PROS:
•One of the best blind picks for toplane.
•Even worst matchup is killable solo , not many champs can do that in top.
•Least boring tank to play in the game next to K'Sante.
•Very unkillable in lane .
•The best gank setup in the entire game , your ult stalls until jungler arrives , your w will cut off the enemies path so they cant run to tower its insane.
•In teamfights you are basically malphite you can w engage in 5 ppl or turbo peel a fed carry with your ult .
•Even if lane is bad you can always cs from away with q.
•VERY VERY HIGH DAMAGE for a tank
•Good mobility
•10/10 lore
•Is a demon (based) (literally me).


Cons :
•Insanely weak before lvl 4.
•Your w rarely lands without setup.
•Gets demolished by Blade of the Ruined King
•Mobility can be interrupted
•Needs knowledge on how to perform the combos to reach max potential
•0 wave clear (big problem).

•#1 If you Devour an enemy an wait for the last possible second before Devour runs out!!!NO SPIT BUTTON INPUT, LET IT RUN OUT!!! And then cast Tongue Lash it will make Tongue Lash un-dodgable even if they Flash. I use this in 100% of my games and every chance i get its the most guaranteed way to confirm a kill. Play Video Here is also an example of me doing the under tower kill combo with un-dodgable q at the end ,also if you want go to my channel in yt (the same as the following video to watch some other useful clips). Play Video Lastly here is the same combo with an extra Abyssal Dive although it is more risky to do and i wouldn’t personally do it unless they don’t have Flash. Worth noting this is not my clip but it is taken from "No Arm Whatley" he is a streamer Play Video
• #2 land Tongue Lash and then instantly Abyssal Dive on top of them to guaranteed the Abyssal Dive landing

•#3 Tahm Kench can pull an enemy with BLUETOOTH™ Devour , but it only works on enemies and only when they have 3 An Acquired Taste stacks on them. You can do it by pressing both Q + ULT buttons when the q is about to hit. Play Video
• #4 your Tongue Lash range scales with champion size ( Heartsteel Elixir of Iron etc.)

•#5 Almost all champions are killable as long as you are in your tower range you can Devour + Ghost and then use trick #1 to guarantee ult-q and slow under tower. This will kill all champions in lane that are not Kled or Volibear since they can drop/disable aggro from tower.

•#6 your biggest enemy are minions they block Tongue Lash and can tank tower while you use trick #4 always have in mind that if a minion blocks a couple of Tongue Lashes while you brawl someone you probably lose.

•#7 USE BUSHES PLEASE. Your Abyssal Dive is invisible until the very end when casted from out of vision so it's a lot easier to land when we are in a bush.

•#8 Best strategy by far is to hold a freeze near your tower this pressures the enemy and makes very possible for you to start a random trade with the enemy and before they know it they have 3 An Acquired Taste stacks we Devour them under tower do the un-dodgable Tongue Lash and they die for free and type in all chat (nice champ) it breaks their mental gives us gold and denies 3-4 waves cause they died on a frozen wave

S13 SPLIT 1 MASTER AND #1 TAHM KENCH EUNE

THIS IS NOT A GUIDE ON HOW TO PLAY TOPLANE IN GENERAL. IT IS ONLY ON HOW TO PERFORM ON TAHM KENCH SO THE GUIDE DOES NOT BECOME VERY EXTENSIVE.

•Tahm kench is a cannon minion at best in levels 1-3 but you spike really hard with points in q and when you unlock ult so general guide is to play safe early levels.

•After 20 mins i like to rarely go to farm and group up with my team . Use red trinket and try to play like a zac aka look for w from fog of war to engage.

GENERAL PRIORITY FOR ULT :
#1 if you have fed teammate and your ult would save them
#2 the enemy carry is fed and you manage to stack 3 passive marks on them
#3 anyone got caught by some big cc ability (morgana q etc) and you need them to dps so you ult them and spit them out to help them deal dmg
#4 you have a fat engage champ like amumu so you ult w him inside the enemy team.

In this section i will provide a short (or long) explanation on each rune + when you take it and finally a rating out of 10 for each rune after considering
•win rate
•play rate
•value
•practicality
Lastly i will use the emote : when this rune is a noob trap and my eyes bleed, every time i see someone having it :D.

Keystones first
• Phase Rush Personally i do not play this rune , but a large portion of the tahm kench community does pick it sometimes. It is very useful for an escape tool in hard lanes like olaf where you need to kite his ultimate in order for it to run out. Worthy to note here that Phase Rush removes a large portion of slows and that includes the self-slow from our ult Devour. 7/10 (loses win rate since it is picked vs bad matchups and the sorcery tree is not great).

• Lethal Tempo This is the DEMON PERFORMANCE™keystone, since our passive An Acquired Taste has on-hit damage lethal tempo makes tahm kench accend , and since i am all about that DEMON PERFORMANCE™it was very close for me to pick it over grasp but the resolve rune tree is very strong. Worth noting here that for aram's / nexus blitz etc i always pick lethal tempo because Grasp of the Undying falls off. 9/10 if max score is the optimal then this is 1 step away from becoming meta , also the precision tree is very strong for thomas kench.

Smaller runes
• Triumph is the definition of noob trap so i will have to give it a / 10 . Triumph is useful when an enemy dies so for toplane (most of the early game you are 1v1) it does nothing, but even when you kill your laner VERY often you couldnt care less for some extra hp (unless you get ganked right after, but what are the chances). Where this rune shines is in teamfights, but it is not worth in my opinion to have a rune that only saves you a death every 5 games on average.

