you can manage to pull this off at the right time, you will most likely win the game.
Nunu and Willump
Nunu as he is commonly called is an underrated jungle champion especially when you have to blind pick. The champion has no clear weaknesses or counter picks as far as the jungle role is concerned.
Nunu has a really fast early clear all the while making sure he is at a healthy health percentage thanks to his Consume ability. Nunu’s “Biggest Snowball Ever” ability also makes it easy for him to get across the map and help his teammates quickly. Furthermore, in the early game, the high damage and crowd control duration of the ability generally results in an easy kill if it lands.
Although Nunu’s early game ganks and damage is really nice, his specialty lies in objective control. Nunu is perhaps the best champion at securing objectives like Dragon and Baron thanks to the 2K HP execute he gets on monsters with the combination of Smite and ‘Consume’.
Moreover, Nunu has exceptional team fighting thanks to his zone control Ultimate. Nunu’s Ultimate as well as his other abilities can be used to make space and peel for your carries in team fights. Overall, Nunu is a pretty well-rounded champion with an easy-to-execute play style.
Ekko
Ekko is our pick of the lot blind pick champion when you need to pick an ability power-focused jungler. Ekko has multiple things going in his favor that puts him above the rest in the ability power jungler category.
Ekko is such an effective blind pick because he is a ‘flex pick’; a pick that can be played in more than one lane. You can pick Ekko to confuse and misdirect the enemy team. Until your team has picked their mid-laner, the enemy team can not be certain where the Ekko is going.
Ekko is also an extremely potent threat to any backline champions that the opponent picks. Other AP jungle champions such as Fiddlesticks can find it hard to get to the enemy backline, Ekko faces no such issue and has reliable backline access with gap close abilities.
Ekko’s impressive early game damage and zone control with his “Convergence” ability makes for easy early game skirmishes. These factors combined with the fact that Ekko can be used to team fight effectively, make him an ideal blind pick when you need AP damage from the jungle role.
Final Thoughts
As discussed above, the jungle role can impact all the other lanes of the game. Junglers can help their team get to a better position than they would have been if left to their own devices.
If a jungler is able to dominate and limit the play of the other jungler, it means he can impact other lanes with little to no competition from his counterpart. Thus, the jungler can decide way more than just his individual matchup if he is able to dominate the enemy jungler.
Having said that, it is clear you need to have reliable blind pick options if you are a jungle player. The champions mentioned above are time-tested blind picks with no certain losing matchups. Moreover, all of the champions are able to cover a different playstyle for different players.
