Well, spellthief is pretty much all the mana regen I need. In lane I don't use W every single time it's off of cooldown unless I'm trying to get a huge amount of pressure into their botlane, but rather time my W usages with spellthief stacks to generate gold - this also gives you time to keep a decent mana pool (around 70-90%) for when you need it. I also poke with almost only W unless they're low enough for every point of damage to matter in the short trades. After fights in lane my mana is rarely less than my health, so if you need to leave the lane it's probably because of both mana and health rather than mana.

Abyssal scepter still offers just about the same amount of damage in all cases, with a few extreme cases that make the item maybe about 15~% more/less efficient in their respective extremes, but it's a solid item.

And for runes, the damage might be better with ap quints or overall ap runes, but since the overall scaling is not as notable as Brand's scaling with spell levels, I find flat magic penetration, even in high amounts, the superior option.

And I'll see what I'll do about the guide, I'm not sure yet. I'm studying IRL atm so I probably won't play LoL quite as much.

In my personal opinion Thunderlord's presence is only more relevant than Deathfire Grasp's in some cases of early levels, namely all-ins where you value burst over sustained damage, but it will work at its expected potency even if you go with this build anyway.

(And yeah, if you feel comfortable with some other set of runes/masteries, you're naturally free to do it. This set is just the set I found having most success with myself)

I wouldn't take away the flat armour from runes though, since you'd end up being pretty squishy against their botlane's auto-attacks.

If you want to fiddle around with Courage of Colossus, I'd recommend building rather tanky after finishing rylais, namely with items like Banshee's veil, *Maybe* RoA, just anything that grants you either magic resistance and health, armour and health or health and ability power/magic damage. The loss of Deathfire Grasp should show up in your end-game stats as lack of damage, but you probably want to fulfill a bit different kind of role anyway if you decide to go for the tanky mastery.

That's very good to hear, thanks for commenting and trying out the build!

Hi, thanks for taking your time to read the guide!

So, first things first; while I absolutely am a pretty good Brand player, I do not claim to be the #1 with Brand. It's hard to compare the players of different servers to one another so some players are ranked higher/lower than others and LoLskill has a bad habit of valuing pure games over the level of play and success rate. But anyway, rant over, I'll get to answering your questions!


I've tried a lot of different builds in Season 6 ranked, most of which happened in master to challenger elo games. My first variable was my starting item which I was swapping between liandry's torment, rylai's scepter and the third option, buying only the magic penetration part of liandry's and then finishing rylai's, after which I'd complete Liandrdy's. I concluded that the utility and defensive capabilities of Rylais were far superior over the added damage the magic penetration would offer early on.

My builds used to have more cdr every now and then, but I've grown to like abyssal scepter quite a bit after playing a lot of games with and without it. Abyssal scepter gives you the only mr you're going to get early to mid-game and possibly even in the entire game, so going without it could be pretty bad if the enemy team has any magic damage. Since you're going to be in the effective range of Abyssal Scepter's aura when you do your spell rotations, the flat magic penetration is very potent especially when it's stacking with your other sources of magic penetration.

While in theory, 20% cdr should add 20% overall damage potential to your kit, I didn't find if worthwhile doing especially after I started taking more and more care aiming my stuns and other skills that need to be placed with thought. However, if you are facing an enemy with 60-90 magic resistance, abyssal scepter offers about as much damage increase, but instead in your burst damage - which is always better.

To summarize, morello over scepter is not bad per-say, but you're going to lose damage against squishy champions and you're going to have to do something about the utter lack of mr you'll face. Boots were never an option for me since Boots of Lucidity are a pretty awkward purchase for champions that do not rely very much from the latter part of the boots, that is the summoner cooldown reduction. Flat magic penetration is so potent on Brand that not stacking it would be a waste, while cdr would only be a boon but not a necessity.

Neat!