Important Information about the Guide

The build section of this guide is rather in depth. There are 7 different rune setups, and notes for each. Additionally, there are notes for the different item starts, and item buys. When to buy what, etc.
In case, like me, you weren't familiar with the notes function, simple hover over the text that says "NOTES" next to the setup name. You can do this with each and every option in the runes, spells, and abilities tabs, as well as the item builds.

About Me

Hi, this is my first guide. Please be gentle, everyone. I've been playing League since season 7, and have been mostly playing Anivia the whole while. I was in silver the past two years, though I'm currently in platinum 4 on NA, having played my promos the other day, and I'm also the mid laner of IHS Esports, though the summer open will be my final tournament playing, as I have graduated. You might ask, "Why is this random stranger on the internet writing this guide?"
Well, to put it simply, 9.14 is a buggy mess, so I'm waiting a day or two to play so that bugs get ironed out. In the meantime, I wanted to go ahead and try and contribute to the general knowledge pool for my favorite champion, which I have over 660 thousand mastery points on.

Anivia is a champion with a relatively weak early game, that gets stronger as the game goes on. Due to her ultimate being a toggle ability on a very short cooldown, she thrives in a fiesta. That only holds true after you get a good number of stacks on your items, however. Once she gets fully stacked, however, she becomes a beast. She can fit into virtually any composition, and can out DPS a season 7 Ardent Censer Kog'Maw once she gets closer to full build.

Anivia's also a very good champion to learn the fundamentals of League with, as you don't need to focus too much on learning fancy mechanics while playing her.

Anivia is a champion that is easy to get into, but has a rather high skill cap, but for different reasons than something like riven/yasuo/lee sin. Her skill expression has a few parts to it, which I'll cover in order of how important I think they are to mastering Anivia.

Mana management

In my opinion, the skill most important to being able to play Anivia is good mana management. Unfortunately, this one's sort of a skill that can't exactly be taught through anything other than experience, but I'll simply go through some tips and some numbers, to teach as much as I can here.

While this is likely something you knew before reading this guide, anivia's q has 2 damaging parts to it, the pass-through and the stun. Usually, you'll use this in lane by throwing q through the melee minions as well as casters, and then stun the casters after the pass through damage ticks. However, if your lane opponent is out of lane either to roam or to back, you can wrap around so that you are between the minion wave and the enemy tower, and throw your q through the casters at the melee, stunning the melee minions. If the enemy is gone long enough, you can even stun the entire wave by grouping it, though you'll take damage that way. Doing this can save you 40-80 mana when shoving a wave. An example of how to do it is provided below.
Additionally, you can cancel ult right after a tick of damage to instantly re-tick for free. This is useful for last-hitting, as well as saving you a little bit of mana.

Once manaflow is stacked, with just ult, you can farm a wave with slightly over 200 mana. I'm not sure what the exact number is, but you're definitely in the clear with 240.

Farming in the early levels

Anivia's auto attacks are very much so not her strong point. She has a clunky animation, her autos do very little damage, her auto projectile speed is slow, and her attack speed is slow. Luckily, after level 6, you don't even need to auto the minions. Pre-6, however, you're in for a rough time.

The only way to get better at this is through practice, so I'd advise going into practice tool and just last hitting the wave with auto attacks until you can consistently get at least 80 cs at 10 minutes. Once you do that, play normal games with her until you can consistently get 60-70 cs at 10 against players, and from there you're good to go with last hitting.

You're likely to get pushed in early, and this is perfectly fine pre-6. The tower actually makes last hitting much easier after the second wave of minions. Its agro is much more easily predictable, and its damage is consistent throughout the game. To perfectly farm a wave without a cannon minion, follow this pattern.

1. Allow the tower to hit full-health melees 2 times before attacking the melee. Do not use Q unless it is the last melee alive.
2. On the final melee minion, throw your Q to last hit it, such that the pass through hits the caster minions. DO NOT detonate your Q on the caster minions. Let it go to full range.
3. Let the turret hit the the caster once before you hit it.

This will let you perfectly farm a wave under tower. For cannon waves, do the same, after the cannon dies. It takes 8 tower shots and an auto attack to die.

Ideally, you aren't under tower though. You want to set up a freeze just in front of your turret. If you don't already know how, I would advise watching this video from Skill Capped. Play Video
Once you can do this, you can quickly scale up to the teamfighting monster you are with a few items.

Teamfight positioning & making effective use of your abilities

This requires a firm understanding of the game state, your composition, and the enemy's composition. Simply put, team fighting with Anivia is about figuring out your team's win conditions and loss conditions, along with the enemy team's, and then realizing your win conditions and the enemy's loss conditions.

For example, if the enemy has a strong assassin such as Kha'Zix, and you have a fed adc, let's say Kog'Maw. Your win condition is that you and Kog'Maw can stay alive and close enough to the fight that you can deal damage. Your loss condition is that you or Kog'Maw die. Your enemy's win condition is for Kha'zix to one shot the kog'maw, and keep you from using your ultimate offensively.

You'd want to place your ult such that it damages as many enemies as possible on the frontlines, stand near your adc, and be ready to throw Q at them as soon as the assassin shows up to one shot them. While doing this, you'd have to decide whether to use your wall aggressively on the enemy team to keep them in your ult or pin them to a wall, or defensively, to place between your adc or yourself and the assassin after they use their mobility, in order to generate more space, or to pin the assassin to a wall to finish them. You also of course need to position accordingly with that in mind.

