Greetings summoners, I'm an italian mid/jungle player presenting you with an all-new remake of a homonymous guide i wrote in season 3, in the past featured by the LoL community. At the time I was driven by disappointment and passion, after reviewing almost every high rated Malzahar guide on the net and finding most of them inane or only partially valuable, even sourced beyond 2.3k elo, therefore decided that coming out with this guide was a duty.
Malzahar is the champion I spent most of my ingame life on, it's pure autopilot for me regardless of the matchup even tho I really miss his prerework iteration.

This is currently under work scrap, most of the information is placed under "notes" section. I'm meanwhile available for specific tips.
Also shoutout to my fellow AquaDragon, check out his unmatched jungle malzahar guide, the pool above is my personal modification of his buildpath.

Thank you.

This part can be insightful everywhere, not exclusively on league.

Like any competitive game, as well as videogames, one of the main keys to consistent success is the Yomi.

Yomi is a japanese expression for the art of reading the mind of your foes. This does not apply to simple algorithm based and mechanical games, although works quite well with League of Legends, in particular with heroes that have a versatile kit. Nothing supernatural and unreachable, Yomi has a precise structure and it's just a way to convey what makes people like Magnus Carlsen great at chess, and so on.

This art is basically compound of three "statistics", take note neither of those are negative, but can be excessive and fall into overwhelming vicies.

Smartness

This defines your Layer pool, average prediction tendency.

Layers are barely a simplified interaction scheme you come up with:

P1 does the best countering according to last P2 move - Layer 0
P1 predicts P2 - Layer 1
P1 predicts that P2 predicted - Layer 2
P1 predicts that P2 predicted that P1 noticed P2 predicting. - Layer 3

You can personally come to the conclusion that Layers are cyclical, they can have the same output and concrete result, although the thought process is different and more complex (and in non turn-based games of course can take more time). Thus you realize that having a huge prediction pool is useful but can slow or confuse you while you may require instant and solid choices. With perfect information in certain games, some Yomi masters could also predict an entire succession based outcome, from beginning to end, including intentions behind external factors.

Safeness

Safeness is your coverage capacity, your evaluation ability. How does this work?

You may evaluate how gamechanging would be a certain hard prediction compared to a simple one, you can find moves that would allow you to skip the smartness with the same/average profit, sometimes this is just stalling, waiting for a more useful prediction, or settling for moves that are not predictable or exploitable.
Might imply you have secondary plans that can actually be applied with the least margin of error.
Maybe you have a way that allows you to skip your move and wait the foe's without exposing chance or suffering impactful income loss.

In other words this one proportionally minimizes your unefficient moves and actions ratio.

Ascendency

This is the most rewarding skill. It consists in forcing your opponent to a certain action, limit his coverage, his choices, inducing him to an "objective" or a counterplay that can be self-detrimental. As you can see the fact is, why waste time reading opponsing thoughts, when you can induce foes into a plan tailored mental state?


These skills synergize and play a huge part on the outcome. Generally:

Smartness>Ascendency
Safeness>Smartness
Ascendency>Safeness

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Once you've mastered the mechanics of the game, such as ranges, timings, combos etc.

Once you are aware of these three skills you need to base your Yomi around and the issues they bring up in league.

Once you rawly tested and applied these, and you got an idea of how Yomi works in your mental.


How do you successfully take advantage of Yomi, in particular for what concerns LoL?

Maximizing dot output alongside kiting is for example the baseline to succesfully master Malzahar in improper situations.

Thank you for stopping by, i hope it was worth.


Credits:

David Sirlin: A modern author expert in game design, psychology and stuff such as Yomi, conveys deep concepts quickly, a good starting read that helped me with explanation.

Special thanks:

Diamondprox for inspiring me with priceless passion for games, metagame research and theorycrafting in the community.