Well first of all, before we talk about anything, we have to get something straight.

There are TWO effective ways of building Mordekaiser.

You're probably thinking, "What are they?".

1. Sustained Damage

2. Burst Damage

This isn't just in regards to AP Mordekaiser.

You can either build him to be a sustained tank, or a burst tank.

You can either build him to be sustained AD damage(Starks+TBC+Gunblade+PD+FM+Merc), or Burst AD damage (Youmuu+IE+PD+TF+LW+Merc). (these are just examples, i don't normally build Mordekaiser AD so i haven't had a lot of games to try things out in.)

Sustain: I don't mean this in a healing manner, it's purely a time difference.

Sustain means you spend more time on your target, so you will naturally need to be a bit more tanky.

Burst means you spend less time on your target, and this means that you want to do as much damage as possible in a short amount of time.

You need to analyze the enemy team you are fighting.

First of all, If you are fighting against a team full of stuns, then congratulations, Ultimate Bravery achieved.

Once you have made an ***esment of the enemy team, you have to say to yourself first of all, "Can I aggressively solo lane against any of these champions?"

If the answer is yes, then you should PROBABLY use build #2, If no, then you should PROBABLY use build #2.

If the answer is yes, and they have a large amount of CC (silence&stuns mainly), then you need to ask yourself if they have a bursty enough team to kill you, if they do, you need to play the burst build and just do as much damage as possible before they focus you.


So in summary, if the lanes are passive, play sustain, if the lanes are bursty, play bursty.

We still have some things to talk about.

There are some items which may seem awesome, and some items you wouldn't even think about.

: Thornmail is an awesome item, but know that you shouldn't be relying on it's passive in order to deal your damage.

: also an awesome item, mainly because of the resists, the hp/5 bonus is great, it allows you to stay in lane much longer than normal. The speed is great as well.

: With it's large price tag, "meh" stats, and "meh" slowing effect, i don't really consider this item good enough to put in a Tank Mordekaiser build.

Rylai's is an effective item in an Anti-Carry build, and shines against very fast carries and carries that can kite.

: This build focuses heavily on Mordekaiser's team fight presence, so we're building CDR heavily. This gives us armor, CDR, and a nice AtS debuff for our team.

Note: This item is awesome, but if you're getting your CDR from somewhere else, then it's not worth the gold.

: 5% CDR, a splash of health, and 75 armor, great right?! Well yeah it's pretty awesome, but it's also freakin expensive, pick up HoG if you plan to pick up Randuin's.

: 50 magic resist and 350 health for 2710g? No thank you, you have the tank to take a few hits, no need for the passive.

: This item is great, but i would only get it if there was a Malzahar, Warwick, or Urgot that you wanted to counter.

Note: If you're behind in gold, this is an AWESOME MR item, i will usually pick up Abyssal instead of this though, because of the damage and aura it offers.

:This baby is sexy, 57 Magic Resist, 70 ap, and an aura that gives everyone 20 magic pen when they are near you? Hell yeah.

: Gotta build that revolver into something ;)

: If you have a pretty AP heavy build, this is the item you want to get.

: The main reason to get Zhonya's isn't really for the active, though you can do some pretty fancy stuff with it. The 100 ap + 50 armor make for a fairly defensive item that makes a lich bane, or just your normal skills pretty powerful.

: NO! Bad dog! BAD DOG! Warmog's Armor implys a bad pick.

Build this ONLY, if you are the main tank, and you are getting chain cc'd by a high dps, insane chain stun team, like Blitzcrank/Alistar/Soraka/Annie/Jax

Well, first of all, we have to look at the benefits of Warmog's Armor.

1. 1370 health
2. 45 hp/5, which is 7 hp per second.

This seems pretty good right? The best Health per Gold in the game, with 7 hp regen per second for only 3000g!

Lets look at hextech revolver.

Assuming you are using 9/0/21 and only have Hextech Revolver and enough magic pen to do true damage to minions, then this is what your abilities will do.

Q does 222 damage to four minions, or 386 to one minion, and has a 3.6s CD, and costs 40hp.

W does 540 damage to an unlimited number of targets and has a 11s CD, and costs 50hp.

E does 275 damage to an unlimited number of targets and has a 5.5s CD, and costs 72hp.

R does 34% of an enemy champion's health, 17 instantly, 17 over 10s. You heal for 100% of this damage.


Now, Q would heal you for 888*.05=44.4hp, or 386*.15=57.9hp.

W would heal for 27 for each target it hits, if you catch the whole minion wave, that is 27*6= 162hp

E would heal for 13.75hp, becoming an effective "heal" at 6 targets, the whole minion wave (heals 82.5hp)

R would heal for 17*1.15= 19.55% of their maximum health before mitigation, basically that means that if they have 2k health, you heal for almost 400 when you ult them, and then another 400 over 10 seconds.


So, Warmog's armor gives 1370 health, and 7hp/s.

Using all your skills on CD assuming you have 9% CDR, you use 28.5hp/s.

With a Hextech Revolver, using all your skills on CD against 4 targets (just for instance), you would be healing for 32 health per second.

What does this all mean?

It means that a Hextech revolver will catch up to the health from a Warmog's Armor in just 54 seconds.

Also, Spell Vamp scales with CDR, actually heals you as apposed to just giving you a bigger pool of health.

To compare two items with similar costs, we will use a Will of the Ancients + a Hextech Revolver.

Q does 1008 damage to four targets, heals for 134.4, has a 3.64s CD.

W does 2544 damage to four targets, heals for 339.2, has a 10.92s CD.

E does 1292 damage to four targets, heals for 172.3, has a 5.46s CD.