To pin an enemy to a wall, you'll usually want a roughly 30 degree angle to be formed by the wall and your wall from the point of contact. Additionally, you can use your wall to split champions from one another by placing it right in between the two champions. It'll interrupt any spells being cast aside from your own ult as well as any auto attacks in progress, so remember the feature exists. You can even use it to push people out of things like Yorick w.

A mechanic worth noting is the ability to stun through spellshields. Spellshields such as Banshee's Veil and Malzahar Passive can be broken with the first part of your q, and if you hit them straight on with it, you can then recast after it passes through. Since the explosion radius is larger than the flight radius, the enemy will be stunned, assuming you time it properly.

Laning combos

Anivia's mechanics are relatively simple, though her combos may take some getting used to. In reality, everything you do in lane is just a derivative form of two different combos.

Her primary combo pre-6 is Q-W-auto-E. Ideally, the W also hits the champion to increase the amount it disrupts their movement. You want to throw the Q slightly to the side, and then place the wall so that it's behind the enemy champion and angled slightly, so that the short edge closest to the enemy's tower (or whatever's behind them) is in the same direction as your Q. The enemy will likely click to move backwards in panic, and end up running right into the Q. Then you weave an auto in and hit them with your now empowered E. If you have electrocute, this combo will take 30-50% of your opponent's maximum health. It also guarantees a hit from comet, so the damage would be comparable in early levels.

Post-6, if your opponent is one that you can walk up to; meaning, they either missed their only CC, or they're something weak like a veigar, lux, or xerath that have stepped too close; you can step up to around 500 units of them, place down your ult at their feet, and throw your stun right at them. Hit them with an E. After they come out of your stun, see how they move, and move to position them between you and the furthest end of your ult. Hit them back in with your w as they get within ~100 units of the edge, and hit them with auto attacks. Usually, your enemy will eat at least 70-80% of their maximum hp from this, and will die if you ignite them. It also serves as a psychological attack of sorts; right when they thought they were free, it turns out they were actually still well within the anivia ult. Usually, your lane opponent will sorta give up trying to farm while you're in lane after this, and give you and the minion wave a wide berth.

Establishing control of the map

This is something that is hard to learn but is one of the most powerful skills to have in the early game. Being able to do this helps not only yourself, but also your team. I'll first be going over warding spots to use in lane. Trinket wards are depicted by yellow dots, and control wards are depicted by red dots.

To do this on blue side, you'll want to start by dropping a ward here, if your lane opponent is freezing the lane in the middle or getting the wave to push.



at level two. This will let you and your jungler know if the enemy jungler is attempting to gank you, assuming they leashed bottom. In solo queue, the enemy jungler will leash bottom 99% of the time.

Throughout the rest of the lane, you'll want to have your wards set up like this.



This will provide you and your top laner ample time to react to a gank from top river, help your jungle track their jungle, and protect your bottom side from invades.

If you're on red side, you'll want to place a level two ward here, if you get the chance.



Your warding throughout the rest of the game is largely the same as on blue side, just mirrored.



Post-6, you'll want to periodically check and see if the enemy raptors are up after you shove the wave. If they are, drop your ult and stun on them, and leave the big raptor alive. Doing this will give you some extra gold and experience, while setting the enemy jungler behind.

If the first dragon to spawn is an ocean dragon, communicate with your jungler that the dragon should be a high priority, and work with them to secure it if possible. Securing an early ocean will secure your lane, and will make your waveclear effectively infinite once you complete manaflow band. You should also of course try and get the other dragons as well, but you likely won't have enough mana to both farm and secure dragons, especially not if the enemy tries to contest.

Going into the midgame, you have a few options for what to do with your trinket slot. If nobody on your team is getting a sweeper, you'll have to do it yourself. If your team is super far behind, you'll need to get a blue ward in order to check on the baron. If your teams are even, however, I'd advise keeping your yellow wards. They provide more vision than blue wards overall, so I'd generally avoid them if at all possible.

To set up for baron on blue side, this is the minimum ward coverage you want to secure with your team.



And on red side



With this, the enemy will have no idea if you're on baron or not, as they can't even see you walk up through blue buff, and can only check by facechecking, or with blue trinkets. Additionally, on red side, you can wall enemies off of their approach, making them burn vital cooldowns or go around in order to get to the baron. Make sure that the baron is swept out inside and out, though. A good enemy will place a vision ward just in front of the pit, so that they can see your carries attacking it.

Stalling games from behind

This is a relatively simple skill for Anivia to do, so I'm putting it towards the end. To stall a game, there are 3 things you need to do.

1. Keep the enemy from getting baron
2. Ult the wave at any tower the enemy tries to siege
3. Don't get caught.

In order to do the first, purchase a blue ward, and use it on the baron when you think they're starting it. Communicate with your team to get a ward just outside the pit, and in the pixel brush.

To do the second, place ult slightly within tower range, such that you can walk around the tower without interrupting the channel. This will allow you for maximum mobility to dodge the sieging champions' skillshots, and put you just outside of their auto attack range.

The third is a matter of simply playing safe. If you don't know where the enemy team is, avoid walking into fog of war alone. If you have to go into fog of war, use your Q to check. Throw it at the bush, and if comet procs or relentless hunter movespeed is lost, start running.

Anivia is a good, well-rounded pick. She does good damage, can peel well, and can fit into any comp. With a solid understanding of the fundamentals of League and practice, anyone can play her very well, and climb with her. If you want to learn more about the fundamentals of League, I would recommend watching Skillcapped videos for learning mechanics and decision making, and Randomonium for learning the abstract concepts of League.