I play Garen as my main character and I want to share with you my favorite build. I play Garen as a strong fighter, dealing great damage and having good armor and magic resist numbers.

An important thing you need to care before starting a game is your teammates, I've play over than 200 games with him and Garen, first, is not a great solo champion in 2v1 lane, especially against ranged opponents early game.

You must always try to lane with a ranged teammates, attack or magic damage, I think it's the best, champions like Ashe, Caitlyn, Vlad are especially strong laning with Garen. A tank can do the job as Rammus or Mundo, Malphite but it's not the best. With a skilled range, your chance to dominate the lane are very good and by then, overbuild opponents.

Except his ultimate, Garen is a full physical damage champion. By the way, he need to penetrate enemies armor as much as possible to be more effective, and for this offensive build, you need full Armor Pen runes to do very high damage. With these runes, your Judgmentwill do very big damage to enemies, if you can spin around them for the duration (3 seconds).

I also take dodge in my yellow runes because it is very useful during all the game. In the beginning for example when you spin into your enemy and minions are close to you, they will target you and at the end of judgment, you want to back of minions, you will dodge some of their attacks and keep your life higher. In mid and late game, you will dodge some attacks during they attack you while you are spinning, and it could save big damage (mid and late game attack damage range can do easily 200-300dmg + crit chance).

I take cooldown for blue runes, which reduce time by almost 10% (8.89% with masteries + runes) for your spin and other spell to be rdy, which can be the difference between a death or a kill in early game. Maybe it's less useful while the game advance, but I've included no cooldown in my items (it's not very needed in the case) but it's always good to have a little bit of it and almost 10% is enough for the entire game as well.

EARLY GAME

Doran's shield: give you life and armor + health regen, make you very strong in early game with Garen. With my masteries, my life at beginning is 716, which is a great number for a full armor pen body (people will think sometimes that you're a tank and you can surprise them in early game with quick kills)

Sunfire Cape: your survivor item, you will need it all the game long. Garen base life + Sunfire Cape make you look like a tank when you're not one. If they do this error, they will die­. This item add to your Judgment 40 magic damage per second, which is good additional damage in early game and always useful in late game.

Mercury's Treads: add the magic resist you need, and reduce duration of crowd control on you, and you always need to ran in your enemy to deal damage and Garen movement speed is very average so this item is needed quickly. You run at 385 with this.


MID GAME

Hexdrinker: maybe this item is not very popular, but I like it. You need quick damage (to wait for your BF Sword and finish IE) and more magic resistance, which this item gives you and also, it can save your life if youre receiving magic damage when your low. I played some games that my shield poped like 5 times and it often save my life when im trying to escape (example if you run on a teemo champ).

Infinity Edge: we all know what infinity edge does and why it's good for Garen. Increase spin damage DRAMATICALLY.


LATE GAME
(you can alternate order of these items)
Phantom Dancer: increasing your movement speed it a priority and crit chance make your infinity edge works better. Attack speed is a great bonus and your basic attack will be a lot more effective.

Guardian Angel: increase your survivability, armor and magic resist + chance to came back from death, good late game item.