• Legend: Alacrity This rune is great, nothing to say here :D like it more than other options in this row 9/10

• Last Stand This rune should be your only option in the precision third row ,very often you can be intentionally on low hp and stay there for a while with your Thick Skin and healing from Tongue Lash. 9/10

•We dont mess with Domination tree so ill skip to Sorcery for Phase Rush rune set.
Nimbus Cloak or Nullifying Orb should be your choice for the first row. Both are fine , the win rate for nullifying is higher but i personally like nimbus for the Ghost + nimbus combo 6/10 for both.

• Transcendence or Celerity for second row. Stats say transcendence has a very small edge over celerity but both have ok synergy with Tahm Kench 5/10.

•Time for the gigachad Resolve tree
Demolish should be renamed to demolish me daddy with the amount of work it is pulling every game! I cant stress this enough how much this rune enables our champion. EXTRA GOLD + TOWER DAMAGE SCALING WITH HP i could not design a better rune . Lastly it makes you a threat on sidelane since you can take tower anytime instead of tickling it. ∞ / 10 honestly it should have been a keystone.

• Shield Bash Here comes the juice of the guide , this is the BIGGEST NOOB BAIT IN THE ENTIRE GAME it MUST get a / 10 , WHAT am i saying you should be instantly DEMOTED the second you pick it over Demolish or Font of Life in 95% OF CHAMPIONS. The reason it is such a bait for tahm kench is : you would assume that since we have a MASSIVE shield with Thick Skin this rune will be great right ?! Yea, no the numbers on this rune are honestly so bad that you could double the damage it deals and it wouldn’t matter NEVER PICK IT UNLESS INCREDIBLY BUFFED

• Font of Life This rune is great and my rune of choice when playing either support or adc tahm kench (with senna) it provides a heal that scales with hp and our champion stacks hp so don’t need to say anything else 9/10.

• Second Wind INCREDIBLE RUNE all 3 runes in this row are amazing it doesn’t matter what you pick 10/10 . Best vs poke or in general if you don’t like waiting 12 mins for conditioning
• Bone Plating INCREDIBLE RUNE all 3 runes in this row are amazing it doesn’t matter what you pick 10/10 . Best vs all in champions
• Conditioning INCREDIBLE RUNE all 3 runes in this row are amazing it doesn’t matter what you pick 10/10 Best of general value

• Overgrowth 10/10 gives hp we scale with hp end of story

• Revitalize another great rune in Resolve helps with our shield and heal from q and e but slightly weaker than the rest 9/10

• Unflinching Amazing rune take it over Overgrowth vs a lot of cc 10/10

• Lastly the MONEY RUNE TREE $$$ Inspiration
• Magical Footwear Should be your only choice in this row and even if it had better runes as rivals i would still pick it , gives more speed and free gold 10/10 free is love free is life.

• Minion Dematerializer Is my choice when the matchup requires EARLY boots instead of waiting till minute 12 for your Magical Footwear.For example early boots are needed (from the top of my head) vs Tryndamere , Yone , Darius , Illaoi since either Plated Steelcaps counters them too hard or in the case of darius and illoi it helps dodging their e Apprehend and Test of Spirit that will cause most of the harm. Also this rune helps with the non-existent wave clear of the champion 10/10

• Biscuit Delivery Biscuits heal you for a lot of hp when you are already low hp ( i am going to ignore the mana they give cause i almost never have mana issues). That being said the problem with biscuits is that only once every 3-4 games do you find yourself in a situation where not recalling and resetting is better cause you can bait a fight with biscuits. For this reason i prefer Approach Velocity cause it activates on every q that lands, providing value throughout the entire game , every game.

• Approach Velocity This should be the only option in last row it gives you speed when you hit q , w , ult or when someone is cc'ed in general and we never say no to free speed ∞/10.

𝙏𝙃𝘼𝙉𝙆 𝙔𝙊𝙐 𝙁𝙊𝙍 𝘽𝙀𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀
𝙒𝙀'𝙑𝙀 𝘼𝙍𝙍𝙄𝙑𝙀𝘿 𝙏𝙊 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙀𝙉𝘿 𝙊𝙁 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙂𝙐𝙄𝘿𝙀, 𝙄 𝙒𝙄𝙇𝙇 𝙈𝘼𝙆𝙀 𝙎𝙐𝙍𝙀 𝙏𝙊 𝙇𝙀𝙏 𝙔𝙊𝙐 𝙆𝙉𝙊𝙒 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙍𝙔 𝙉𝙀𝙒 𝘽𝙐𝙄𝙇𝘿, 𝙈𝙀𝙏𝘼 𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔𝙎𝙏𝙔𝙇𝙀, 𝙐𝙋𝘿𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙂𝙐𝙄𝘿𝙀 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙍𝙔 𝙏𝙄𝙈𝙀 𝙏𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀'𝙎 𝙎𝙊𝙈𝙀𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙉𝙀𝙒. 𝙄 𝙃𝙊𝙋𝙀 𝙔𝙊𝙐 𝙀𝙉𝙅𝙊𝙔𝙀𝘿 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝘾𝙊𝙉𝙏𝙀𝙉𝙏 𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙏𝙃𝘼𝙏 𝙄𝙏 𝙒𝙄𝙇𝙇 𝘽𝙀 𝙐𝙎𝙀𝙁𝙐𝙇𝙇 𝙄𝙉 𝙔𝙊𝙐𝙍 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙎. 𝙂𝙊𝙊𝘿 𝙇𝙐𝘾𝙆 𝙒𝙄𝙏𝙃 𝙔𝙊𝙐𝙍 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙎 𝙆𝙄𝙉𝙂/𝙌𝙐𝙀𝙀𝙉 LASTLY I WOULD APPRICIATE IF YOU LEFT A POSITIVE VOTE/COMMENT OR +REP AND ILL TRY TO ANSWER ALL YOUR COMMENTS!