Hello, everyone. your friendly neighborhood hardstuck gold player coming at you with another wacky build that is guaranteed to get you question-mark-pinged to kingdom come, but will work much better than you'd expect.

Do you ever look at irelia or fiora and say "man, I wish that were me, look at them carry the game with ease, sustaining much more than they should be allowed to, taking very little damage, and getting 5 honors every single game. I wish that were me, but here I am stuck playing BARD."

Well, do I have a build for you.

Now, instead of wishing that were you, you can still wish that were you, while doing an above-average attempt (at best) at copying them!

Introducing...Bard the Bruiser. Best played while using the comedic cuphead skin.

HoB for the burst and synergy with meep autos, cheap shot because you can proc it very easily, eyeball collection for the scaling (though you can debatably use ghost poro if you want guaranteed scaling and more vision), ingenious hunter for botrk/locket/trinket cooldowns.

Conditioning to make bard tankier and to synergize with locket or evenshroud, since bard will not be building any more resistance for the rest of the game. Overgrowth to make him beefy and feed into titanic/demonic damage. Combos very well with wardstone, too.

Trinkets aren't insignificant because you use literally all of them.

Yes, you read that right.

You use yellow trinket early until you get your wards, then you use scanner, and then once you replace your ward item with wardstone, you get blue trinket.

Finally, if the game goes on long enough, you replace wardstone with the other hp-oriented item (demonic or titanic) and switch back to yellow trinkets.

You need them, badly, to be able to get good vision of the team or remove their vision at key stages of the game.

Go AD if you are into a matchup where you think you can auto them a lot, like melee supports, and do it specifically when your team doesn't have much AD. You probably will not be going AD often, as the requisite conditions are many, and it is objectively worse with bard's kit. Basically you should already have two major sources of AP damage on your team AND you should be into a non-heavy-poke lane. If you're any rune other than HoB, you should be building AP for either the guardian rune scaling or the heal on your W no matter what your team's damage output is.

Go AP if you're into poke (no matter what), or if your team has less than 2 significant AP sources. TBH you will likely be going AP a lot of the time in the current meta, which is great because bard scales better with it anyways. Good signs you should be going AP: you're into a leona/rell and need the guardian scaling, you're into a heavy poke lane and went fleet (for the W scaling) and/or your team only has one major source of AP damage, so you need to supplement that.

There are a couple of other rune choices bard should go into specific matchups. Fleet footwork should always be picked into excessive poke lanes that bard does horrifically into, like karma, brand, or something real annoying and cheesy like ashe/miss fortune. Your goal at this point is to survive.

Guardian should be chosen against leona and rell specifically. Blitz and naut you should just go HoB into because there's nothing you can do for your adc if they get pulled at that point, same for pyke.