Hey there! Why do I like Gnar you may ask. First, he is one cut **********ed. Secondly, he is a very safe blind pick and allows for both punishing mistakes in lane and winning teamfights for your team. I want to keep this short and comprehensive so you don't fall asleep reading, so let's go! Read the chapters you are interested in.

As for runes, I run two different pages based on the matchups. The first one is versus enemies with magic damage. Attack damage marks, flat armor seals (because even though the enemy usus ability power, in top lane a lot of auto attacking is going on), flat magic resistance glyphs and attack speed glyphs. Against auto attack based enemies, I run scaling magic resistance because I will not need MR until later on in the game (scaling MR becomes better than MR at about level 9).

The best masteries at the moment are 12-0-18 as shown above. These give you good lane sustain, a little damage, great tankiness and most of all the ability to bully your lane with Grasp of the Undying.

My items on Gnar are very tank oriented. Whilst I respect it when people want to run damage items on Gnar, I think it's suboptimal. With the Black Cleaver buffs in 6.9, Gnar's best item is very affordable now. Gnar is designed as tank so anything beyond Black Cleaver is overone. I can see the logic behind Frozen Mallet but not as an early item.

Maxing your boomerang is the way to go. Maxing the W could be viable but I haven't tried it.

Gnar is great as a blind pick and has no impossible matchups. In a normal ranked game, bully your opponent as much as you can without taking risks yourself and teleport around the map (at high ferocity) to secure objectives like Dragon!

+ Cute
+ Blind Pick
+ Lane Bully
+ Cheap Items
+ Easy to learn, hard to master

- Rage management can be hard
- Not very tanky in mini gnar

On Gnar your role is to engage teamfights! Build up your range through poking to the point where you are still mini gnar but you can already use mega gnars abilities, and when you use them, you transform.

This can catch enemies off guard that weren't paying attention to your rage bar. Use E to change into Mega Gnar mid air and flash if needed to close more distance.
Slam the enemies into a wall or if no wall is nearby towards your team, followed by an easy W and Q. Once your Mega Gnar runs out, you can win most duels with AD Carries through good mini gnar mechanics. You are also great for shredding tanks in your cuter form.

I hope you liked this short guide to Gnar, The Missing Link. Have fun playing this champion in solo queue!