This means that using all your spells on CD, you will heal for 36.9+31.1+31.2= 99.2 hp per second.

So you are caught up to Warmog's armor in 14 seconds of skill usage.

This math is completely besides the synergy with Spell Vamp + Your passive, and completely besides the fact that you are doing more damage with the spell vamp items.

Warmog's brings you very little to the laning phase for such a big 3000g price tag.

: "Break glass in case of emergency." If there were a glass case with Merc Treads in it, that would be appropriate for Mordekaiser. Merc Treads are Mordekaiser's main way of dealing with CC heavy teams. Getting these in a ranked game means that you are admitting that you improperly picked characters.

: With just 172 ap, Lich Bane is better. Otherwise, Triforce is too expensive and gives too little to mordekaiser.

: An AMAZING item for Anti-Carry mordekaiser, gives him 15% CDR, 60 ap, and an awesome active that synergizes well with his Ultimate. I would only build this on him though, if you are dedicating yourself to the Anti-Carry role in a game.

: Deathcap is a great item to pair with either DFG, Lich Bane, or Both. Anything that isn't explicitly AP related however, can't really justify a deathcap.

With Mordekaiser's cooldowns, his passive spell vamp, the ability to gain shield and health from W/R while reviving with GA, your ghost being alive and controllable while and after you revive, and his insane single spell burst, GA is REALLY good on Mordekaiser, i'd go as far to say that it's core on a "tanky" Mordekaiser.

If a game goes past 25 minutes, there is a 90% chance that I will get a GA.

That's about everything I've ever built! :D

Assume that your other three items are

The following are a few final builds i could see myself with, and why i would build them.


Built this one time against a WW/Malzahar/Master Yi team.

Yi built lifesteal, so the Randuin's hit him pretty hard, i used the active to catch the very fast WW, and the QSS to cancel Malzahar's Ultimate.

This is a very tanky choice of items, you'll probably want to pick up Blue Pot so you can get some CDR.



Hello and welcome to Mordecarry. This build has ridiculous damage. With this build, you'll want to pick up blue golem so you can get CDR capped.



This build maximizes your CDR/Resists, and still gives you some AP and magic pen from abyssal, this is my bread and butter build.



AD Heavy team, was the guy killing their heavy AD dude.



I've used this build when i had a Carry that needed blue, but i also wanted to do crazy damage.

It's pretty effective as long as you don't need to tank a whole load of damage.



If i was going to be an Anti-Carry but still wanted some presence in team fights, i would probably build this.

I threw in Aegis because it is super OP in terms of stat costs and it adds a lot more team fight presence, a kind of "focus me, or all these auras will keep my team alive" thing.

The second build is MY take on Vman7's Mordekaiser.

It's the same concept, but i feel that it's a bit better suited for the "new" mordekaiser player.

If you haven't played AP Mordekaiser, it will take you awhile to get used to the change in positioning.

I feel this build is EXTREMELY stong, and can be considered a true "carry".

With this build, you do so much damage, and have enough tank ability, that if positioned properly, you should be functioning as an Anti-Carry.

With these specific items, you can function as an Anti-Carry, cleaning up team fights and being almost suicidal in your resolve to remove their damage dealers from the fight.

The main problem with this specific build is that it falls way behind against Tanky teams, i would suggest a Void Staff instead of if the enemy team is something like Taric Lee Sin Cho'Gath Yorick Ashe.

Take flash because the focus is Burst damage instead of sustained damage.

Good Question!

I use flat resists because Mordekaiser is a fairly squishy early game champion, and the resists not only help his ehp at level 1, but also help the health potions be more effective in his early lane.

Ideally i would use 1 Mpen quint, 1 flat CDR quint, and 1 move speed quint, but if all you have is Magic Pen, or Swiftness, go for it, runes aren't extremely important on Mordekaiser.

You can put 2x swiftness, vitality, fortitude, or w/e other quint you want in there.

If you really want, you can ignore everything but the magic pen runes, and just put in whatever you want in there, resists are just to help his early game, and to even out his late game resists a little.

Why do i use Ghost/Ignite in build 1, and build 2 takes Flash/Ignite?

Well first of all, the better question is, Why do i value Ignite so highly?

Ignite only helps a pretty aggressive playstyle, and i don't afraid of anything as Mordekaiser.

Next question, why ghost in build 1, and why flash in build 2?

The first build focuses on being a nuisance. You force the enemy team to either focus you, and most likely fail, or have to deal with you, or waste their CC on you when you are doing tons of damage to their team. Because of this, and your Melee range, you need to stay in range of your spells, ghost helps you do this better than flash.

In the second build, you are focused on large burst damage, where flash shines.

In the same respect, Build 1 is tankier, and will get more out of a ghost than build 2, and build 2 is more fragile, and flashing over walls is going to be more necessary than with build 1.

IF you aren't going to use ignite (It's a more passive play style, it's not better or worse to use ignite.) you should probably go flash+ghost and drop a point from buff duration into the proper mastery. (Try to take both ghost&flash masteries)

When you are playing with ignite, remember that it scales with level, and it does true damage.

If you plan out your damage carefully, you can make very "risky" looking ultimates and kill people that would otherwise not die from just your ultimate.

Here is a link to a .rar with about 200mb worth of replays in it.

Have fun with that.

Spoilers: I have terrible terrible map awareness.

Also, keep in mind that 95% of these games are before i started playing around with heavy AP builds (ala build 2), i was stuck in a very CDR+Spell Vamp oriented mindset.

Some of them are old enough that i am building very tanky with poor item choice.

8/1/11 - Changed guide format a bit.

Basically, Mordekaiser is a pretty cool guy, and you have to read the "Some example item builds." at very least if you want to give this guide a fair shot.